Saturday, March 9, 2013

Weekly Review: Mar-4-8

We are WELL!!  Ok, mostly. Drake still have a little something hanging on but overall we are doing much, much better. The weekend was insane. Thank God for Daddy being home to help. I pretty much just took care of the sick baby and Daddy did everything else, including taking care of two sicklies and two sort of sicklies.

Great week!  I spent a good amount of time Sunday night getting everything ready for the week. I think KNOW this has been key to such a productive week. :)

Monday-
  • ES-finished up week 7 and began week 8.
    • We watched a few YouTube vids on tides HERE, HERE (super cool time laspe video!!), and this kind of silly one HERE.
    • We then watched some deep sea videos HERE (this one is just a picture and explanation of it but I loved comparing the sizes!) and this amazing video HERE.
  • Took a much needed trip to the library. :)
  • Tackled individual work. Kaleb is adding and subtracting large numbers in columns (not a favorite of his) and Gabriel is working on number charts and comparing numbers....a lot of alligator *chomp, chomping* going on. :) 
  • Read about the War of the Roses in history and made rose banners.

  • Spent a large amount of time watching the county road crew work on our road. They are paving the dirt road in front of our house. (YES!!)  This means a lot of dump trucks, heavy equipment, and noises that boys LOVE. It's hard to stay away from the windows!
  • FINALLY started the famous artist study from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  We are starting with Picasso.  I found a book about his childhood at the library. We enjoyed reading it, and learned quite a bit about his early life. Kaleb was in awe of his 8 and 9 year old drawings. :) We looked at some of his work as an adult, talked about the different periods, and learned that Daddy was born just a few years before Picasso passed away! 

Tuesday-Woke up super early to tackle my chores and then woke the boys a little earlier than usual.  The plan was to get all of our group work done before the grandson arrived to hang out. Worked perfectly.  We actually accomplished more than I thought we would. Now my husband can say "I told you so." He's a morning person....I am NOT. :)
  • Scripture Adventures is moving into the book of Judges. This isn't a book that I have read so I'm looking forward to it.  Today we just talked about heros and heroines, and defined the word prophet.
  • We're working our way through nine ways to honor God in Who Is God, tackling one example a day. I love the conversations we're having! (Although today as we talked about honoring God with our bodies with one example being fasting, my smarty pants 8 year old suggested fasting from veggies as a way to honor God. Hmmm...don't think it works that way, son!!:)
  • Read more about William III who was the king killed in the War of the Roses and his two nephews who *disappeared*.  One of the boys suggested fingerprinting or DNA testing as a means of finding the murderer. :) 
  • Kaleb and Gabriel are both working in WWE 1 right now. I also have WWE 3 but, because we've never done any formal writing, I want Kaleb to understand better about what is required of him before moving to his grade level. They love copywork...who knew? :)
The 2nd is his work. He added the A+...haha!

  • Read and journaled on deserts from ES. Checked out the quick links. They LOVE those quick links.  I think most of them are kind of cheesy but I guess if they like them....
  • Ran to the windows each time we heard the dump trucks and heavy equipment rolling by. :)
Wednesday-
  • Read from another book about Picasso. We discussed some of his early paintings. I'm impressed with their attention to detail! This is going to be a fun subject for us. They are all working on coloring their own Three Musicians coloring page. Gabriel was inspired by one of Picasso's paintings and drew this weird face guy. :)

  • The boys worked hard to get all of their individual work done so we could have dinner at a favorite pizza place with Grandma, Grandpa, and Nana.
  • More WWE copywork. This is one of Gabriel's pages. We have a handwriting program that we use as well but he tries harder to form the letter properly with WWE. If he keeps this up, I may ditch the handwriting program and just require a little more writing across other subjects.

Thursday-
  • Tried a new math journal idea. Months ago, I printed some CSMP and MEP math pages for some group work. My idea was to work the problems together and then have them journal about it. I love the idea of them working together and teaching each other. Obviously Kaleb has an advantage but as we continue to work on this, I'll throw out some super challenging ones and see what happens.


