Weekly Report 4/21-4/25

Nature Girl finished a variety of history projects this week, including a pop-up card of the Tower of London, where the little princes were kept by Richard.


We went on to the rest of the African kingdoms chapter of SOTW, and then to the chapter on India. She thought Akbar and Babur were pretty interesting leaders! We'll make Indian food this week as one of our activities. Unfortunately, our salt blocks from Mali did not turn out, but we will still play the trading game, as described in the Activity Guide for SOTW.

Nature Girl always does such neat and pretty map work. Here's a map from the AG about India.


We read about Prince Henry the Navigator the week before, and are now approaching the Explorers chapters in SOTW. Columbus is first up--We are going to read a bit from Marshall's
The Light and the Glory. It feels strange to have come so far in history and finally be talking about the New World (although we learned about Vikings already, so it's not the first introduction).

I would put up pics of NG's nature notebook entries this year, but they keep coming out flipped! I've learned Adobe PhotoAlbum on my own, and I don't know how to correct them, so you'll just have to read text. She pressed wisteria, cherry blossoms (from our trip to Washington), and pine needles, then mounted them and wrote a bit about where she found them. All of it was done independently. There's so much blooming around us! All the leaves are out on the trees, too, which means the shade is back--but we lost some trees last year, so it's not as gloomy as usual.

We have also been speeding thru grammar with Rod and Staff. We've done at least 25 pages the past two weeks. We'll be finished with Unit 3 this week. She can now pick out the noun in a sentence, tell if it's common or proper, find the verb, find the pronoun and find the adjective (if any). She knows a sentence starts with a capital letter, and ends with a mark of punctuation. (I love how Rod and Staff teaches her word order when there are two people in a sentence--they teach the children to put their name last, because Jesus said to let others go before you--I thought that was a great reason!) Spelling Workout has reinforced these, especially with the proofreading paragraph that comes at the end of every lesson. Nature Girl did struggle with spelling "gh" and other digraph words this week, but we can slow down and redo the lesson without a problem.

She's almost done with Saxon 3. This week, we worked on more division, working with a remainder and with quotients greater than 10. I know she'll be ahead next year, and I do plan on reviewing her math facts with her nearly every day during the summer.

That's about it for this week.