Week 6 - Long Division Blues

Fall has come to our little corner of the world, even if the temperatures are more like those of late August.  Since October is Fire Safety Month, we satisfied our requirement by going to a tour of the fire department and watching a car get cut apart with the Jaws of Life. It was pretty cool.

As for academics this week, it was a long slog. For math, as the title suggests, we stuck with long division for the whole week. Oh. My. Goodness. This is the first multi-step math Henry has done, so he's still trying to get everything done in the right order. He knows how many times one number goes into the other number, but then, he can't remember what the multiple is without some serious thought. After the first bit of subtraction, and the bringing down of the next number is done, he's lost. We're going to practice more this coming week.  I haven't told him that they won't always divide evenly yet. It might make his little head explode.

We are FINALLY finished with Mesopotamia. I didn't make him memorize all of the kings, empires and dates. He knows the highlights from the era, and that's good enough for me. We read the story of Gilgamesh - the clean, less womanizing version in Story of the World. He thought Enkidu was pretty funny.

We had another good week of spelling. We had the prefixes uni, bi, and tri. We did some dictionary work, looking up words with those prefixes and defining them. 

We didn't do any formal science lessons, but we did some impromptu work. While we were doing school work outside (such a treat in October!), a giant wooly bear caterpillar came across our path. We looked it up, found out what it eats, found out what it looks like when it turns into a moth, etc. On another day, we read about why some leaves turn red, and others turn yellow. I am really hoping to get back on track with formal science lessons this coming week.