Wrapping Up Week 6 (2014-15)

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Deanna

The last time we went to the library, we maxed out my card. It was a first for us, but now that the boys are both really getting into reading, I could see it was going to be a recurring problem. The solution? Get Ian his own library card! Ever since I mentioned the idea, he’s been begging to go back, so this week he was quite proud of his newest acquisition. (Elijah won’t be old enough for a few more months, but he’s looking forward to getting his as well.)

Next week my boys will be spending their mornings at music camp, so I wanted to finish on a strong note this week. I was thankful that we not only covered everything I had hoped to, we even got most of it done in four days, so we were able to take most of Friday off to go swimming and play with cousins!

Bible

We’re on week 2 of Bible Road Trip: Year Three, which was basically an introduction to the New Testament. Some of the research portion of the lesson had to do with the history of the period after the Old Testament ended. In addition to the assigned reading, we all watched The Maccabees: The Story of Hanakkuh and Ian colored one of the pages that goes along with the movie for his Bible notebook.

Our family devotions in Old Story New had us talking about the birth of Jesus, so we went into the Christmas closet and dug out the Little People nativity set. We also watched the last couple scenes of The Nativity Story on DVD. It was kind of fun having a taste Christmas in August!

We’re still reading just a few verses in Proverbs each morning (finished chapter 15 this week) and working our way through Prudence and the Millers (Chapters 11-14). P1030798x In addition to the reading, we usually try to discuss some of the pages in Prudence and Your Health, a workbook designed to go along with it. For chapter 14 there was a fun game that all three older children enjoyed playing with me. Wise choices allowed them to move forward, while foolish ones sent them backwards, sometimes all the way to the beginning! It was the first time Arianna has joined us in this kind of game, and she thought it was great fun being a part of it all.

Math

I’m not always very good at finding ways to have fun with math, but this week that wasn’t a problem. As we worked through lessons 16-20 in the Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2), we spent quite a bit of time with the “logic set,” (shape cards from MEP) which Ian always enjoys. We play a game sort of like “Guess Who?”, where one of us picks a shape and the other asks yes or no questions until they figure out which one was picked. I’ve been trying to teach Ian to think of questions that eliminate as many possibilities as he can in one turn:

Is your shape black?
Is it large?
Does it have more than 3 sides?

He loves playing this game, and we always have to move on to something else before he is ready to stop.

The boys have also been begging Eric to play “The Allowance Game,” which is a fun way to sneak in some math practice.

Literature/Ambleside Online

In A Child’s Garden of Verses we read the poem “The Lamplighter.” When I asked Ian if he knew what a lamplighter was, he surprised me with a very thorough answer. I asked him how he knew so much about it, and he reminded me of a book I’d picked up from another homeschool family last year. We found Peppe the Lamplighter on our shelf and added it to our reading for the week. It’s a charming story with beautiful illustrations (a Caldecott Honor-winning book) about an immigrant boy who takes delight in his work as a lamplighter, even though his father disapproves of the menial job at first.

In our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading, we loved the story and message of “Cornelia’s Jewels” in Fifty Famous Stories. Ian didn’t really get the point first, but I explained what it was about and then we reread the last part of the story. He beamed when I pointed to the wall of pictures of our kids and told them, “Look at my jewels–I’m rich!”

History Cycle

This week we only covered one lesson from Mystery of History, Vol.1, and I realized that the only part I’m really using from MoH is the Table of Contents. This volume spends so much time on biblical history, which I feel like we’ve already covered in depth. I definitely want my children to know where biblical events fall in relation to other things we study in history, but I would rather save our precious school hours for things they’re not yet familiar with.

Ancient China (Shang Dynasty)

We read in Story of the World, Vol. 1 about how the ancient Chinese learned to harvest silk from silkworm cocoons and turn it into cloth. We also read a bit from The Silk Route by John S. Major (just the map and the page on the history of silk in China). It was a teaser for when we talk about the Silk Road in Year 2 of our history cycle. Ian loved that the secret of how to make silk was kept for thousands of years. For his history notebook he did a page from biblestoryprintables.com.

To help understand the process of making silk more, we watched this video from the Science Channel. I like the style of it, but didn’t cover enough for my taste.

So then we watched “The Story of Silk,” which wasn’t as well narrated, but went through more of the process.

Science

Lessons 14-15 in The World of Animals (from God’s Design for Life) had us learning about amphibians. For his notebook, Ian did a “Life Cycle of a Frog” worksheet I found online (which was a little more age-appropriate than the one included on the curriculum CD-ROM). We read About Amphibians by Cathryn Sill and watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Amphibians (which contains a few evolutionary references we just discussed). Ian really loves this show, and he’s always asking to do the experiments in the “Try This” segments. They were really simple this time, so I was happy to be able to say yes for once.

The first experiment shows how amphibian skin works. We filled a baby food jar with water and food coloring, then covered it with a paper towel held on by a rubber band. We placed that jar in a larger jar filled with plain water. Just as an amphibian’s porous skin lets water and oxygen pass in and out of its body, the dyed water was able to pass through the paper towel.

The other experiment was just a simple demonstration of how frogs croak, which Ian loved and repeated throughout the week.

Extras

For Spanish, we started the next unit in Salsa with episode #113. We spend two weeks on each episode, and there are six in each unit. All of us were excited about learning some new Spanish words as we began the series on the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I was excited to hear Ian trying to put together phrases in Spanish in a totally different context using what he had learned during our lesson time.

We finally managed to squeeze in some art! Ian had a great time creating a torn paper collage to go along with our lesson in ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Vol. 2: Stories of Artists and Their Art.