Week 12 &13

 History:

Sis and I started reading a new book for history. It is called God King. It's a historical fiction story that takes place in the biblical time period of king Hezekiah. It's about an Egyptian boy who becomes the king. In Egypt the king is considered to be a God, so he is the God King. When he flees  his country he meets two kings who are in conflict, King Hezekiah who trusts in Yahweh and Sennacherib the Assyrian. He must choose who to side with and the fate of his own country is in the balance. This fictional book brings the real bible story to life.
This is a pretty thick book so I assume that it will be several weeks before we finish this one.



Here is Sis's notebook work from both weeks:

 Sis did a history project in her notebook showing the division of the 12 tribes when they divided into Israel and Judah.

Boo started something new this week in history. Up till now we have been learning the history of the United States. Now we begin our study of the 50 states that will continue until the end of the school year. This year is not meant for her to memorize her states and capitals but just give a brief introduction to them. Each day we will add a state to her notebook. We look at a map to locate it. then Boo has her own map to color in the state we learned. She also has a worksheet for each state where she will label the capital, color the state bird and flower and stick a state flag sticker on. On the back of the page is facts about the state. We also have full color state cards that she will look at and use to color her birds and flowers correctly. here is a sample of the sheets she is doing with the flag stickers and bird cards...

We also finally get to start adding stickers to our  state sticker poster that has been hanging up all year. It is a blank map of the states and we will add colorful stickers of each state with it's name as we learn them.

Science: We are still learning about light in our science book, but we also added a second science book for Boo that goes with her history. She will also be learning about birds in science as we learn state birds in history. We started reading this book, "Birds, Nests, and Eggs Take-Along Guide." which tells all about birds and introduces her to many different kinds of birds. 

For a small project Boo made some pretend binoculars. She had fun using her real ones to look out side for birds, but it's the middle of winter so the best we did was find some nests in the dead trees.

 
For our regular science lesson all of the girls did another experiment with light. This one was really cool, yet so simple. We learned that light can not only be reflected and absorbed but can also pass through some objects. in the experiment we put a metal fork in the bottom of a clear bowl. When we looked at the fork from beneath the bowl it appeared to flip upside down and float on top of the water even though it was really still just sitting at the bottom of the pan. This is because the light is passing through the water, bouncing off the fork, reflecting off the top of the water, then passing back through the water and glass and hitting our eyes!
This is what the fork really looked like...

This is what it looked like to us from under the table looking up! No the fork isn't really floating upside down on top of the water. It is the reflection of the real fork that is being seen in the picture. cool huh?

The girls drew pictures of what happened in the experiment and Sis wrote about what we learned.

Bible: Since we are learning everything birds Boo had a whole week of Bible stories about birds. Then for week 13 we added a new name of Jesus to our list: Jesus is the Way.

Read-a-loud time: Boo and I also started reading Farmer Boy as a read aloud time together. This picture cracks me up!! Only in homeschool can you dress yourself for school when you're 7. Why not? Hahahaha!! All of the kids have been listening to this story though. We love Laura Ingals Wilder.

 Art/Poetry: We only did one painting over these 2 weeks. It was of a night time sky with a full moon and trees. Sorry I never took a picture...


Baby Bear had fun doing Play-Doh cake factory while we did school. All 3 of my girls still love to create things with Play-Doh (even Sis when her sister's are playing) so they all took turns making cakes this week during their quiet time, but I discovered this is a great way to keep Baby Bear busy while the older girls are doing their work. So, I bought the the pizza maker and ice-cream factory too too for Christmas! shhhh!

 We will be taking a couple weeks off for Christmas break and will be back after the New Year.

Week 10 & 11

Wow it's been a really long time since I've blogged. I have good intentions to really, but it is so hard to keep up during the holidays. This is a recap of two weeks even though a week long Thanksgiving break was between them.

Science: On week 10 we took a closer look at the human eye during our study of light, to find out what actually happens when light hits our eye. We learned that light passes though the cornea to the lens and is hits the retina. There rods and cones change the light into electrical energy and sends it to our brain, then we can see the object!  Our experiment was about our blind spot, the one spot on our retina that doesn't have any rods and doesn't get the message to our brain. We used this drawing by staring at only the green dot and moving the book from arms length closer to our face we eventually hit a spot where the blue dot disappeared completely! Was the dot really gone? No,the dot was in our blind spot. The light reflecting off of it was hitting the spot on our retina that couldn't send the message to our brain. This experiment was another fun one. The kids have been amazed by just about every experiment this year and they are actually remembering and learning a lot.