  • The boys each made their own Tower of London as a quick history project.


Friday-A light day. We did most of our individual work and some group work before heading to town to do some errands. Don't you love when your child's bible lesson teaches you a thing or two? In Who Is God, we finished up the section about the nine ways we can glorify God.  Love that What Should I Do section!



Co-op starts next Friday, and I have a fun surprise for them on Thursday. :) It's going to be a good one! Hope you all have a great weekend!!

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Weekly Report Feb 25-Mar 1

We didn't get a lot of school work done this week. It happens! I am thankful for the past few full weeks of schoolwork. We'll get caught up next week and be back on track.

We actually did these plague doctor masks the week before but I never got around to blogging about the week. They still wanted me to share. :)


Monday morning's field trip was the highlight of the week. We went to see a high school performance of Peter Pan! My boys have seen a couple plays and musicals before but none of those held their attention like Peter Pan. It was fantastic! We stayed afterward for a talk back and pictures. It was pretty hard to get the boys settled down after that so the rest of our Monday was pretty low key. We managed to do our group work but that's about it. :)

Gabriel and Drake wanted a picture with Peter Pan. :)


We had several errands to run on Tuesday that took a LOT longer than I had planned. The boys' favorite part of the day was our trip to the post office. I had several packages to mail, and the postman let the boys take turns stamping them. Then he gave them each a *priority* sticker. It was an unexpected experience from an incredibly sweet man. :) After our errands, we read about the Hundred Year's War and completed map work. The boys couldn't believe that a baby became king!! We finished our bible study on Joshua. Of course their favorite story was when God made the sun stand still (this is Dad's favorite story too). We moved on to math before ending our day a little early.

Start them early! Just kidding. Who doesn't like brightly colored movable beads?


We babysat my youngest grandson on Wednesday. The boys LOVE getting to play with their nieces and nephews. They are the sweetest uncles!! So thankful for their willingness to entertain their nephew since Joshua wasn't feeling well. We still completed a good amount of work. Read about Joan of Arc in history. Talked about how one becomes a saint. Completed most of our group work and a good amount of individual work. Of course the best part of the day was hanging out with their nephew!!
Math on the go? I don't know but Gabriel did ALL of his work with NO complaining...so I'm not going to complain either!


Babysat the grandson on Thursday too but we still managed to play catch up on our history, geography, and science projects. Daddy SURPRISED us all by coming home a day early!!! He brought some freshly picked daffodils for me. :)  Also did all of our individual work AND even got a day ahead on most of it.

Building a volcano. Unfortunately it was broken before we could use so we'll make another next week.


Joshua started getting sick Thursday night so we cancelled school on Friday. I hope not having school on Friday isn't going to become a habit but we needed to devote our time to the baby. Pretty sure he has the Rotavirus. Bleh. This is something we take very seriously in our home. One of our boys was hospitalized for almost a week and another spent the night in the ER on a separate occasion for IV fluids because of this virus. We've been keeping a close eye on this baby boy.

Hoping everyone is well by the start of next week. We have several projects that we were suppose to do on Friday that we need to finish up. We only have a couple more weeks before co-op starts!! We're excited about that but I had really hoped to get more work done before then.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Week in review: Feb 10-15



Monday-We had a FUN morning!! I had the opportunity to fill in as a babysitter for a women's bible study led by our church. They meet in a bounce-around place!! :)  The boys had such a fun time with some of their church friends, and I got to meet some ladies from our church that I didn't know. Made it home in time for lunch and then hit the books for a little while.
  • Elemental Science-We watched the following YouTube videos on glaciers. The boys especially loved the exploding glacier! Warning: It's a LOUD video and I think there may be some inappropriate language at the very end. I just turned the volume all the way down.  This reminds me to caution you about YouTube videos. YouTube is an awesome educational tool. I love it!! However, the language in the video AND the comments under the video can sometimes be incredibly inappropriate for children. Be sure to preview videos before letting the kiddos watch them. :)  We also read from the Usborne First Encyclopedia of Our World and checked out the quick-links page.
  • We read about the Forbidden City in history, colored a coloring sheet, and did some map work. Gabriel was shocked that the emporers' children had pet crickets. It did seem odd that they led them around on leashes.
  • Kaleb took a test on time and reviewed money in math.  Gabriel did some work with number bonds and long addition (the 2+2+2=6 kind).
  • Drake was excited to do MANY ETC pages!! That kid will be through book C in no time!
  • We did a fun art lesson with lines.

