Weekly Wrap-Up: Last School Day of 2010

Last week of school for the year 2010...hardly seems possible. We still have two weeks to finish from our current term but not until after we get back from our break so projects are left hanging. I would rather have everything buttoned up for the term but this is the way our schedule played out this time. Mr. A has three weeks off from his welding class which means he will be home in the afternoons and we can take some long walks together.

History: First, modern history was a focused week on D-Day (WW2) and we listened to a few speeches on YouTube. I gleaned the idea of listening to speeches from Ambleside Online and they have a whole list of speeches to choose from on their website (if you click the link above they will be listed by term in the history section of Year 11). For ancient history we are still deep into using the Bible as our core reading. Mr. B is also reading Holman's Bible Atlas to supplement his reading. This book makes things more alive and I am thoroughly enjoying following along with his reading. Last week he used it to find out about Bible geography and this week about Israel's surrounding nations.

Literature: Using SparkNotes.com we chose two themes to think about as we read The Crucible, intolerance and hysteria. I asked Mr. A to start keeping a list of places in the play where he finds examples of each of these themes and then at our Friday meeting he will share his points. We started this last week and I think we will keep it going until we finish the play. Everything else was pretty routine for The Chosen and then Mr. B's Iliad reading.

We are all enjoying Robert Frost's poetry and this week we focused a little on The Tuft of Flowers. How about these lines?

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

I am beginning to see the value of SparkNotes.com and with my son we have found it to be a great jumping off spot for doing some deeper thinking about what we are reading. It helps point us in the right direction if we are having trouble understanding something or if we want to see what other people think about what we are reading. There is so much more there than just summaries of literature and poetry.




Art and Music: Mr. A is working on a special timeline featuring Picasso and Matisse as part of his study of more modern art. The assignment was to include a piece of artwork on the timeline that represents each period of the artist's life and include their artwork other than paintings (sketches, collages, sculptures). He is using some of Notebooking.com's new Book of Centuries Timeline Pages. They add just a little something extra to his project. I will be sure to post some completed pages when he finishes.

Mr. B is listening to Edvard Grieg right now. My days are filled with this sort of music coming from his computer. Hall of the Mountain King

I think I will put this composer on the list of ones I want to cover in a Harmony Fine Arts Mini-Unit. There is a lot of interesting stuff to be learned in connection with this composer. I think Mr. B is really enjoying his study and I have to laugh...I don't know how many times Mr. B has said that Grieg looks like Mark Twain.


Hard at work on his videography project in his brother's workshop/office.



Baking and now Cooking Course: Mr. B has added another cookbook to his shelf and this week he tried out a Meatball Soup recipe. This is the results that we devoured for dinner last night with some rolls and butter. Perfect dinner after our cold damp hiking trip. 

So ends our last wrap-up post for the 2010 calendar year. We are taking three weeks off I think.....hoping to extend the two weeks we had planned off into three weeks to take advantage of an opportunity that just arose and we are tempted by.

Thanks for all your kind words and encouragement in the last weeks in the comments section of my wrap-up posts. I appreciate every single one.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom






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