Schools out for - thanksgiving break! Lucy's Year 4 Term 1 Exams and Review

It's not quite as catchy as "summer" but I am still pretty excited to have wrapped up the first term of the school year. It was Lucy's first term of year 4 and Jonah's second term of year 1.

Lucy's Year 4 Term 1

Year 4 was quite intimidating for me. It just has so many new components! But she's done so well with all of them.

Latin

We went with Getting Started with Latin. I'm doing it with her as a refresher for myself. We do it all orally (and ecclesiastical pronunction for you Latin geeks). We are almost half way done with the first book and I'm glad there is a second! The only thing I wish it had was a bit of English to Latin translation instead of relying on Latin to English excercises but I add a few of those in myself every once in a while. I have all three levels of the Latin Road to English Grammar but those are fairly intsense so I don't want to start them yet. This is a gentle and easy but effective intro to Latin.

Grammar 

I love our grammar program. We do just the grammar and practice books from Michael Clay Thompson (actually, I take that back, we are also all working through his first level's poetry book very slowly in our tea time but its kind of its own thing). Lucy and I read Grammar Island together over the summer and now she does one practice sentance a day, doing his four part sentance analysis. This was the first time we had done any formal grammar with Lucy but she's done brilliantly and its one of her favorite tasks every day.

Dictation

We started Simple Spelling. It's inexpensive and all the levels in one. We started at the beginning with level A (3rd grade) but have jumped her up to Level B. She studies the same passage all week and by Friday, has no issues with dictation. The only issue I have is that she only gets one passage each week. It's a good quality passage but I'm wondering if perhaps I should do 3 days of Simple Spelling and two days where she picks her own passage for copywork. 

Shakespeare

Form 2 means full plays! I let her pick and was not at all surprised when she asked for Much Ado About Nothing. We tried listening to the Arkangel radio productions but she thought they moved too fast and we were missing the jokes. So we just took turns reading. We'd pick different parts each scene and sometimes one person would end up talking themselves quite a bit but we had so much fun. I don't think I've heard her laugh as loud and as much as I did in this reading, especially the ones with Dogberry. One of her exam questions asked for her favorite scene. This is the picture she drew to accompany it, showing Dogberry handing out his ridiculous instructions. 

Dogberry is telling the guards what to do. And he says, you must be very quiet and I think it would be a good idea for you to sleep because you would be very quiet indeed. And if the prince comes, then stop him, but only if he wants to be stopped. And if thieves come in the night, you should make them go away and leave them alone, don’t take the thieves just leave them alone. And that is all. 

Originally, I had planned for us to do just Shakespeare in the fall and then depending on how it went, either replace it with Plutach or add Plutarch in. We have a bit of a crazy spring planned and on paper Shakespeare should really stay out of next term (and maybe Plutarch - as I said, crazy spring!) but I don't think I can because she'd be so heartbroken so I think we'll tackle Hamlet.

Written Narrations 

I didn't expect any issues with written narrations because she loves to write. And she did well, the only issues was that she didn't like having to have shorten narrations so we compronised by my letting her write was she could in a reasonable amount of time and then she would finish orally. We only did one a week this term, I'll probably bump that up to two next term. I also let her choose which book each week and she often choose Storybook of Science but did branch out to Shakespeare and Minn occasionally as well. I'll continue to encourage her to try different books but unless she really gets stuck, I'll leave the choice to her. And reading her written narrations each week is one of my favorite tasks, I just enjoy seeing her writing style develop.

History, Literature, Science and Bible

This isn't my favorite period of history but the revolutionary war is coming and that will be fun (It's Lucy's favorite time period)  I'm hoping she can start to take over more on her own but I thought she did really well with what she was given and the exam results seemed to validate that. We started doing recorded narrations with a voice memo app on my phone and that works really well. Her recorded narrations are the most detailed, even more than when I'm reading to her. We did Robinson Crusoe on audio and managed to stay on track which felt pretty good. Madam How and Lady Why was stretching but we took it slow, added some youtube videos and its definitely growing on us. 

French

She finished the oral part of Learnables 1 and instead of moving to the reading section we started using ULAT. We both really love it. We just finished the free portion and I subscribed for the next year. We do it together. She could probably do it on her own but I'm trying to refresh my memory/keep up with her so we do it together. 

