10/22/12

Resurrection to Reformation Units 6-9

Princess S has been enjoying (from what I can tell) working on these units.  She started out learning about the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim invaders.  She learned about the reign of Charlemagne and the Northmen (Vikings).  She finished up with learning about the Great Schism.  For her history projects, she has done a lot of baking.  She made some loaves of bread that had Scriptures hidden inside of them.  She made colorful Marzipan cookies.  She made a fun card game called Lord of the Castle.  But her favorite project was making a shield with a coat of arms.

She thought it looked more like a puffin that what she wanted it to be. 

In Math, she is on lesson seven and should finish it up by the end of the week.  In Latin, she is up to lesson 10.  Since we had to completely start over, she is doing one lesson about every two days.  She is still in the review process.  In science she has learned about grubs, earthworms and moles. 

For Grammar, she has finished up Grammar Voyage and has begun Practice Voyage.  Here is the MCT way of studying grammar.

She begins with a sentence, “Taking the wheel, the captain laughed unexpectedly at the mate.”  The first thing she has to do is label the part of speech for each word in the sentence.

You’ll notice she left “taking” blank.  She wasn’t sure about that one, so I told her that we would come back to it as it would become more obvious as we went along.

Next, she labels the parts of the sentence – subjects, predicate, objects and complements.

The third step is to label the phrases – prepositional, appositive, gerunds, participles and infinitives.  This was where she started to realize what “taking” was.  When she could identify “taking the wheel” as a participial phrase, she started sorting things out.

The final step is to identify any clauses, the structure and the purposes of the sentence.  So, this sentence has one independent clause, and is a simple declarative sentence.  For the rest of the school year she will do three sentences a week using this process.  We all enjoy it so much more than diagramming, and my elder two princesses are grammar whizzes as a result. 

On Wednesdays, Princess S has an art class and a writing class at a co-op of sorts.  Since HOD schedules four work days in each unit, we do not do HOD on Wednesdays.  Instead, on Wednesday afternoons Princess S and Princess E and I do vocabulary and literature.  We usually do vocab first.  I put up the three stems we are studying on the whiteboard along with a list of words that have the stems we are working with.

First we underline the stem we’re working with.  Then we underline any stems we have already worked with, and finally underline any other stems.  Next, we use collegiate dictionaries to look up the meanings of the stems that are new or that we haven’t had yet.  The fun part is using those definitions to come up with a short definition of the words themselves using the definitions of the stems.  For example, bio means “life” and log means “speech, study of, written work, or word”.  So biology becomes the “study of life”.  I will post about our literature program when I post an update on Princess E next week.

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