Week 16 & 17

Weeks 16 &17 were pretty rough. We had an unexpected death in the family with the girl's Grandpa passing, so school was a little bit hard. We skipped days here and there but managed to get most of our school work done. Even with combining weeks 16 and 17 in this post there's not a  lot to write about, because many days we struggled to even finish the basics like math spelling and language.

Bible: Boo is still learning the different names for Jesus during her bible time.  We added the name "Immanuel." to our list. We learned that the name means "God with us." Our picture was of baby Jesus, because God came to live with us as  man when he was born as baby. We learned that even after the ascension God is still always with us. We also learned the song "O Come, O Come Immanuel." Too bad this lesson didn't fall on Christmas week!
Boo and Baby Bear made  little paper people. The girl is her and the boy figure is Jesus. On that one we wrote Immanuel and explained they are holding hands bc God is with us.

Sis does daily bible reading on her own and is still working on memorizing all of Philippians chapter 2.

History: Here is Sis' history journal from the past 2 weeks. This is the one part of HOD that I am going to miss next year. I love the note booking idea and the nice pages that come all laid out for her. She knows exactly where to do her writing, journaling, copying verses, and narrations. Plus it's so much prettier than using plain white notebook paper and will make a nice keepsake for 5th grade when it's all finished. I've been throwing around the idea of making our own note booking journals when we return to My Father's World.
One of the most exciting things for her this unit was the return of Draw and Write Through History! Sis' favorite history assignments. Last year she did a different D&WTH book and loved it. The only difference is this year her drawing and writing go directly onto her note booking pages. This was her first assignment, drawing a Babylonian Garden... I love Sis' artwork when she actually tries and cares about it.

below is the finished product along with her writing assignments...

 and this is her work from week 17...

Boo took a short break from learning the states and learned about Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road. We added a picture of him to our timeline and we read about him in our history book. We also read a cute fictional story in our American Pioneers and Patriots book about what life was like for one family traveling the wilderness road. We found the cutest Daniel Boone hat and wooden gun at a specialty toy store. Boo had fun playing with them and getting to see what a real pioneer hat was like,too bad we didn't have enough money to buy them though. They were so cute though I promised the girls I will buy a racoon hats when we study US History together in a couple years.

Language: I feel like language is the one thing that we worked on most those 2 weeks. Boo is working hard on her spelling words and did really well on her tests. She also has been working hard on spelling and neatly writing her full name. She always writes her nickname when signing something because it's easy, short and what we call her. It just occurred to me though that she didn't even know how to spell her entire name! So we've spent two weeks working on that. She also learned the difference between, "two, to, and too" in her language book. The best part of language this week though was getting a new letter from her pen-pal in FL.

Sis and I have done a ton of Language because we're trying to get caught up in her book. Most of it is review this year so we have been doing 2-3 lessons at a time skimming a lot of the stuff she already knows pretty well. Her book is huge though and we have 100 lessons left to finish the book! So we're trying to speed up a bit and focus on the lessons that have new material.  

Baby Bear learned the letter "o "and the sound ah" for the short /o/.  here she is making an "o" with her hands.

Art: Our book actually had no painting scheduled for these two weeks. I'm glad because with everything else that was going on, we probably would have skipped it anyway. We did however try our hand at pottery early week 16. It was A MESS! They had fun, but I had a nightmare.We were covered in wet gooey clay and they were sloshing dirty water all over the floor.  I'm pretty sure we're never doing it again. Each of the girls got to make a small pot with the pottery wheel though. Our pots took three days to fully dry, so we didn't paint them until week 17.