We covered the Roman Legions, citizen-soldiers and the Punic Wars in which Carthage was ultimately destroyed. We went on line to explore the ancient city of Ephesus whose ruins I have visited several times

We moved on in the text, reading up on the role of Roman women, the importance of education, mythology and religion. We compared some of the Roman deities to their Greek counterparts and saw how the Romans "borrowed" many customs from the Greeks. We took a text-based quiz verbally.

Today, Hunter and I reviewed nonfiction texts, including "The Perfect Storm" excerpt by Junger. We discussed setting, evidence, definition of disaster, locating answers to comprehension questions, and the theme of nature's fury. We also reviewed chapter 2 of his vocabulary text.

Ch. 4-4 Graphing a Function Rule.

Hunter began the session with a review of words from step 4.3 (these words were introduced at the previous session). He fluently read the word cards. He charted 15/15 real words correctly. Syllable cards were used to practice spelling three syllable words. For the written part of the lesson Hunter spelled 10/10 real words and 5/5 nonsense words correctly. He did a good job on the sentence dictation. He misspelled infantile and escape. We discussed these words and Hunter made corrections.

We used the text to explore the origins of the Roman Empire on the seven hills near the middle of the Italian peninsula which later became the city of Rome. We learned that the Romans evolved from the Etruscans, Greeks and Italic-speaking tribes. We went on line and explored how the Roman government evolved from a monarchy to a form of republic.

We covered Ch. 4-1 Using Graphs to Relate Two Quantities, Ch. 4-2 Patterns and Linear Functions, Ch. 4-3 Patterns and Nonlinear Functions.

Hunter began the session using syllable cards to spell several words. He had no difficulty spelling any of the words. Ten words were dictated to Hunter for spelling. He spelled 4/10 words correctly. He spelled 5/5 nonsense words correctly. One sentence was dictated and he had no difficulty with it. The final part of the lesson was spent using letter cubes to spell some of the misspelled words from the written portion of the lesson. For the next session we will continue to use the letter cubes to practice spelling words from step 4.2.

Hunter completed the Ch. 3 test.

It was Hunter's birthday today! Sweet 16! He completed a grammar pretest and then watched some scenes from the movie Dead Poets Society in order to gain inspiration for poetry assignments.