Our Week in Review

Our daughter G

In history this week, she learned about the presidency of James Madison, events leading up to the war of 1812, more about the relationship the United States had with the indians, and Napoleon's disastrous military campaign in Russia and his ultimate defeat. For literature this week she also read some poetry by William Wordsworth and learned some literary terms that relate to poetry. Together we are reading a book about William Wilberforce and the abolition of the British slave trade. It's a little book but has really big words, thus we are reading it together. She was shocked to read about what a self-centered and rather unscrupulous man he was during his young adult years, and we were able to discuss how God uses what we may consider unlikely people for great things once they yield their lives to Him.

She and I continued our work in latin, declining our first set of nouns!! I confess that she got it much more readily than I did!

She continued her on-going work in math and spelling, and for science learned about habitats, what instincts of animals are, and the meaning of extinction, endangered species, and some animals that were extinction errors (thought to be extinct but later found). Here are some of the books she read from this week:



Our sons G, L, and C

Her brothers, meanwhile, also learned about James Madison. We focused much of our attention on details of the war of 1812. They were fascinated by the story of the burning of Washington D.C. by the British, and how Dolly Madison saved so many valuables from the "president's mansion" (as it was called prior to the fire), including a large painting of George Washington ~ the only article inside the White House that dates back to the very first president. We learned that after the fire, only the outer walls of the house were left standing, and they were painted white to cover up the blackened burn marks. This is when it became known as the "White House." Interesting, isn't it? We also learned that Dolly had prepared a feast for guests that evening, but had to flee the house quickly before the meal could be eaten. The British soldiers helped themselves to the feast before they ransacked and burned the house! Learning about the Battle at Fort McHenry and the writing of the Star Spangled Banner was also a captivating topic this week. Here are some of the books the boys read (or I read to them). I highly recommend the book "By the Dawn's Early Light" that we got from the library. Great information, exciting topic, few words, fantastic pictures. Perfect for young boys!

Each of the boys continued their weekly work in math, spelling, and grammar. Both G and L are learning about prepositional phrases right now, and how to identify the subject and verb in a sentence. Son C is working away in his phonics workbook and doing reading lessons with me. He is doing great! They studied the same science topics as their sister. As his sister, son G also learned about poetry this week. He fell in love with poems by William Blake!

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After our history reading this week, the boys and I made flapbooks where they wrote on each flap anything they remembered from our reading about that topic. Here they are closed (the one on the far right is C's and I did all the writing for him except for the words "James Madison". If you click on the following pictures you should be able to enlarge them).

And here they are each open to a favorite page:

To cap off our week, we painted pumpkins in honor of fall!