Wrapping Up Week 32 (2015-16)

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Deanna

I love that my younger children have the benefit of learning alongside their older brothers, but sometimes I feel a little sad that they don’t get to do all the fun preschool activities I did with Ian (and a little with Elijah). So when Daddy and the older boys headed off to a retreat together, I decided to work in some special preschool time with Arianna and Nicholas.

Arianna always wants to have a tea party when the boys are gone, and I find those are great times to pull out special books to read. This time I pulled out three Before Five in a Row books: Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?, Ask Mr. Bear, and Blueberries for Sal. We got out the Wooden Bear Family Dress Up Puzzle I bought back when I first “rowed” Jesse Bear with Ian, and we made our craisins go “kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk” in the tin buckets I collected when I first “rowed” Blueberries for Sal” (no blueberries in the house, so cranberries had to do). Then we had fun dancing around while watching Jana Alayra videos on YouTube. It was so sweet to have time with just these two little ones for a while.

Science

We’re about to start a review of a new science program, so I decided to finish up Our Planet Earth, completing the God’s Design for Heaven and Earth for the year. (Woohoo!) We finished learning about the planets (the gas giants, plus the two dwarf planets, Pluto and Eris), watching the rest of Wonders of God’s Creation: The Milky Way and our Solar System as well as The Solar System: Outer Gas Planets.

Then we really enjoyed learning about NASA and America’s exploration of space. Lots and Lots of Roaring Rockets-Soaring Spacecraft is a wonderful video for kids about the history of the space program. The boys saw it a couple years ago, but they both enjoyed watching it again. (We have the DVD, which for some reason doesn’t work in our DVD player but works fine on the computer, so I recommend the streaming video.)

The boys and Daddy also kept up a continuing game of Solarquest: The Space-Age Real Estate Game all week. They’ve gotten so familiar with the names of the moons of various planets through this game, and they loved it when they’d recognize them in the videos we watched.

History

Ian is down to the last three weeks of the Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. This week he studied Calvin and the Institute of Religion. It wasn’t assigned in the course, but I had him read John Calvin: What is the truth? by Catherine Mackenzie to go along with the lesson. I really like Mackenzie’s whole “Little Lights” series. They are picture books about important people in Christian history. Arianna has brought me several of them to read to her, and I love that she’s getting familiar with people like Corrie ten Boom and Amy Carmichael at four-years old. Yet they’re not so simple that Ian can’t learn from them as well at eight. (Plus he can easily read them on his own, which is always something I try to encourage in my reluctant reader.) I’m glad I was able to add the whole series (14 books) to our family library.