Week In Review - A Quiet Week

Overall, this week has been a quiet week.  We stayed home and did our schoolwork every day.  Two nights this week, Amber and Mason were home all evening too since both swim team and youth group were cancelled for Tuesday and Wednesday nights due to the weather.  I've only left our house once all week - I love it!


But, I'm particularly excited for tonight - my good friend is coming over to scrapbook with me!  I haven't scrapbooked in years and I'm so looking forward to working on my favorite hobby with a good friend.


Now, back to the academic highlights!  Amber wrote her second of two literary analysis essays about The Scarlet Letter this week.  I've been so impressed with both of her papers.  She absolutely loved the book and that certainly helps in writing an interesting essay.  She has worked so hard on the papers, though, I wanted to share one paragraph from her paper about symbolism in The Scarlet Letter.  She has always enjoyed writing and I'm so proud of how she has embraced writing literary analysis essays this school year.

• Roger Chillingworth.  Even the name sends shivers down one’s spine.  This character is the symbol of the Devil.  Evil, all that is corrupt, wrong and wicked is what Dr. Chillingworth stands for.  Even his image in the town is built up with lies and deceit, a false identity.  Like Satan, he sneaks around peoples backs, lies, trying to seem friendly and right- but there are always clues.  Roger Chillingworth’s character is in the book to scare Hester, and to be the danger to Hester’s love.  Roger befriends Reverend Dimmesdale so that he may, when the time comes, strike.  Like a snake, his lies and prods and almost undetectable comments of torture to Mr. Dimmesdale constrict around the Minister until he can not breath- and at the end of the book, the man is crushed.  “Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of especial sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself, or Satan’s emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth.”

Amber, Mason, and Duncan all did experiments this week.  Far and away, though, Mason's was the coolest.  First, we boiled water with red cabbage in it.  After letting it cool, we added the cabbage water to a 2 liter bottle.  Then, we added vinegar which changed the color of the cabbage water from pink to a bluish color.  After that, we dumped in the baking soda from the balloon we attached to the top of the bottle.  In addition to all of the foaming and the balloon blowing up, the cabbage water/vinegar mix changed back to the original color.  It was all very cool and very exciting!

Amber extracted the DNA from peas.  That was really cool, too - it actually worked!  In other related Biology news, Amber is quite happy to be done with the meiosis module in Biology.  She is finding the genetics module to be far more interesting to her.

Duncan looked at a leaf under the microscope, learned about pitch in sound with a hands-on activity, and made a model of a plant cell.

All of the science experiments were made easier through the use of my prepared science experiments basket.

In my continuing effort to play more educational games with my children, we played the following games this week:

• Professor Noggin's Human Body Game
• Go To Press!

We are still focusing on biblical history in History, focusing on Ancient Assyria this week.  We are all LOVING our new read-aloud book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  I look forward to reading it every school day.  We're enjoying it so very much that I'm no longer going to try to link our read-alouds to our history studies all of the time.  We're just going to focus on reading excellent, classic children's novels and enjoying them from the bottom of our hearts.


During our read-aloud and history time, Amber worked on making beaded bracelets for her friends for Valentine's Day.  She is new to beading and I think her bracelets are turning out well.  I love when the children do handicrafts during our read-aloud times.

In art this week, the children completed a drawing lesson focusing on overlapping animal shapes.  I got out our big box of plastic animals for the lesson.  My kids used to play with them all the time when they were younger - I'm glad I kept them.

Duncan drew an ocean scene with two fish as well as two whales overlapping.  He used a watercolor wash to finish his artwork.

 Mason drew a beach scene with overlapping whales.

Amber drew a very detailed drawing of lizards with a bit of overlapping among the lizards.  She was happy to discover her box of lizards in the plastic animal box.  The plastic lizards were her favorites when she was younger.

Next week will be a hectic week as I am taking Amber and a friend for an overnight trip to an indoor waterpark for her 14th birthday.  We are also meeting good friends one afternoon to tour a local art museum. Amber's family birthday party will be next week-end as well.  I am glad that we were able to enjoy a quiet week as next week will not be quiet with all of our planned activities!

That was our Week in Review!  If you'd like to read about what other homeschooling bloggers have been doing this past week, check out the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.  Now, I'm off to scrapbook!