Home-school lessons continue!

Lacie and I met today to review last week's assignments.  She finished reading Robinson Crusoe and wrote two drafts of a letter to her Dad.  We start at 10:00 and worked for 1 1/2 hours revising the letter and making corrections.  We saved all of the revisions for her portfolio.  My goal is for Lacie to be able to write a paper using the third person, present tense, active voice, and indicative mood.  Not easy!  We're spending time now as an investment for future papers.  I started to work on Latin.  Lacie and I are starting over in grammar.  It's hard to understand declensions without an understanding of subject, direct objects, indirect objects, object of a preposition, etc.  Today, I had Lacie copy the first declension for terra, terrae and porta, portae several times and assigned more for home work.  My technique is to copy noun declensions and verb conjugations over and over to learn them.  We took a break and Lacie had a guitar lesson with my husband, Rob, lunch, and more work.

I checked on her Chemistry summer assignment, Periodic Table cards, due next Tuesday.  We worked on Algebra, Theology (Sola Scriptura), and grammar.  Next week, things get real!  Right after Chemistry class, we're spending several hours reviewing assignments, giving direct instruction in grammar and Algebra, and learning the elements in the Periodic Table.  I plan to assign more first declension nouns to learn, but launching Latin slowly to teach the grammar simultaneously, including diagramming sentences.  Wooooo!

Lacie's Fine Arts credit is guitar.  Below is a photo of the chord cards and book she is using.

After guitar and lunch, we began grammar.  We are using Easy Grammar 5/6.  First, we reviewed prepositions, subjects, and predicates.  Once we completed the exercise, I introduced Lacie how to diagram simple sentences.  Next, we added prepositional phrases to the diagram.  As we went along, we talked about objects of a preposition, definite and indefinite articles, etc.  So, as we do exercises, we doing a bit more grammar.  This link explains how to diagram sentences.  Start slowly!  

Lastly, we did some Algebra.  We are starting with Lesson 1 to learn order of operations, and basic algebraic rules.  Tell me this isn't exciting!  It has been a long time since I've taught grammar or math.