Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Week 3 - review

Bible Time: We read from 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles this week. The most important story in our opinion as parents is the story from 2 Chronicles 19-20, where Jehoshaphat led his people into battle with praises. However, even though I really talked this story up and reviewed it with the kids each day, two days later no one really knew anything at all about Jehoshaphat. Junior wasn't even sure if he was a good king or a bad king. *Sigh* I want to go back to this story later on in the year and see if I have any fresh ideas for it.

History: We are doing Colonial Life from Homeschool in the Woods. This week we made fortune catchers and silhouettes. The kids love, love, love the fortune catchers. Junior ended up making one for his grandpa and Peanut made one for a little friend who was coming over.

The silhouettes were more difficult. I will put up a post with silhouette tips later. Dad will take them to work and shrink them on the large copy machine there, and they will make a nice framed piece, I believe.

Our read-aloud is still The Warrior's Challenge by Dave and Neta Jackson. I like it. There are some themes that I feel my kids would better relate to if they were older, but it is not a big deal. The subject of cruelty to Native Americans is dealt with without being disturbing to young kids.
In the evenings, I do read-alouds with Peanut by herself. We love reading the Burgess Animal stories, but we just started on Emily's Runaway Imagination by Beverly Clearly, and we are enjoying it. Somehow I missed it growing up.

For language arts, we are still doing copywork using the Rules of Civility from our unit study.

Reading: Junior finished up Nate the Great and started on Prairie School. Peanut finished The Skippack School, and she really liked it. After the first few chapters, I did not have to share the reading with her. She got into it on her own, and didn't want to wait on me to finish what I was doing.

For science, we got a lot of books at the library, but we haven't gotten started on them yet. Junior is wanting to study buoyant forces. Before I got to the library, I found some directions online for making a Cartesian Diver, so we did that. It was a bit tricky, but we got it to work. The cartesian diver doesn't exactly demonstrate buoyant forces, but it is close enough. My opinion is that when he says "buoyant forces," he means that he wants to do water experiments, and he did enjoy the Cartesian Diver.

2 comments:

  1. Your week sounds great! I'm going to look for all of those books you mentioned. They sound like they be a hit with my daughter.

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  2. I have found that often my kids don't remember it 'the next day'- but a yar later when the topic is brought up they remmber having learned. I have found that elementary age learning and some middle school learning- it's all just laying ground work for high school. they don't often have total recal of the early stuff, but it's there in the background of their minds, making high school work easier.- at least with my kids.

    Connor was 12 when he was ready for the weekly list. we tried it at 11 b/c he asked, but it didn't work.

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