Our First Week Back!

This has been our first week back. We resumed school after only a two week break. The summers are incredibly hot here! The boys never wanted to go outside until late afternoon/evening. We were all getting a bit stir-crazy. I have been so excited about starting the new year - especially science and history.

It seems that fall has been our "summer" since moving to the desert. The weather is always nicer and there are smaller crowds at all the fun places we like to visit!

This is what we accomplished this week.

Brandon:
Horizons 3 - Lessons 1-5
Growing with Grammar (GWG) - Lessons 1.1 - 1.4
Explode the Code 6 (ETC)- pages 81-96
Singapore Challenging Word Problems (CWP) - pages 63-64
Spectrum Reading 3 - pages 8-19

Gavin:
Horizons 1 - Lessons 1-5
Singapore CWP - pages 1-5
Explode the Code 2 1/2 - pages 17-32

Both:
Story of the World 2 (SOTW2) - Chapter 1
- map work
- Brandon did copywork
- read Who Were the Romans?
- barbarian coloring page
- narration exercise about the Roman Empire
- read chapters 1-5 of The Sword in the Tree by Clyde Robert Bulla
- made our own Roman ruins that the boys ate afterwards!

REAL Science Life - Unit 1 (What is Life?) and Unit 2 (The Cell)
- read The Magic School Bus Inside Ralphie by Joanna Cole
- read Germs Make Me Sick! by Melvin Berger
- read Your Skin and Mine by Paul Showers
- read Magic School Bus: The Search for the Missing Bones by Eva Moore,
chapters 1-5
- germs coloring page
- animal cell coloring page
- plant cell coloring page
- human cell coloring page

For science, we completed two labs the boys really enjoyed. The first was "An Egg is a Cell" lab where they had to identify parts of a cell as found in an egg. The second involved making edible models of plant and animal cells!

We've also been reading Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary. A child-friendly version of Gulliver's Travels is our family read-aloud now. The boys cannot get enough of Lilliput!