Weekly Wrap-Up: It Was a Hairy Bear...

... it was a scary bear. We beat a hasty retreat from his lair. And described him with adjectives."

If this sounds familiar to you, then you must be familiar with Schoolhouse Rock. This week, we watched "Unpack Your Adjectives" to add a little oomph to our grammar study. A little oomph can be a good thing, can't it?

Other highlights:

The girls completed book A3 of the Mind Benders series. The last two puzzles were quite tricky, and they requested my help. However, I did very little. Both of them are better and more practiced than I at these grid puzzles, and, working together and talking it out, they were able to figure out the answers.

We began our study of the brain and nervous system. Again, I found the KidsHealth website to be a great introduction and overview. Click here for their chapter on the brain and nervous system. The girls listened to a recording of the article as they read along.

I really cannot rave enough over the Eyewitness Science book, Human Body, by Steve Parker and published by DK. I found it at our library, but this is a keeper, so I bought a used copy on Amazon. While simplistic illustrations of body parts are helpful in clearly depicting their functions (like this Flash diagram on the KidsHealth site), more realistic-looking models are invaluable in showing how our inner workings really look, how they fit together. We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made.

The girls began work on their Colonial America history pockets. For children in grades four to six, these pockets are more detailed than others we've done in the past. I'm going to pick and choose the pockets we complete, since we've already covered some of the material a few weeks ago, such as the Mayflower crossing.

We watched a short VHS production by Kultur entitled "Rembrandt: Painter of Man," which I found at the library. There's another part we have yet to watch, "The Restoration of 'The Night Watch,'" which is one of Rembrandt's most famous works.

In math, Miss Priss tackled decimals, a bit of geometry, and basic operations practice in Mathematical Reasoning. Tiny Girl continued with geometry in MEP, including work with tesselations, enlarging/reducing geometrical figures, figuring area and perimeter, and similar/congruent figures.

On Friday, the girls attended their Timothy Ministry homeschool enrichment classes. They are both enjoying the  acrylic painting class. Miss Priss is having fun in Irish dance. Tiny Girl absolutely loves chess, a class I had to convince her to try. She's a born strategist, like her father. I, alas, am not; she routinely beats me at checkers and mancala.

 Those are the highlights of our week! To read more Weekly Wrap-Ups, hop over the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Have a great weekend!