So overall, I'm really happy with how Term 1 went! It was definitely an increase in work load and expection for her but she rose to the challenge very well and I'm so proud of her.

Exam samples:

I find it helpful to see other kids exam questions so I will continue to share as long as the kids are comfortable with it. My little ones love to share theirs. Lucy's is getting longer so I'll just share some samples. Notice that some answers are really long and detailed - and some aren't. And I'm okay with that. We had to do exams concurrently with our last few days of readings although I lightened the load by dropping math and language arts on those days. It kinda dampened the fun of our exams days so I'll try not to do that again but we had a big thanksgiving trip planned and sick days took up our flex time so it is what it is.

1.    Describe a picture from this term's picture study and tell me what you know about Leonardo DaVinci

Leonardo DaVinci, well, he was first an apprentice and the other apprentices would work on a big picture together and when the artist, when he started to paint a picture and Leonardo draw one of the angels in it, the artist thought his angel was so good that he never painted again because Leonardo was so much better than him at painting. Leonardo didn’t finish a lot of his work, he started to make a big statue of a horse and it was working pretty good but just when he was just about to make it, all the metal was used for cannons. And he also had sort of a contest with Michelangelo. He painted a big mural of Jesus and the disciples and when he was old, he lived with the king of France and he painted a very famous picture called the Mona Lisa and its one of the most popular paintings in the whole world.

I have two favorites. One of my favorites is the Lady with the Ermine and it’s the lady and she’s posed odd. Her body is turned one way and her head is turned the other and she looks uncomfortable and shes holding an Ermine which is a weasel. And the ermine looks kinda like a dragon or a lizard because it doesn’t look like it has fur, it just has greenish skin. But she looks kinda fancy, she’s wearing fancy clothes but the background is all black.

And then my other favorite is one I like a bit more, it’s the mural of the disciples at the big table. And it looks as if it were just when Jesus had told them that someone was going to betray him because they all seem to be excited and worried looking and Jesus is in the middle and he’s in a red and blue robe.

Tell about John the Baptist and about how he baptized Jesus.

All that happened was John was baptizing Jesus and a dove flew down. And God said “this is my son, with whom I am well pleased.” I’m not really sure what else there is to say about it. 

Narrate one of these stories: Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Cephalus and Procris, or Diana and Actaeon.

There was a guy who was shot by Cupid so he loved nymph named Daphne. But Daphne was shot by a different arrow so she didn’t love Apollo. So Apollo was chasing her and Daphne was running away and then she turned into a tree. 

Draw a Map of Robinson Crusoe's island or an outfit of his.

She did an amazingly detailed map but I forgot to take a picture and now we're out of town. I'll try and remember to add it when we get home. It was great. 

What are earthquakes? What causes them?

Not in Madam How and Lady Why’s thinking, but earthquakes are caused by the shifting of the tectonic plates and sometimes the plates shift passed each other and sometimes the plates bump into each other and sometimes they pull away from each other. If they pull apart from each other, then under the sea the inner mantle it hardens to become crust but if they bump into each other and there are continents on the plates, they rise up into a mountain.

Talk about silk, and about Epeira's Bridge… or Describe how flax is made.

Epeira is a spider and it usually makes its webs over banks of rivers. And this is how they make them because they can’t swim to the other side, they’d just drown, this is how they would stretch the web over the river. So, they go to a branch on one side of the river and they attach a thread there then they spin a thread that is long enough and they simple let it blow in the wind and the wind carries it to the other side and catches it. And once it gets caught on something, the Epeiria goes back and forth over it to make it very strong. And there is more. After that, then the Epeira makes another bridge a little ways under that one, but he doesn’t do it the same way. He goes down to a lower branch just below the end of the first bridge he made, lowering himself down by a thread. Then he attaches a thread there, goes back up and across and he spins thread as he walks across but he hasn’t been attaching the thread as he goes, then he goes down on the other side and attaches it there then it falls and goes all across the bottom. So then he makes a thread right between those in the very center between those two bridges and he stands in the middle of that and then he makes little ropes of thread going out from that center point and these are called the radiating threads.