Amazing Maize Maze-September 25th

Luke went on a field trip to a corn maze last Friday. He went along with a friend (thanks Ms. Bethany!!) because I didn't particularly want to pay for all of my kids, when he would probably be the only one who really enjoyed it. Chasing Bo and Noah throughout a maze for nearly 2 hours does NOT sound like fun to me. :)

Enjoy it he did, and I got reports that his group (pictured below) had some heated discussion about who was going to be the leader. Not sure whoever won that battle.

Friends below are Jonathan, Samuel, Anna-Grace, Julia, Michael, and John Carl, and leaders Bethany, Cathy, Alyce, and her husband...

It took the group about 1 1/2 hours to find their way out, with the help of 4 hints...

Judging by their wet hair, it was a HOT day!! Here they are reading a clue.

I do hope that the whole clan of us will be ready for this fun trip next fall!

General, Week Five...

I think my weeks are getting all messed up because of our trips and stuff. Anyway, you get the idea.


We went to the Festival at the Park. This is the only picture I took the whole time. The kids like to get on this 'safety bus.' It's pretty much there only school bus experience. :)


This is the only picture I took of general stuff last week...K's math lesson...learning cones, cubes, spheres, and cylinders.

We are still reading each morning from The Child's Story Bible. Love. It.

We got to the Sermon on the Mount and I decided to slow it down a bit and write down each beatitudes and talk about each one in more detail. So we will be doing that for a week or so, then catch back up to reading one chapter a day.

This week we are starting the dictation part of Spelling Plus. I am really loving that spelling curriculum. And I was happy to see that both L and K spelled and capitalized and punctuated everything correctly in 'regular' writing!

SCIENCE--we are doing the ocean, seashore, and deep sea theme over a couple weeks since our trips have messed our weeks up a bit, so I will post on all of that when we are done.

History, Week Four...

Our three topics this week were The Stonehenge, The Egyptians, and the Minoan Civilization.

Pretest

The Stonehenge:
-we just read the chapter and looked through some of our books to find pictures of it.
-I had planned to let them build a mini-Stonehenge with small rocks around a paper plate, but it just didn't happen this week.

The Egyptians:
-we mostly focused on pyramids and mummies.
-they wrapped their favorite stuffed animal up in TP to make them mummies.

Will mummified Beaver...
Aren't they cute?

Luke's Spot...

K's pink dog...


Then we made a sugar cube pyramid...

The Minoan Civilization:

-just read our chapter for this too.
-game: play leap frog (The Minoans played a similar game but hopped over bulls instead of each other)

Post test

One of biggest things we are learning is that the ancient folks were very very intelligent and hard workers. They figured out how to build some super-huge structures (pyramids and Stonehenge) without machinery and were able to move extremely heavy rocks and such with the resources they had (like the Nile River, etc.). Also smart in language, art, and other things.

So we added these 3 things to our Wall of Fame:

The Stonehenge is a rock (picked out by K), Luke drew the pyramid and I wrapped up the mummy.

This is Luke's drawing of a 'bull with a man's head' for the Minoans. It had to do with a legend...

Luke is fired from his job of drawing bulls with a man's head. :)

And here is our history timeline so far this year. We have a LONG way to go until we get to Jesus' birth!

Memory cards.
Maps with Dad.

Some books I rented from the library for this week:
-Pyramid by David Macaulay

-Solving the Mysteries of the Pyramids by Fiona MacDonald

-Egypt (Country Explorers)

-Pyramids (First Facts)...I liked this book the best and it has internet links.

www.facthound.com You choose your grade level and type in the book ID number (1429619155). There are many different subjects to look at. Cool!

-Max Disaster #2 Alien Eraser Unravels the Mystery of the Pyramids

Revelation...

I am excited because we are studying the book of Revelation in CBS (Community Bible Study) this year. The women are, and also the homeschool class, which Luke and Kendall are in. All 3 of us have homework each week and I'm just glad we are all on the same subject.

I think it is neat to be studying the beginning of history with them (creation...) and also be looking at the end of history at the same time. This was a neat part of my CBS commentary this week about Revelation and I'm going to copy a part of it here:

"The book of Revelation is a fitting conclusion to the Bible. It brings to a dramatic and joyful conclusion the long, tortured history of sinful humanity and its troubled relationship with its Creator. It is about the events that led up to the end of history, about the Second Coming of Christ, and the permanent establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. The book ends with man back in paradise, from which he was driven in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. He is holy, righteous, and pure again, and he has access both to the river and to the tree of life (Rev. 22:1-5). The story of fallen Adam and Eve ends happily here with the redemption and glorification of many in their human family through the blood of the Lamb, who is the central figure in Revelation."