My favorite part of this experiment though was when Sis said "Wow, you would never know that so much goes on inside your eye ball for you to see something. All this stuff happens in the world with light that you never think about! Science is my favorite subject."Without even realizing it the kids are getting the message. Science doesn't contradict God's word, instead it proves that creation is so complex that there has to be an intelligent  Creator.

The girls drew diagrams of the human eye and what happens when light passes though it. Sis also wrote about the experiment and what happened.









Bible: Boo added a new name to her study of the names of Jesus. This week we learned Jesus is the Giver of Living Water. We read the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Boo's memory verse is John 7:37 "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink." We put her verse on a drinking cup that she used every night for bedtime water. Every time she took a drink it was suppose to remind her that Jesus has living water to give her.

Sis is still using the Jeshub's Journal Bible study to study the Old Testament laws.

The girls are also still doing their detective Bible Study (using Cold-Case Christianity for Kids) with Daddy in the evenings after dinner. He bought them each a binder for their investigation. They have been enjoying this time together. 

History: Boo has asked me for weeks now "When do we learn about when we became America?" Well we finally reached it week 10! We had a brief overview of the American Revolution. We learned about the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the thirteen colonies, and the American flag. We read the books "The 4th of July Story" and  "Red, White, and Blue." 
 Boo and I used out world map to act out the British soldiers coming to fight and the American soldiers cheering in victory. Here's our little doodles we used.

Boo added a copy of the Declaration to her notebook. She also wrote a little bit about the American Flag.

 

Week 11 we learned more about the war ending and George Washington becoming president. We read a story in our American Pioneer and Patriots about the day he was sworn in.  

Sis began reading about the reign of King Saul for week 10. That week we started out looking at the story of David and Goliath and then pretty much read about the lives of David and Saul during his reign. I know Sis has known the story of David and Goliath since she was 2 and about King Saul as well. These studies on a 5th grade level really are more in depth than your basic children's Bible story. Sis is studying geography, researching ancient weapons and slings, studying and comparing Bible passages, memorizing scripture, doing written narrations. She is learning things she never knew or understood about this time period in history. 

For week 11 Sis did most of her history without me. I feel a little guilty that we have skipped the fun projects for both of these units (which was suppose to be make a slingshot and an ancient board game,) but like I said the holidays are busy so lately we've been doing the minimum.

Here is a sample of her History Notebook from both weeks. 

Poetry/ Art: After 2 weeks off of watercolor painting all of the girl's were excited to start back up. This week's painting was a fun one. We read a poem about leaves called,"Misgiving." Then we did a leaf painting.The background was made with strokes of yellow, red, and orange paint and then we placed a wrinkled up plastic bag on top of the wet paint to make the effect. It looked pretty neat. After drying overnight, we traced large leaves onto our background and painted around them with red paint. Last Sis added a verse from her poem. We were happy with the end result (sorry my picture turned out so blurry though)

For week 11 we had a painting fail. First off it was the weirdest painting assignment we've had this year. We were suppose to paint two blue skies...that's boring. We opted to paint one instead. We tried to use white crayon to resist the paint and make the sky "broken" like our poem, but it ended up not turning out quite right.

One exciting thing happened for Boo last week. She got her first penpal! Boo has been a little jealous of Sis' penpals over the last couple years. I decided she was finally old enough. I have been waiting until I was confident that she could write a letter. She's been practicing her handwriting a lot and I found another mother who was looking for a penpal for her 7 year old girl. She lives in a state very far from us, so that is a plus. I like for the girls to have penpals who live in places different from us. Boo was so excited to receive her first letter this week. Next week we will begin working on writing her first letter to her new friend.  

Over the past 3 weeks we went out of town for Thanksgiving, celebrated Baby Bears 4th birthday, went to the movies, celebrated a birthday for our now 1 year old puppy, and had an end of the season swim party at the girls swim class (see why I haven't had tome to blog!) We also finally got in the holiday spirit. Baby Bear and I took a special trip to the World's largest Christmas store. All of the girls have been watching Christmas movies after school. I only let them watch our Christmas movies once a year. That way they don't get tired of them and it makes the holiday movie time a little more special. Their favorite Christmas movie is Elf. We put up our tree and welcomed our family's "Elfie" on the shelf back.