  • We read about Moses turning over leadership to Joshua, and reviewed all of the miracles God performed during the time of Moses.  We named the baby after THIS Joshua. :) He is Bo's favorite person in the bible.  So excited to share this book of the Bible with the boys.
  • Started a study on South Korea, did some lapbooking on ducks, and finished the Chinese dragons from last week. (also these are apparently the only pictures I took all week!)






Tuesday-A FULL boring day of school to make up for all the fun we had this week.
  • Reviewed the capitals and counties so far in Asia.
  • Talked about the promises God made Joshua and how those promises relate to us today:
    • to prosper us
    • to help us be courageous
    • to be with us always
  • Finished another lesson in Who Is God? I wonder sometimes if the material is a little over their heads. I know it is for Drake but I'm not sure about Gabriel. Kaleb can easily narrate what we talk about every day and remembers when we review though. I know he's remembering it but I'm not sure if he's *getting* it. We did talk at length about our worldview and who/what are good/bad influences.  I do know Gabriel and Kaleb understand that much.  Afterward I let them take a TV break. As they surfed channels, they were discussing why the Disney and Cartoon Network channels are bad influences on their personal worldviews. They settled on a documentary about fast food which ended up being pretty eduational and interesting.  Kaleb, later on that evening, asked me if I thought a particular show that I sometimes watch was a good or bad influence on my worldview. I had to agree that it probably wasn't the best choice for me. That was convincing enough for me to continue with Who is God? for now. :)
  • The rest of our school day followed nicely:
    • Gabriel's reading is really picking up! I couldn't believe how quickly he is being to read the short stories in OPG. I remember when this happened with Kaleb. So exciting to see another child grow a love of reading!!
    • Kaleb struggled with converting days to hours. It wasn't his favorite part of the day! :)
    • Drake finished a cheap little math book I picked up for him. I'm trying to hold off starting MM until he's in kindergarten but that boy just keeps asking for more and more math! I have one more math workbook for him and hopefully it will hold him until the fall.

Wednesday-Another FULL boring day of school.
  • Read about Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible in SOTW, and did some map work.
  • Continuing in Daddy's favorite book in the Bible, we read how Rahad protected Joshua's two spies and the promise they made to protect her family.
  • In ES, we learned about the seashore:
    • Read about the seashore in our encyclopedia book.
    • Defined the word tides.
    • Visited the quick-links website where we saw how the seashore changes over time, went virtual beachcoming, and read an online book about the coastline.
    • Found several seashore-related items in the Great Planet Earth Search book on pages 20-21 Scraggy Shore. They LOVE search books!
  • Used the Internet to find information about South Korea.
  • After all the fun stuff, we tackled individual work.

Thursday-highlight of the day: Valentines Skating Party!!!  Did much else matter to the boys? Not really. :)  Nathan played hooky from school so he could go with us and see his homeschool friends. We cleaned the house all morning and then left for the partay!!


Friday-Daddy came home Thursday night so we scrapped school for the day. LOVE that option! :) We'll do some catch up next week but SO worth being able to hang out with our favorite guy!


With all of this lovey dovey Valentines stuff going on this week (that I will admit I LOVE), I woke up with Jesus Loves Me in my head and I was reminded yesterday that the GREATEST LOVE OF ALL comes from above. God gave us the best Valentine gift in the form of His Son because he loves us SO much and wants to spend an eternity with us. He continues to love and forgive us even in the midst of our many failures. Happy Valentines!!  Hope you have a great weekend!!