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"This Week in Review" Thursday

This has been an extremely busy week, but a short one as well.

We were off Monday for Labor Day as my other three children were out of school those days. Then today and tomorrow we have taken off because Dawson and his older sister take these two days every year to spend at their dad's hometown fall festival.

That only left two days of school this week. But, we accomplished much!

A World of Adventure  ~ Our Bible lessons right now are centered around not worshiping other idols and beliefs about the afterlife. We made a living timeline across the top of our schoolroom with yarn and index cards. We are going to start charting dates (both Biblical and historical) on the timeline. It will be cool to see it progress throughout the year.


 Our curriculum also has us reading The Golden Goblet. Dawson is doing vocabulary, grammar and writing lessons based on what we are reading in the book.

Social Studies  ~ We will be continuing our study on Ancient Egypt for about two more weeks or so. It's hard to believe we have almost completed an entire unit! Dawson took his first 5 Facts test this week and made a 100%. We started talking about classes of people during Ancient Egyptian times (women vs. men vs. wealthy vs. poor). Dawson also baked a Honey Cake with Cream Cheese Orange Frosting. Yum! Baking has become one of his favorite things to do. We charted the mummification process and watched a documentary on "The Screaming Man".

Science ~ Our transpiration experiment was a success! Even with some additional rain, the jar with no covering evaporated much more water than the jar with foil on top. We thought it was cool, too, that the foil was rusted which shows how desperately the moisture was trying to evaporate out the top of the jar. We discussed photosynthesis and how it affects desert plants and Dawson did some additional reading on desert plants.



Fine Arts ~ On Tuesday we made Cartouches made out of salt dough with our names carved into them in Hieroglyphics with a toothpick.


Then on Wednesday we chose pictures for our Relief we will work on all next week. We also did our Sketch Tuesday drawings of things that use batteries.

He said this large machine gun was operated by a car battery. If that's not plausible then this guy is a battery-operated robot.

Algebra ~ It continues to be a struggle for him and his least favorite subject of the day. We are going to start doing it earlier in the day because he tends to be fizzling out by afternoon. I have considered switching him to Life of Fred Beginning Algebra, but don't want to give up on Saxon just yet. He gets frustrated with the volume of work each day. Maybe we'll start with having him just do half of the problems on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the full problem sets on Tuesday and Thursday.

Other ~ Dawson is still on Lesson 1 of Good Typing. He is struggling and it frustrates him so bad! (And I caught him chicken-pecking his lesson.) I explained to him that he will get it! It just takes lots and lots of practice (doing it right, that is)!! He did one lesson in Spanish out of the book and worked on LiveMocha for a bit. He's good at Spanish. He is also still reading The Journey from The Guardian of Ga'hoole series. He says that it's kind of boring, but he's still reading in anticipation of the movie that comes out on September 24th. He also did his weekly wrap-up blog post, so check back tomorrow to see what he had to say about this third week of homeschooling.

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