 

Week 9:

This week everybody was back in good health, so we got to have the first full school week that we've had in a while. We finally got caught up on some things that we were behind on, so I'm feeling a bit better about where we're at this year. Week 9 by mid November doesn't sound very far considering there are 34 scheduled units this school year, but really we are about where I planned on being.

History: History was pretty fun this week. Boo learned about George Washington. I'm slowly learning how to teach Boo. This has been a challenge for me because she is a totally different type of learner than Sis. So, even though this is my second time through Adventures in US History it is totally different this time around. I've discovered that Boo is a visual learner. She can not retain information very well by just being told or read to, she HAS to see it. To the left is a sample of her history lesson this week which was 7 pages broken down into 4 days. Can you guess how that would have gone over?Exactly, after one page she was lost and couldn't remember anything the next day. So, I ditched the reading (after studying it myself of course) and just told it to her in my own words. We doodled a map and drew stick figures for Washington, Indians, French soldiers, and we drew out the story as we talked about it. She remembered it great. I don't want to get off track, but this is important. There are certainly pros and cons of both homeschooling and public schooling. One of things I really think is a huge benefit of homeschooling is being able to teach your child in the way they learn. It is so important that a child be taught according to their learning style in order to get the most out of the lessons and to do their best in school. Not all children's brains are wired the same. In a classroom it is impossible for a teacher to teach 30 children with different learning styles in the way that each of them learn best. So for example a visual learner or kinesthetic  learner is not going to do well in a classroom where the teacher only teaches in an auditory approach. Most public classrooms use this approach to teaching even if only 50% of their students are auditory learners. Therefore the kinesthetic learner gets bad grades, not because they're not capable of learning the material, but they are not being taught in the way that they learn. When you homeschool you can first figure out what type of learners your children are and then personalize their curriculum according to how they learn best giving them the best opportunity to succeed in school.

Ok back to Boo's history lesson. She made one of these cute Tricorn hats, like George Washington wore for a history project.

Sis is learning about the period of the Judges. She learned about Sampson this week and the Ark of the Covenant being captured by the Philistines. Here is a picture of her notebook.

It just so happened that Sis' history project was also to make a hat this week. She made a Philistine helmet out of construction paper. I let Baby Bear decide which kind of hat she wanted to make and she chose the helmet with Sis. They painted designs onto their helmets and then curled purple paper for the top. All the kids had fun wearing their hats and helmets while they did their school work the rest of the week.

Science:  We've been skipping science the last few weeks, so the girl's were excited to start back up since it's one of their favorite subjects. We are still learning all about light. This years science is divided up into large sections based on the 7 days of creation. Light is Day 1 and covers the first 15 lessons. This week we learned there there is actually light that the human eye can't see! One of those kinds of light is inferred light. We discovered that our TV remote uses this kind of light to turn on our tv. when the remote is facing the TV the invisible light hits it and turns it on, that's why the remote won't work when we aim it at the window. We did an experiment the girls loved. We tried to turn the TV on by facing the remote away from the TV, nothing happened. We then pointed our remote at a blank sheet of white paper and it magically turned on!! Actually no magic here, the inferred light bounced off the paper and hit the tv turning it on even though the remote was not pointed at the tv. Oh my goodness they thought this was so cool that they did it over and over again. Then we discovered that even tough inferred light isn't visible to the bare human eye, we are able to see it through a camera lenses. We went in a dim room and looked at the remote through the phone camera while we pressed buttons, sure enough when looking through the camera we could see the bulb light up! Proof it really is there! We also talked a little about ultraviolet lights (another invisible light) and sunburns.

 Language, Writing, Spelling: I'm proud to report that Boo got her first 100% on a spelling test! Sis is happy to finally be done with spelling tests and her Spelling Power curriculum is going pretty well. Sis is also reviewing sentence diagramming in her English book and doing writing assignments in her Writing Strands. Unfortunately Boo's handwriting didn't go too well this week because the dog ate it! One of the downsides to having a wild puppy.

Reading aloud: Both of the girls started new books for their read aloud time. Boo is reading "Sara Whitcher's Story". This is the story of a little girl who gets lost in the woods and is kept alive by a wild bear! We're just getting to the exciting part.
 

