Homeschool Week 8: Breaking News

Language Arts: We are getting close to the ending of the book! I love that Phi is reading this book at this age. What a great reminder how girls are just as strong and resourceful as boys can be. Karana is such a great example of the strength and courage a young girl can possess. I am bracing myself for the ending. Phi did all the novel study assignments. I have noticed that Phi's reading comprehension this year is a little better than last year. She is already reading novels a but faster too.

Math: We dove right back into multiplication and anyone who has been following along since last year knows that this is not Phi's forte. Getting her to memorize the multiplication tables, combined with these crazy common core lessons has made it really hard. She still hasn't them all memorized but we are slowly working on it. This was the first week where math was hard. There may have been some talking back on her end, and there may have been 4 days without electronics. I hope that these hard weeks are few and far between this year.

Social Studies: We talked about the Native California tribes close to home. We talked about the desert tribes. We talked a lot about about how the climate determines how they build their homes and what they wore. We talked about the governments they developed. When we were talking about what Phi thought made a good Chief she talked about traits like, honest, brave, kind, funny and realized that her Tata would make a damn good Chief. I told her he was kind of like the Chief of our tribe!

To bring the lesson to life a little more we took a trip to the small Native American Museum in Palm Springs. It was a very small place but it was enough to let Phi learn a little more about native governments and she got to touch and see a few of the plants and what they were used for.

Science: This week we studies microorganisms. We talked about the 3 different types of microorganisms The assignment was to write a newspaper article about one type of microorganism. There needed to be quotes from an expert and from someone who has dealt with the microorganism first hand. We got permission from Phi's teacher to do a video instead.

BREAKING NEWS:

Big thanks to Uncle Matty for helping us out. 

Despite the math we had a pretty fun week!