Jj- Jewel

This week we learned the letter J and about jewels.We learned what it means for something to be considered valuable. Diamonds and precious jewels are very expensive and considered valuable. People value different things. However, Jesus said "What good is it if a man gains the whole world but loses his soul?" Paul said "I consider everything loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ." (Phil 3:8.) Boo's words to remember this week were "Jesus is more valuable than anything else."


Well Monday happened to be groundhogs day, so after introducing our jewels. We did a few groundhogs day activities. It's fun for the kids to celebrate this tradition even though the thought of a little fur ball predicting the weather is just silliness. Here's a link to a cute little song Boo and I learned.

Ground Hogs day Song

Then we played around with shadow puppets a little bit and made this groundhog shadow craft. I simply printed off a silhouette of a groundhog from the internet, cut him out, and very lightly glued him (with a glue stick so that it would easily peal off) to black construction paper. We then used him as a stencil and colored around him with light colored chalks to make a groundhog shadow.

For our tactile letter activity I just drew some letter J's on a paper and Boo used rubber stamps and ink to trace over the letters.


We're still practicing basic addition. I bought a cheap pack of decorative jewels for our craft this week. We decided to use our jewels for math too, to help in figuring out the problems.She's almost ready to begin her MathUsee Primer, which she's super excited about.


I didn't do too great presenting info on jewels. It was hard to find materials, and I didn't have any books. At least Boo learned the letter J and the definition of the word "valuable." I thought it was neat that our family bible study in "Long Story Short," just happened to focus on Esau not valuing his birthright. So Boo's K lessons kind of helped her to understand that lesson better.


 For our craft we made a crown using a paper plate. We used our "jewels" to decorate it and we glued our words to remember on the front.

Sis Highlight:

Sis completed memorizing all of her multiplication facts. We've been slowly learning them all year. I really love the approach that MathUSee uses focusing on one main concept for the whole year (addition yr 1, subtraction yr 2, mult yr 3, etc) and really mastering the "how and why" of that one concept. At the same time they gently use fractions, algebra, and many advanced math concepts to teach the easier ones.That way when she gets to higher levels she'll already be somewhat familiar at least with these concepts. Sis also loves the weekly math lessons on DVD that help her understand the lesson.

This week we got to use our shark tooth for science. We found this while gem mining on vacation last fall, and we've been saving it for our shark week. We learned about sharks teeth and how to determine the size of a shark based on the size of it's tooth. By the size of our tooth, we discovered that our shark had been 5 feet long.

The most exciting thing that happened this week though is that we got our next years curriculum in the mail!It's so exciting looking through it all!