"The biblical account thus comes full circle, back to loving fellowship between the Creator and those He created in His image but who rebelled in the Garden of Eden."

I just love those points. The world and its people will finally get back to the way God intended for it to be back in the beginning. That's hope.

General, Week Four...

This week we only are working on Monday (yesterday) because today is our first day of CBS, and then we will be out of town for the rest of the week.

We moved the kid computer up to the school room and it is coming in handy for entertaining Will during some of our school time.

History, Week Three...

We finished up week number 3 today (timeline and maps), and we will be taking this week off since we are going out of town. So week 4 will come next next weekend. Anyway...

Pretest

Sumerians
-read lesson
-read some library books about them, or rather looked at the pictures. No one book really stuck out to me.
-Since the Sumerians were the first people to create a written language (Cuneiform), we made and baked clay tablets and carved our initials on them in Cuneiform. At least that was the plan.

Luke got frustrated with the whole Cuneiform alphabet thing, so decided to carve a little man (himself)...



A little happier picture here...

Luke top left, me top right (LW), Will bottom left (W), and Kendall bottom right (W??)...

Tower of Babel

-read lesson

-read book from library called "The Tower of Babel" (imagine that!) by Marilyn Hirsh

-otherwise the kids knew the story from the Bible pretty good...

-The book had a fun idea of playing cd's of different languages all at the same time, to show how confusing it must have been when they all started speaking different languages (the word babel means confusion, by the way). So that is what we did. I only played 3 at once and 2 were music ones, so that was real confusing. :) The kids thought it was funny and I think they got the point.

Gilgamesh

-read lesson

-found no good books for kids at the library

-they were not good listeners so had to do some copywork on this one and then they remembered the important facts

-We played the game 'telephone', when you whisper something around in a circle and then the last person says it out loud and it is usually distorted. That was to show how the stories of Adam and Eve, and Noah's Ark, which was in the Bible and also a similar version in the Epic of Gilgamesh...how the story was probably passed down for generations and that is why the version in Gilg. sounds familiar but the details are wrong...

"What did you learn" post test

Wall of Fame...

(Sumerian statue has HUGE EYES...their trademark)

(Luke's tower of babel)

(K's Epic of Gilgamesh book...tree is part of the story)

And here it is all together so far...

Geoff worked on maps with them and I am glad he has officially taken over that job. :)

General, Week Three...

I'm not happy with the amount of time I am giving Will this year. It's just really hard to get them all 3 done and I can't seem to figure out a good routine. With Will I am mainly just working on his letters and the sounds they make, and some beginning kindergarten math stuff like shapes, patterns, basic concepts. I guess that's enough, and then next year I will work with him more. I will consider it a success by the end of the year if he knows all his letters, their sounds, and how to write them! And numbers too. He likes lots of breaks anyway, and is a pretty good helper for Bo and Noah (until he pulls their pants off and throws them up to get stuck on our foyer chandelier, or locks them in their room!).

Anyway, this week he liked to surprise me with all the letters he puts together in the morning before I 'arrived to school.'




These wooden sticks are from "Handwriting Without Tears"...

Here is Noah reading to himself in his room while we are doing school. He was going to town with it!

That's all I got this week, except for history, which I will have to post on Monday because we still have to do our Wall of Fame for week 3.

Science, Week Three (Volcanoes)...

This week was a fun one for science. I personally was really looking forward to it because I knew the kids would love it.

First, here are some books I used:
**"Volcanoes" by Simon Seymour
"Volcanoes, Disasters Up Close" by Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods
"Volcanoes" by Franklin M Branley
"Volcanoes and Earthquake"-DK Eyewitness Books
**"Volcanoes, A True Book" by Elaine Landau (Scholastic)

Pretty much all volcano books seem alike after you read like 5 of them, but the 2 I have **'d were my favorites.

We also used "Volcano" DK Eyewitness DVD and
Usborne Encycl. of Our World and the internet links for that (which weren't great this time)

Luke and Kendall each had to read a Reading Rainbow Book called "Hill Of Fire" by Thomas P. Lewis and the summarized it for me while I typed it for them. It was fun hearing each of their versions of it and we now have it on record. I am going to start doing that more when they read books.

So on to the volcano-making:

We mixed up some modeling clay and they each formed a mound of clay around an empty can (Tuesday)...

Done and now they had to dry until Thursday...

Supplies ready to make a chemical reaction and make our 'volcanoes erupt'...

Adding the red food coloring...

Kendall was the first one to do it...

They loved it!

Playing with the now wet clay...

They kept adding baking soda and it would bubble up again and again...

