RTR: Week 2

This week focused on Julius Caesar and Roman Cities and homes.

We read about the life of Caesar and the Ides of March (the day he was killed.) I tried to make it interesting by drawing pictures of Pompey, Julius, and Brutus on the chalk board as I told the story. Boo had fun drawing and erasing expressions on the characters according to what was happening in the story. The girls made drawings of Julius Caesar and wrote about him for their notebooks.

For Bible we learned about how writing began. It was interesting! We saw how our letter "A" began as the drawing of an ox head and changed over many years. We learned about the Rosetta stone and a little about translating writings. We learned about the languages of the bible and the different materials ancient books were made with. The girls made their own little mini scrolls with messages in them.

I wanted to share a little bit about Boo's new math curriculum. To say that we have had a hard time finding something that is right for her is an understatement. I don't know if this is going to be the perfect fit either, but so far we are liking it. We started using Masterbooks Lessons for a living education this week. Boo seems to do better with hands on lessons and colorful workbooks than Sis who is fine with the black and white worksheets of MathUsee. I found this curriculum last year and have been dying to try it. Each lesson starts with a story that teaches math concepts! The Christian based stories revolve around two twin children and their family. The stories keep Boo's attention much better than a dry math lesson. Then the rest of the chapter has colorful worksheets that reinforce the topics discussed in the story. There is no teachers manual. The stories instructions and worksheets are all together in one big book. The first lesson was on place value. Boo used cut out manipulatives that are in the back of the book to build a "Place Value Village." She has a container of dry beans that are used for counting and sorting into the village cups. For the first time ever she told me she likes math. We'll see if it lasts and if we've finally found the right curriculum for her.

Another thing we're doing new for math this year is "math drill." In addition to our regular lessons Sis and Boo have a daily math drill. I time them and they practice simple math facts. Boo practices her addition and subtraction facts. Sis practices everything from addition to division facts. This is  just to practice and reinforce fact they have memorized.

 This year Sis is using MathUsee Zeta which focuses on decimals, percentages, and some early geometry. This is the last level before she enters the higher level math books like pre-algebra. I might need to hire a tutor after this year! haha!

We began Science this week. Last year we used "Science in the Beginning," which covers one day of creation each unit. Last year we spent the entire year covering the first 2 days of Creation learning about light, water and air. This year we will continue to use this book for the first half of the year. This week we started out on unit 3 (the 3rd day of creation) learning about Land and plants. Our first lesson was "What is dirt?" We did an experiment where we had to collect samples of two different types of dirt, mix with water and observe what happens over time. We discovered that the dirt broke up into different layers. Some things floated others sank. We learned that dirt is actually a mixture of many different materials. We learned about items such as leaves and dead bugs decomposing and becoming part of the dirt.We learned what makes soil "rich," and that the materials dirt is made of are necessary to growing plants and for all of life that depend on those plants. God knew what he was doing creating the dry ground and dirt before creating living things. Who knew that even the dirt points to existence of our awesome creator!

Baby Bear has been having fun with her Kindergarten work. I decided that I'm not going to write about everything that she is doing. I just wrote about MFW K a couple years ago with Boo and those posts are still on this blog. This week she started her 2 week unit on Creation. She's been learning letters, numbers, and making her own creation book.

With Daddy home for a few weeks it's been much easier for us to fit in field trips. Normally we do field trips and extra things on Mons since that's his day off. Now we're free to take a field trip any day. One thing I love about MFW is that it is a 4 day a week program. That leaves the weekends off plus one extra day in the week for extracurricular activities, catching up on missed work, fun projects, nature walks, and field trips. Later in the year we're gonna start some special things on our day 5 like a cooking class. This week though we took Fri off for another field trip and took the girls to a giant pumpkin farm (this pic cracks me up because it says 'giant pumpkins' on the sign and then the girls got the tiniest pumpkins ever.) They really did have some enormous pumpkins. The weather has been so beautiful here lately though, so we're trying to enjoy it as much as we can.