Unit 34: Preparing

This is us on our way to school...not really, more like a day at the park while everyone else is in school. Actually we only had 3 days of school at home this week with a new baby (cousin) being born in the family, appointments and some really nice days that we spent out enjoying the weather. Here is one of our backyard nature discoveries from this week, a great big toad.

We still managed to complete the whole unit in 3 days though. We only have one week left now of Preparing Hearts and then we will be finished with 4th grade!!!This week we covered WWI and WWII.

History: We quickly covered WWI in one day. I have to say that after after reading the details I still am confused as to why this war even happened. It seems so senseless, when you consider the loss of life. I hate war! Sis researched a German Zepplin, which was an airship used in WWI and where we get blimps from today. We decided to skip the project which was making one.

The last two days we covered WWII.
The first day I cried. I can't read about the Holocaust without tearing up. The second day Sis cried when we talked about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and the first atomic bomb. The loss of innocent life in times of war esp children is so sad.
  
Reading:
We started reading a book about a family who lived  in Holland when German soliders invaded during WWII. It's called "The Little Riders." Sis is reading this one aloud to me. I thought it would be best to read this books together so that we can discuss it and I can answer any questions.

I also just discovered that this story was made into a movie. We haven't watched it yet, but we are enjoying the book so we probably will when we finish. The dvd can be found on Amazon HERE for under $5. Here is this free version also that is on Youtube, but the sound is pretty poor quality.

I also read "A Picture Book of Anne Frank," aloud to Sis. I have the complete diary of Anne Frank and when Sis is studying WWII in older grades I plan to have her read it. For now, I just wanted to introduce her to Anne and give her a gentle age appropriate glimpse into the horrors of the Holocaust.

 We are finished with spelling and math now, so we have been doubling up on lessons in our Language book "First Language Lessons book 4" trying to complete that. It's definitely end of the year cram time around here. For science Sis has been doing her lessons independently this week. All year I have read the lesson to her and we do the experiments together. Right now we're just trying to get through the last chapters, so Sis has been reading from her science book on her own and then journaling about what she learned so that I can make sure she's actually understanding what she's reading.

 1st Grade

Boo has been working hard to finish up her My Father's World 1st grade material. We can proudly say that she has finished the Old Testament in her Bible reader! The New Testament part is a lot harder and is not scheduled in the manual. Instead they just suggest we read through those for extra practice when she is ready. Next week she will officially finish her phonics workbook! So there will be a lot of finishing things next week and then we are going on a much anticipated weekend getaway. 

Unit 32 & 33: Preparing

History: We learned about the American Revolution a couple weeks ago and then we moved on to the French Revolution for week 32. After seeing how America was successful in breaking away from King George, France decided they wanted a revolution too and got rid of their king! We read about the storming of the Bastille (Sis recognized this from her American Girl: Grace movie. She told about the yearly French celebration of Bastille day! I LOVE IT, even when you think they're just being entertained they are learning. Sis is like a little sponge, she remembers everything!) The French revolution turned ugly fast though with the reign of Terror that ended up being one of the bloodiest times in history. I definitely had to skip over some parts of our history reading this week! We read about Napoleon. Then finally we finished off the week with a study of musicians: Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Sis did a written narration about the musicians.

For her project Sis researched the French tricolor flag. We read about what the colors stand for and when the French adopted this flag. Then Sis had to make a tricolor flag out of paper. The French word that each color symbolizes was written on the front and then she made flaps to write the English meaning on the backs.

This week for unit 33 we learned about the Civil War. I know it seems like we're moving too quickly through history here, when there is so much to learn about these time periods. However, this year is just a brief introduction to these subjects. Over the next four years (5th-8th grade) we will cover each time period in much in greater detail beginning at creation. Sis project for unit 33 was to color and label a Civil War map. She colored the confederate states grey and the Union states blue. Of course we learned about Lincoln this week as well as slavery. We also learned about the Industrial Revolution, and Sis did a written narration on how it changed the world.