Here are some videos of each of the kids telling about the volcano picture they drew for their notebooks. I was impressed with Will because he actually put factual stuff in his. :)

And here is some video of the eruptions...

Science, Week Two (The Icy World)...

It worked out nicely this week because history was about the Ice Age and science was about 'the icy world.'

Here's the breakdown:

-learned about icebergs and glaciers (rivers of ice)
-learned about the continent of Antarctica and all things related (seals, penguins, ice houses...)
-Watched Ice Age movie
-made our own icebergs ("Mudpies..." book, pg. 85)

Resources:
-"Encyclopedia of Our World" (Usbourne)
-"Winters Across America" by Simon Seymour
-"Icebergs and Glaciers" by Simon Seymour
-I have never taken advantage of the internet links in the Usbourne Encyclopedia. We used it for this subject and there were some really neat things on there. They got to dress a person for the cold in Antarctica, watch some real video of icebergs and glaciers moving, penguins, seals, etc.) They really enjoyed this!


Here is the 'iceberg' we made. It was kind of a lame experiment as far as practicality goes, but the kids just thought it was fun freezing this block of ice with a toy fish inside. We made each half a different color. Then when it was frozen solid we put it in a bowl of water and timed how long it took to melt, noted if the shape changed, etc. For the record, it took like 46 minutes to melt completely. While we waited, the kids worked on their pages for their science notebooks (drew a picture of anything they learned, wrote down 3 things they had learned, and wrote up their experiment page).

Kendall takin' a little snoozer during science class. :)

Week Two Pictures...

A thought on Spelling. I am loving our new Spelling curriculum (Spelling Plus). Makes last year look like a joke as far as spelling is concerned. Our favorite spelling activity is to use the trampoline. I take their words out there and call a word out (taking turns) and they have to shout out one letter with each jump. It's good because it makes them not hesitate to spell it, plus gets some energy out. It's fun. I took Luke's math flashcards out there and did the same thing this week. He liked that. I realized we needed to get his addition facts memorized better. He can add them pretty fast in his head but doesn't have them all memorized, so we are taking a digit at a time and perfecting them. He did nines this week and got through 11 cards in 17 seconds by the end of the week. Now we will work on 8's until he gets those mastered.

We read from The Child's Story Bible each morning and I am proud that we are keeping up with that. I started with the New Testament and we are reading a chapter each morning. Usually I get slack with that stuff (opening circle-time), but am seeing the importance of starting the day off together and with prayer, so we are sticking with it. Anyway, one of our stories this week was about Jesus in the temple when he got angry because the people had made it into a marketplace. The kids were acting it out funny so I got the camera. They got a little crazy with it.





Here is the Student of the Week, waiting for the history lesson to start...
This is often what our lunch breaks look like, watching PBS...

History, Week Two...

This week in history our 3 lessons were about

1)Noah and the Flood

2)The Ice Age

3)Dinosaurs

Geoff and I have had some talks this week about history and science and about the debate of when the Ice Age really was and when dinosaurs really lived. We agreed that this history book is one view, and that some would disagree. I taught it to the kids that way....that we don't know for sure when these two things happened, but that they DID happen indeed. They were cool with that, and Luke asked 'then why do we have to learn them?' Man, we think alike. :)

Anyway, here's the breakdown:

Noah and the Flood

-took pretest and read lesson

-played the game Memory (because the animals went on the ark in pairs)

-did a worksheet of questions about Noah and the Ark (had to look up the answers in Genesis)

The Ice Age

-read lesson

-watched Ice Age, the movie in afternoon (for fun)

-had an ice cube contest...who could keep their foot on the longest?

-made greenhouses in a mason jar (this was to show the way the earth was before the flood when there had not been any rain yet. The Bible said there was like a canopy of moisture and all was green and lush, etc. Then, according to this resource, the ice age came after the flood)

Here they are gathering the 'earth' for the greenhouse (grass, rocks, dirt, leaves, etc)

We put 1/4 cup of water in it, sealed it up, then sat in on the deck in the sun...

It got like this...

**It worked out good because this week our science was about 'the icy world,' so our science topic and experiment worked right along with this theme.

Dinosaurs

-read lesson and drew pictures of Noah and the Ark including a pair of dinosaurs

-I let the kids play with our toy dinosaur figures while I read this lesson

-Used a dinosaur book we have called "The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible" which answers a lot of questions.

Wrap-Up

-Made memory cards

-Post test (cumulative)

-added to our Wall of Fame

-map work, compliments of Dad who came to my rescue on Friday afternoon

The kids are having fun making the stuff for our Wall of Fame (timeline)...