We had our first 4-H field trip to the Franklin Mineral Museum. We had a great guided tour through their collection, down into the mine replica, the fluorescing mineral display, and then out into the pit to collect our own rocks.
They had a great display of trilobite fossils, which Vicki loved!
At our regular meeting, we used a magnifier to take a closer look at some of our minerals, explored my mineral collection (many of the pieces are actually Steph's), discussed how to identify minerals, set up our own little dark room to explore long-wave fluorescing minerals, and cracked open geodes.
I found a solution to Vicki's struggles with math. She didn't appear to be having trouble with the calculations or set-up of the math problems. She was just getting overwhelmed with the amount of work on a page and that seemed to keep her from knowing where to start. The author of Math Mammoth does not advise assigning every problem. Something I had forgotten and the full page of problems was overwhelming Vicki. So I went through and highlighted a selection of problems for her to do. I picked from different parts of the page, at least a couple word problems if they were available, but probably around half the problems from a single page. IF she did those problems correctly, she would be done. This has worked very well for the past two weeks, so hopefully will continue to be a solution.
Vicki finished her 5th grade Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Spell & Write. I did purchase the 6th grade book but may wait until after the holidays to get started. She did write a pretty decent story for one of her last pages in the 5th grade book. She usually writes the shortest entry she could possibly come up with.
She had to write a story about Andy Ant, a worker ant.
Andy was in a very dangerous environment, the deep, muck forest. The temperature was steaming. There was no telling what could happen in that humid place. Out of nowhere, a snake leaped at Andy! That snake scared him so much he landed in the water. Luckily he landed on a lilypad. He floated away, never to be seen again.
Vicki is doing great with the skip-counting chapter in Beast Academy. She has also started doing matrix puzzles from our Logic book and has really been enjoying them.
Vicki read The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Pippi Longstocking and Misty of Chincotegue in the past couple of weeks.
Squidy is doing ratio/proportion word problems in Math Mammoth 6A. He may need help with setting up one problem out of 7 or 8, but for the most part he finds it fairly easy. For now I'm having him to do all the problems on two pages each day.
He is almost finished with Beast Academy 4B and we are going to jump right into 4C (which we already have). After that, I'm not sure he'll continue with BA. He likes it but it's probably overkill as we get farther into pre-algebra/algebra with Jousting Armadillos.
He's finding Jousting Armadillos fairly simple at the moment. The current lessons are covering what is meant by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The next lesson is exponents, which might be a little more of a challenge.
Zaccaro Challenge math is more of a ......Challenge ;-) but he's still enjoying it. The current lesson is Algebra word problems. I've been having him do a few problems each day so splitting each Level into a few days. He has been able to do the majority of the Level 1 and Level 2 problems on his own. We've done the Einstein Level problems together. Once he has some help with setting them up, he is usually able to solve them on his own.
Squidy finished the entire Chronicles of Narnia series in the past couple of weeks. I have all seven books in one volume, which I thought he would find overwhelming but the size of the book didn't bother him. He enjoyed the stories (the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe most) and has taken to randomly saying "For Narnia!!". :-)
Coming up: We will definitely be starting our Ancients studies this week, we have another 4-H meeting where we will be exploring pendulums and doing some painting, I'm hoping to do a post on how I'm getting better at planning, and I'm hoping to start doing review posts on some of our new materials.
