Fourth Grade Week 9

Well, we made it through our first week of schooling adding in Classical Conversations Foundations and Essentials.  It was tough, but we managed.  Adding these elements to our schooling increases Caleb’s work load, and he’s not a huge fan of that.  However, it’ll all be worth it in the end.  Here’s how our week went…
Bible – This week I decided to use The Answers Book for Kids, Volume 1, which is put out by Answers in Genesis.  These 4 books go through questions asked by kids and gives answers based on the Bible.  We read the first two questions and answers this week…”When did time begin?” and “How did God create everything from nothing?”  For the first question we read Genesis 1:1, 2 Peter 3:8, and Revelation 1:8.  For question 2 we read Hebrews 11:3, Exodus 20:11, and Genesis 1:14-15.
Math – This week Caleb worked on multiplying 3, seconds, subtracting one digit from two digits, finding the missing part in story problems, missing factors, and numerators and denominators.
Classical Conversations Foundations – Like I mentioned this was our first week of CC, and it went well.  Here’s the memory work, science, and art we focused on this week…

• English – role of a preposition
• Science – classification of living things
• History – the first 5 commandments
• Math – counting by 1s and 2s
• Latin – Noun cases
• Geography – location of the Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean Sea, Mesopotamia, Sumer, Tigris River, and Euphrates River
• Timeline – Age of Ancient Empires, Creation and the Fall, the Flood and the Tower of Babel, Mesopotami and Sumer, Egyptians, Indus River Valley Civilization, and Minoans and Myceneans
• Science Experiment – we soaked baby beans in water overnight.  Then, we examined the inside of them to see that a baby plant had grown.  The parts of the bean were also identified.
• Art Project – we focused on OiLS (basic shapes) – circles, dots, straight lines, angles, and curved lines.

Classical Conversations Essentials – The Essentials program focuses on grammar, writing, and math review games.  We aren’t doing Essentials in our CC community; however, the director and I are meeting at her house to do the program with our children.  It went well, considering how overwhelmed, tired, and stressed we both were.

• Grammar – This week we focused on Sentence Classification…structure, purpose, pattern, 8 parts of speech, and 5 parts of a sentence (***please note that these are just introduced right now…we are not delving into them in great detail yet***).  We also worked on one punctuation and spelling rule, as well as a few homophones.  We were also supposed to introduce 112 Model Sentences; however, we just didn’t get to it. 

• Writing – We were supposed to start working from Institute for Excellence in Writing, Student Writing Intensive A.  However, it just didn’t happen.  We’re hoping to add it in beginning next week.  This week, there was just too much new information, and we needed time to breathe.

So, it was a very busy week; however, Caleb learned a lot!  He’s really surprising me with the memory work…he has almost memorized it all.