Friday, October 28, 2011

Our Work for Week 11 - 2011....

~  My son completed Pilgrim's Progress this week and is finishing up the analysis work that his teacher assigned to go along with the reading of Part II of the book.  I believe they are beginning Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde next week - appropriate for Halloween, I think, and as a go along with the mysteries we've been reading at home....

~  He read more Poe at home and we attended our local children's theatre today for a terrific production that encompassed a number of Poe's stories/poems, and also gave insight into the tregedies in his life that influenced his writing....

~  He finished reading The Man Without a Country.  He'll read more Poe through Halloween, then we'll switch to O. Henry's stories....

~  In history, I finally finished up reading Andrew Johnson: Rebuilding a Nation, Cathy Dubowski:




It was a good juxtaposition against "The Birth of a Nation" film that we viewed earlier. 

We also read more on certain battles that he had an interest in from Scholastic's The Encyclopedia of the United States at War:

Scholastic Encylopedia of the United States at War

On Wednesday, we spent half the day at Camp Nelson, visiting with one of the best Frederick Douglass re-enactors in the country.  We got to see a nice film about the encampment and tour their new interpretive center, as well as the officers' quarters building, an old farmhouse (which has always been there).  Camp Nelson was the primary location where slaves came to join the Union army.  Many of their families followed and there were numerous problems that arose from this.  It was as a result of one of the purges in cold weather, when over 100 women and children died, that the U.S. agreed to free all that came into the camps and provide them with adequate housing.  We're going back out tomorrow night for a ghost walk....
       




I finally got to move into the next time period (although there is always some overlap), breaching the time period of the 20th century by reading from the Usborne Illustrated Atlas of the 20th Century and Time-Life's 20th Century America:

             Atlas of 20th Century (Usborne Illustrated Guide to)
I also began reading The Yanks are Coming, by Albert Marrin:
The Yanks Are Coming: The United States in the First World War
He caught up with his reading in Volume 8 of History of US.  We'll be adding in additional readings next week.  Now that chemistry lab is finally ended, we'll have an additional 3 hours a week to cover history and lit, so I hope we'll be back on track shortly!
~  Everything else is running smoothly.  He completed his last lesson in Latin Primer III today, so he'll be wrapping up tests and moving into the grammar book next week. 
~  He completed another calaca for Dia de los Muertos.  This started because we have a local ballet company whose director hails from an area in Mexico where this celebration is very large.  She wrote a ballet that centers around this celebration and we attended it a couple of different years.  They arranged to have locals set up various altars that are used during this celebration so that visitors could get a better idea of the culture. 

I bought a couple of little wooden skeletons at Michael's a few years ago and we had never painted them.  I had glow in the dark paint to use, but we had just never gotten around to using them.  My son got interested in using Sharpie's in myriad colors to do artwork.  When I finally pulled out one of the skeletons last year, we brainstormed and he decided to decorate it as a calaca.  He did a "girl."  It was so cute, but we never had time to do another, so he just completed the "boy" to go with it.  They are so happy and upbeat.  I much prefer them to all the scary, gory things that our culture promotes during this season of the year. 




(I didn't have the heart to mention to him that "mortes" is feminine....)



I'm not glorifying death (except as it leads to eternal life), mind you, just looking for a less gruesome way to get through this season with a boy....  (The Halloween concert last weekend was actually very cute, too!)



Wow, that skeleton became disarticulated quickly, LOL!

Now we turn around three times and it's Christmas....

Regena

2 comments:

laughinglioness.lisa@gmail.com said...

Wow, Regina. What a full and rich week! We love so many of the books that you mentioned! Love the skeleton decor ; )

laughinglioness.lisa@gmail.com said...
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