Read-at-Home Mom: Homeschool Update: October 2023

Group Activities

Geography/Art

From The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton, Dad read the sections about the Boulder (Hoover) Dam, Niagara Falls, New York City, and Washington, DC. Then we watched these videos:

Latin

We continued working our way through Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age by William E. Linney. After we learned a few verbs and how to conjugate them, we took a break from the book to make sure all three girls were solid in their understanding of how to identify and translate each verb. E. took a bit to catch up. C. is our strongest Latin student right now.

Shakespeare

The girls spent October memorizing some of the three witches' lines from Macbeth. They recorded a performance on Halloween.

Read-Alouds

In October, Dad read aloud The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis Mcgraw and Egyptian Adventures by Olivia Coolidge. I read aloud A Lemon and a Star by E. C. Spykman and we played the audiobook of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury.

Catechism

M. and C. continued to memorize answers to questions in the New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism Volume 1 and E. continued to memorize the answers to questions in The St. Joseph First Communion Catechism.

Poetry

We are reading Poem-making: Ways to Begin Writing Poetry by Myra Cohn Livingston on Fridays.

Science

C. and E. read about birds and insects in The Golden Treasury of Natural History. In Secrets of the Universe, M. and I read three chapters: "Planetary Motion," "Pendulums and Falling Objects - Galileo's Laws of Motion," and "Newton's Three Laws of Motion." She watched several demonstrations by Julius Sumner Miller, and did two experiments from Janice VanCleave's Physics for Every Kid, one about buoyancy and one about gravity.

Health

E. watched the episodes of How the Body Works about the tongue and the nervous system. M. visited the orthodontist.

History

E. and I read about Egypt in A Child's History of the World by V.M. Hillyer. We also read Pharaoh's Boat by David Weitzman and The Great Pyramid by Elizabeth Mann. On her own, she read:

Mummies Made in Egypt by Aliki
Pepi and the Secret Names by Jill Paton Walsh
Hatshepsut, His Majesty, Herself by Catherine M. Andronik
Zekmet, the Stone Carver: A Tale of Ancient Egypt by Mary Stolz
Seeker of Knowledge by James Rumford
The Shipwrecked Sailor: An Egyptian Tale with Hieroglyphs by Tamara Bower
Sokar and the Crocodile by Alice Howard

She also acted out an Egyptian burial using a homemade paper mummy and a shoebox sarcophagus she decorated herself using drawing instructions from Ralph Masiello's Ancient Egypt Drawing Book.

M. and I finished The Early Human World and read most of The Ancient Near Eastern World. She watched most of the episodes of the Great Courses class, Between the Rivers. She wrote a narration about Hammurabi and read The Three Brothers of Ur by J. G. Fyson.

C. and Dad continued reading The World of Captain John Smith by Genevieve Foster, covering these sections:

John Smith, Sightseer in Italy (1600)
Galileo
A Royal Wedding (1600 - Henry IV & Maria de Medici)
Grand Opera and the Violin
John Smith and the Terrible Turks (1601-1603)
John Smith, Slave (1603)
Cervantes and Don Quixote
Boris Godunov
The Queen Is Dead (1603)
King James I
The Globe Theater
Ben Jonson
Sir Walter Raleigh a Prisoner (1603)
Sir Francis Bacon Rings the Bell
The King James Bible (1604)
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot (1605)
A Meeting in Scrooby Village
A Frenchman Reports on New Spain (Champlain)
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Champlain Visits Canada
Off to Virginia (1606)
New France, the First Colony
The Great Chief Powhatan
John Smith at Jamestown (1607)
A Compass and Talking Paper
Pocahontas and John Smith
John Smith Draws a Map of Virginia (1608)
Half Moon on the Hudson River
French and Indians on Lake Champlain
President John Smith (1608)
Starvation and Shipwreck
(Tobacco to the Rescue)
A Synagogue in Amsterdam
At Home in Leyden
(The Telescope (1608))
Galileo and the Planets
Henry IV is Dead
Galileo in Rome (1611)
French Missionaries in Canada
Pocahontas Is Married
The Royal Couple
King Gustav Adolf
Russia's New Tsar, Michael Romanov (1613)
The Naming of New England
In Memory of Shakespeare (d. 1616)
Pocahontas in England
The Law vs. the King?
Raleigh's Last Adventure (1616)
The House of Burgesses (1619)
Servants and Slaves (1619)
They Knew That They Were Pilgrims
John Smith, Unhappy Admiral
The Mayflower Sails (1620)
Anchored at Plymouth

C. also read Puritan Adventure by Lois Lenski.

English

M. continued working on Vocabulary from Classical Roots A and Rex Barks. E. continued working in Grammarland. C. continued working in the Beginning book of Sentence Diagramming.

R. started sounding out consonant-vowel-consonant words.

Math

M. continued working on Challenging Word Problems 3. She finished the reviews in Singapore 5A and moved on to 5B. She also continued with Khan Academy 6th grade math, Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents and drilling math facts with flashcards online every Friday.

C. continued with Singapore 3B, Khan Academy 3rd grade math, and Life of Fred: Farming.

E. continued with Singapore 1A and Khan Academy early math.