Lydia's Grade Eight, Week Eight: Air, Fire, and Water?

Illustration by Trina Schart Hyman for St. George and the Dragon, by Barbara Cooney

Reading together:

How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig, chapter 8, "You don't think anyone's going to hell, do you?"  An intense, serious chapter with big questions.  Read in two parts.

Exploring the World Around You (ecology): "Aquatic Ecosystems."

How to Read a Book: "Finding the Propositions."

Whatever Happened to Justice?, "Economic Calculation."  What makes a free trade?

Keep reading Out of the Silent Planet (from the AO Free Reads list)

Things to read alone:

Assigned Bible readings: 1 Samuel, Matthew, Psalms, Proverbs

Physical Science: finish Module 2, "Air."

Read The Bible Through the Ages, and make entries in the Book of Centuries. This week's topics are The Oracles of Isaiah, Baruch, and Jeremiah; The Making of Parchment; the Babylonian Captivity.

Read this week's English history, about Queen Mary, from either Churchill's New World or Arnold-Forster's History.  Book of Centuries.

Three chapters from History of English Literature, two about Spenser, one about theaters.  Three chapters from Westward Ho!  

Other things to do:

Music of Wagner

Math: "The Sequence of Squares."

French and Latin lessons

Know how to use and care for the stove and some of the small appliances in your home.  Keep notes in an Enquire Within notebook.

Make entries in your Reader's Journal, and at least one Nature Notebook entry.  This might be a good time to take a fall walk around the pond.

Homeschooling does continue

We're almost finished our Ambleside term...I know what AO Years we're doing (Year 8 for The Apprentice, Year 3 for Ponytails), but where we are in the year's schedule is another question. We're just doing whatever comes next. (And Crayons' JK curriculum is made up as we go along.)

The Apprentice and Ponytails have both been reading about King James I, but in different books, and about other things that happened during the first quarter of the 1600s, like Champlain's founding of Quebec and the sailing of the Mayflower, and the Thirty Years' War (which did last thirty years, that's not one of those trick questions).

Ponytails and I just finished Marguerite De Angeli's Henner's Lydia (a short book) as well as Elizabeth Enright's Then There Were Five, which Ponytails goes around all day quoting from. And we've jumped into Prince Caspian, which is (arguably) the second book you should read in the Narnia series. I'm reading Galileo and the Magic Numbers to her as well--it's one of our favourite science biographies. (We didn't download the e-book that I linked to--our copy is an old one.)

The Apprentice is still working on Spenser's Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, Bruchko, and Whatever Happened to Justice? We finished Oliver Twist and are reading A Christmas Carol together when we get extra time.

And there's a little math (I'll post a fun site later on today), and a little spelling, and a little Elements of Style (for The Apprentice), and a few things like that that still go on until the end of this week--and then WE ARE TAKING A HOLIDAY.