The Pretty Life: ivey league academy: week in review!

I finally changed the chalkboard this week! The movie "Rio" was the inspiration; we watched it this week as part of our study of Brazil and one of the boys' favorites quotes is when the main character complains that all samba songs sound exactly the same to him (then chants "tico, taco, yah, yah, yah!" to prove his point).

Reading: We kept plugging away at Hooked on Phonics. Caleb practiced some of the more challenging sounds this week, such as "igh," "shr," and "scr."

English: We finished up Chapter 3 this week and did a review on Friday. Caleb learned about common and proper nouns, capitalizing titles, and how to separate nouns in a series with commas. There's also a cumulative review that covers what we've learned so far this school year, so I think we'll do that first thing next week and then do the Chapter 3 Test. If it were a math test, I'd be fine with Caleb doing a test on a Monday, but language arts confuses him a bit so I'd rather not jump into a test after a weekend without more practice first.

Spelling: Caleb learned List 6 of his spelling words. He got 8 out of 10 correct on his test. He spelled sheep as "seep" and queen as "qeen." This is telling me that he still often relies on reading by sight rather than sounding out the word, since he remembered most of the letters of the words but not all. We'll continue with this curriculum though because overall he's doing so much better!

Word of the Week/Journal: Our word this week was "variety." Caleb wrote about his bird feather collection, plus part of a bird poem.

Math: We continued in his Horizons math workbook.

Bible: We continued learning about the question, "What is God like?" We learned about God's attributes and how that relates to ourselves, and at the end of the week we made an envelope to paste into his journal; inside the envelope were little pages where Caleb wrote his answers to the questions the book asked this week ("Does God exist?" "How many gods are there?" "What does God look like?" and "Is God a person?").

Zoology: This week the Sassafras twins went to a Canadian farm! We learned about cows and bees. Caleb filled out his animal report sheets for each animal and also put them on our food chart. For our scientific demonstration, we made butter in a jar! The directions in my manual were odd (they had you add water with the cream but then also had you periodically pour it back out), so I looked it up on Pinterest and found that really, you just add cream to a jar (and a little salt if you want), then shake it! Randall was home from work that day due to Hurricane Irma, so he also helped with the shaking. After several minutes, we could feel it getting thicker, but when we opened it up we saw that it was whipped cream. After a few more minutes of shaking, we had butter! It's very good too...I've been putting it in our rice and on top of biscuits and toast all week.

We also colored in beehives later on that week, and looked up a video on "waggle dancing," which is a dance bees engage in to communicate to each other. When a bee finds a great flower with lots of nectar, it flies back to the hive and gets the other bees' attention. Then it does a figure-eight kind of dance while wiggling around; scientists have studied the movements and have found that the dance tells the bees how far to fly AND at what angle in relation to the sun!

World Cultures: This week's country was Brazil. Caleb filled out his country fact sheet and we read a few books from the library. As mentioned before, we watched our copy of "Rio," which takes place in Brazil and also prominently features Rio de Janeiro's annual "Carnival" festival. It's a funny, entertaining movie and while it's fictional (the main characters are talking birds!), the animators did a great job showing the landscape and culture of Brazil (including the famous Christ the Redeemer statue). One night I also made a Brazilian meat stew out of the Eat Your Way Around the World cookbook. I wanted to make cheese rolls (pao de queijo) as well, but they call for tapioca flour and I couldn't find it at first. I've gotten a few leads about stores that carry it so if I find it we'll just make them during the next week or so.