Sis and I started reading Jeshub's Journal. This is an interesting book. It's more like a spiral bound booklet, but it is also a Bible study with questions and areas to write in it.  This is a fictional story about a Hebrew man named Jeshub. It is written as his Journal and there is one journal entry per month of the Jewish calendar. Each month Jeshub faces some kind of problem and has to turn to the Mosaic laws to decide what God's law says he should do. Have you ever read all of those laws God gave Moses and the Israelites? Not just the 10 commandments, but for example what to do if a goat falls into an uncovered pit? or which lambs could be sacrificed? Well the story of Jeshub's Journal gives examples from the life of a Hebrew when he needed to turn to those laws for instruction. Not only are we learning about Old Testament laws but the Jewish calendar. After we read the daily story, Sis and I look up the Bible passage that contains the law being addressed and answer the questions to help decide what Jeshub should do.

At the end of the week we had a fun game day. I use to work at a public school before I had kids. Some of the classrooms I was in had shelves of board games and puzzles. The students spent a good part of the week playing them when they finished their work. So, it's ok to take a day and just play games every now and then! We chose to play The game of LIFE. This game is actually very educational. You have to make decisions like (whether to go to college, if you're going to buy a house, should you buy homeowners insurence, etc) and you have to add and keep track of money. This game is for ages 9 and up so it's a bit hard for Baby Bear and Boo, but they still wanted to play this. Baby Bear partnered up with me and she got to draw cards and spin the wheel, even though she didn't really understand then game. Sis and Boo were a team and Sis helped boo to count the money and read the cards so it worked out fine. Sis and Boo ended up being the champions, Baby Bear was not too happy (or the fact that our team never got to have any children.) I guess learning that we don't always win is all part of learning about life too, right?

 

Week 8

I thought we would never finish week 8. Due to sickness it took us two weeks to finish one, but we slowly worked our way through it. We ended up not doing many extra's or activities since it was a struggle to even get our book work finished. I'm way behind on posts, but here is a recap of week 8.

History: Boo learned about Benjamin Franklin in history. Before we began I told her we would be learning about someone who was important to American history and that it was someone she's probably heard of or seen a picture of before. Then I asked her to guess. She first guessed Washington (good guess,) but when I asked her to try again she answered "Captain America?" I laughed so hard! She was not joking. Maybe not as exciting as Captain America, but we read all about the life of Franklin with his many accomplishments and inventions. Boo drew a picture of Franklin and his kite experiment and she wrote a little about him. We also added Ben to our timeline. Boo also made a "Poor Richard's Almanac," for her history binder. Inside are some of the wise sayings that Franklin wrote in his famous little book.

 






Sis is learning bout the time of the judges now. For read a loud this week we read the book of Ruth together instead of a story book, since it takes place in the time period of the judges. Here is a picture of her note-booking pages with her timeline and narrations. I also snapped a pic of her doing some of her Bible reading this week. It's so much more fun when you can have school with your puppy.

Reading: Sis and I didn't start any new books because we read Ruth. Boo started reading "real books," for her reading time. Up till now she has been using the Bible reader from last years curriculum to read aloud to me. We have a whole shelf of easy readers in our school room, so we started reading the level 1 books.

Boo's Bible: 

Boo Added a new name of Jesus to our wall. This week we started learning that Jesus is the rock. Her memory verse is Matt 7:24 "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock." We read the story of the two builders and we learned the song "The wise man built his house upon the rock." We also looked at some of our rock collection and talked about how Jesus is like a rock.

 Math, Spelling, LA:

Sis is using MathU See Epsilon to learn fractions this year. This past week we worked on equivalent fractions and adding and subtracting them. Instead of using the regular MUS blocks, which we have used every year up till now, this year came with fraction overlays. The colors coordinate with the blocks, but they seem really helpful in understanding how fractions work. So far I'm happy with this years math choice for her and she seems to be doing well with it. This is what the  new overlays and visuals look like:

Boo is working on memorizing her double addition facts (5+5, 6+6, etc.) We are slowly working our way through her curriculum and just moving at her own pace. If she can get all of her addition facts down this year and start working on subtraction I will be happy. That's pretty much where I've set my goal for her. Next year we will probably trying a whole new math curriculum for her.