 


 Reading: Sis finished reading The Wonderful Winter for history this week. It took her three weeks to finish with just reading about a chapter a day. She's been getting plenty of reading in on her free time though. She read all three of the American Girl of the Year Lea books. She asked for these for her birthday. She also re-read two of the Grandma's Attic books this week. Those are still some of her favorite books. I'm excited that Boo will be reading the first one next year for 2nd grade.


Science: In anatomy we started a new chapter on the senses. Sis' first reaction was "really? I learned the 5 senses in kindergarten!" Oh but there is so much more to learn about those senses! Sis is studying the Olfactory system (a fancy word for the parts that give us the ability to smell.) She's learning about glands, taste buds, the parts of the ear, sound waves, the parts of the eye, colorblindness, near and farsightedness, the difference between animal sight and human sight, and balance. We will probably spend one more week on senses and then move on.

Math & Spelling: This is the most exciting thing that happened this week. Sis took her final math and spelling tests!!! She is officially finished with these for the summer! I love it when we start finishing up subjects as the school year comes to an end. It means less work and shorter school days. We don't do official grades until High school because we are not required to. She got an "A" for spelling this year though! She never missed more than one word on a test all year. She did well in math too, although I think that long division made her dislike math. Next year we will be doing MathUSee Epsilon, which deals mostly with fractions.  

I've decided to stop blogging about Boo's work for the remainder of the year, mostly because it's getting pretty repetitive, nothing new really. She's been doing her reading, drawing in her notebook, workbook pages, and math each week. She's a little bit behind Sis and still has about 5 weeks left in MFW 1st. For now we're just trying to get through it so we can be done for summer break. She's doing well though and I will post pics here with Sis' work if there's anything exciting to show. 

Unit 30&31: Preparing

I'm falling really behind on my posts! This time of year it gets harder to keep up. I decided to combine the last two weeks of school into one post. We are so ready to be done with school this year. Sis has three weeks left of the 4th grade and then we are taking a mini-vacation and a long summer break! By this time of the year I always start to feel the burn out and the longing for summer gets really bad! We ended up skipping our art history projects these past 2 weeks and are mostly just trying to get the basics finished up. We also celebrated Sis' 10th birthday!!!

History: These past two weeks we covered the age of Elizabeth, the thirty years war, and the American revolution. We learned about a lot of people some of them include Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, King James, Peter the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Sis wrote a short narration on the American Revolution. This year all of the narrations are just on notebook paper. Next year the narrations will get longer and there is an actual journal for her entries. Sis has great print handwriting, but she still needs some work on her cursive. For some reason when she's writing cursive she doesn't capitalize words, it drives me nuts! Maybe that's something we can work on over the summer.

This is Sis looking up Russia while learning about Peter the Great.

For her research Sis looked up renaissance jewelry like that worn by Queen Elizabeth. The jewelry was pretty extravagant as seen in this picture! On week two she researched engraving, the method used to make pictures during the French and American revolutions. We were suppose to do art projects for both of these but we skipped the jewelry and engraving. I plan on doing the project for next week though.

We're also still reading "The Wonderful Winter," for history and for fun we're still reading through the Viking Quest series together.

Math: In math Sis worked on reading Roman numerals this week like CCXXXIIX= 238 and also converting Arabic numbers into roman numerals. She's also still learning to find fractions of a number like 2/5 of 45=18. In 2 weeks she will take her final unit test over everything and will finally be done with math for the school year!!!Yay!

Science: Science was the one subject where we kept up with our projects and activities these past two weeks. We finished up our unit on the brain. We still have a large section of our text book left. I'm trying to decide what to do, but I'm thinking we will probably skip a couple units and finish up the year with the ones that sound most interesting since there won't be time to complete the whole book.  This week Sis made a model of one hemisphere of the brain and the different parts. 

She also labeled the parts in her journal and learned what each one does. 

This was a project where she had to draw a bunch of dots on a paper and then try to connect every dot to every other dot. It took forever for her to connect just one dot to all the others. We concluded it would be nearly impossible to connect EVERY dot to EVERY other dot. This was to show the complex connections going on in the brain. The more connections a brain has the more intelligent the person will be. 

 

Just for fun here's a couple pics of Sis getting her ears pierced for her 10th birthday, she was very brave!