She is still getting use to having weekly spelling words, but she is doing pretty well. The hardest part of spelling is trying to convince her that it's ok to miss a word. She is so sensitive about it, but she cries every time she misspells a word! I recently heard a mom say that they do not correct or have children fix their mistakes in their public school. I think that's ridiculous! I hate to see Boo cry when she fails, but I also believe that failure is part of life and correcting our mistakes is part of learning. I try my best to reassure her that it's alright. If she always got every answer right then she wouldn't need school. School is for learning things that we don't know.

Here's Baby Bear working on the letter "G". I print her coloring sheets off the internet every time we learn a new letter.

 
We didn't have any art or science week 8. The girl's all missed doing their painting, but I'm pretty sure that our poetry painting are scheduled again next week.

Week 7

It's fall time! Time for fall crafts and activities. The most fun thing we did this week in school was paint pumpkins. We usually paint instead of carving because it's much easier for the kids and less messy. They enjoy painting their pumpkins though and I enjoy not having to touch gooey pumpkin insides! Boo and Sis painted faces of their Beanie Boo stuffed animals on their pumpkins. I'm not really sure what Baby Bear painted on hers but she had fun.

 

History: This week Sis read about the Israelite's time in the desert after leaving Egypt. She studied the 40 years of wandering, the giving of the 10 commandments, the 12 spies who went into Cannan, the bronze serpent and mostly focused on God's people rebelling against him. She also learned about the priestly garments like that the High Priest Aaron wore, specifically the Ephod and breastplate. Her project was to make a breastplate with the 12 gemstones that represented the tribes of Israel. We were suppose to make the stones out of homemade clay, but we simplified it and just made stones with paint and markers then glued them on construction paper. Sis also tried her best to copy the inscriptions that were written on each stone in Hebrew.



 Here is a picture of this weeks notebook pages...

Boo is still learning about pioneers and Indians. This week we learned about the first pioneers in Michigan, which happens to be our state so we were excited! We read a story about how Detroit began. We learned about the Indians introducing canoes to the pioneers and how they rode them down the rivers to the Great lakes. We also learned the names of the great lakes and remembered times that we have visited these beautiful lakes that surround our home state. Just for fun here's a picture of a recent trip we took to beautiful lake Michigan. We imagined what it would have been like seeing pioneers riding canoes here.

Bible: 
 Boo is still learning names of Jesus. For the past 2 weeks she has been learning that Jesus is the "Bread of Life." All of our bible stories have related to bread in some way. This week we learned how God used the widow to provide bread for Elijah. She did a craft, which was making a napkin holder shaped like 2 slices of bread with her memory verse on the front. she traced her bread shape onto both sides of a cardboard box. then cut ot out and covered it with a brown paper bag. We haven't bought any napkins for it yet. The plan though is to fill it up and put it on the dinner table like we did with her "Light of the World," candle to remind us that Jesus is the bread of life.

Language: Boo started poem memorization in her Language Lesson book. I have a confession, I always skipped this part when Sis was little because it's always seemed pointless to me. What is the point in memorizing and reciting a poem about a bee? My thought has always been that I would rather my kids be memorizing scripture if they're going to put something permanently in their brain to be able to recite. However, after reading about the benefits of children memorizing well written language I decided to give it a try. Maybe this will help her to be able to form well written sentences and understand language better. I guess it can't hurt. So Boo memorized her first poem called, "Who Has Seen the Wind."
Sis is working on writing more complex sentences in her Writing Stands curriculum. She is taking short sentences and adding to them to make them sound more interesting. She is also learning tips on how to be a better writer. Sis wants to write like Mom, when she grows up so this part of her schooling is important to her. I am enjoying her curriculum too, because I am also learning. One of the tips she learned is never use exclamation points in your writing!!!! (that was on purpose.) The words you choose in your sentence should be strong enough that you don't need an exclamation point to let your reader know it's exciting. Exclamation points makes your work look amateurish. I have never learned that in the writing courses I've taken.

Art: This week's poetry painting was perfect because it was about fall time and it also happened to go well with Boo's wind poem that she's learning. Sis' poem was called, "Gathering Leaves." We all painted pictures of a tree with fall colored leaves (yes it does seem like we paint a tree every week) this one was a little different, because we used crumbled paper towels dipped in paint to make the leaves.

For some reason this is our last poetry painting for a couple weeks. I don't know why but there is no painting scheduled next week, so it looks like we have a little break. Maybe we will come up with some fun fall activities to do for art instead.