Weekly Wrap- Up :Telescopes, The Plague & Mud Lessons

So last week I totally skipped posting about our previous week.... oops... I'm calling it "spring break"!! Actually, we schooled 4 of the 5 days the week before last and on the day we didn't school we did a field trip with our homeschool group:) It was a normal week with a great (minus the rain) field trip;)

This week we took Monday as our "spring break" and have had a full week of schooling:) As I planned our week I was just amazed that the end of the school year is in sight. Anna will be finishing up most of her grade level work in the next two weeks???? So crazy;)

Bible
The week before last we worked through the daily devotions from Trail to the Tree @ Holy Experience ;)

Then this week we started working on something I found on Holy Experience or a blog Ann linked to. They used Ann's theme of "thankfulness" and made a Thankful Garden using flowered shaped POst-It notes.

Well I couldn't find flowers. So we're making Thankful Stars:) And really spending some of Bible time reading verses that speak about thankfulness and thinking of things to be thankful for...





very powerful right now after seeing the destruction and loss of lives due to the tornadoes and praying for my dad and his health struggle right now. We have SOOO much and often take it for granted when we're not purposefully being thankful for all we've been given.

Language Arts
Lydia working a little each day:) Some sight words mastered, another BOB book read through and some more reviewing short vowel sounds, a,e and i.


I have finally found something to motivate Chris a little more to complete his reading lessons... we had been using Skittles and I think their "power" has worn off:) Anyway, after he completes his reading and math (no fussing with math!!!) he gets to play Wild Kratts on PBSkids... so we had a pretty productive and fun week:) YAY!!!

Anna worked through spelling lessons, grammer, cursive practice and copywork:) IN one of our grammer lessons we had to pick out all the parts of speech that were used.... wow, we both were ready for that lesson to be over;) But it showed me some areas we can work on this summer;)

For reading she has been working through The Middle Ages by Jane Shuter. And we've also been reading together some books on the ancient and major astronomers. I've also been working through a Door in the Wall , it's a novel recommended by Sonlight and it set in the same time period as the Plague which is what we studied this week. I look forward to finishing it this week.

Math
We're all working our way through the books;) Anna completed 3 lessons so she could complete the book this week:) And Chris did math everyday we schooled.... but on Friday he did Anna's activity with her instead of his own;)Fine with me... it was making a chart... good to learn and fun to do it someone else;)




Science
I have found studying space with my crew challenging... part of the reason is that I don't have the suggested books, so I've been picking our topics each week. And while I use A LOT of resources from our local library and online, I feel like I start from scratch each week.

This week we started by reviewing and finding out more information about some of the early notable astronomers. Anna and I had already talked about a few, so we included Lydia and Chris while making notecards of some of the ones I'd love for them to remember. On each card we included a picture (printed off from online sources), years of their lives, country of study/birth, and their major accomplishments.... mostly used library books and some wikipedia :)

In our 2nd Science "lesson" we talked about the telescope (the most used tool in astronomy). I found a great collection of videos about telescopes (some are better than others... the nasa our world series is great)!! And a coloring page here.

While talking about telescopes and watching the videos, we started getting into information about the Hubble Space Telescope. I found a great coloring page here. We also found a fun little model activity that we tried out;)


Social Studies
The week before last we studied the Ottoman Turks. Besides doing the reading, narration, map work and coloring pages we didn't do much else with that chapter. The kids did look through some books about Turkey with me, too! But we were working towards Easter and missed some morning time with a field trip:)

Last week we studied the Plague;) I know... lovely with younger kids. BUt i have to be honest that my kids have talked about death and heard about death from young ages. Their daddy is a pastor and has been honored to be a apart of many funeral services. And sadly we have had church members also pass away since we've serving here... so they are familiar with death. And they handled our chapter well... lots of questions, empathy felt and then we colored!

We are reading A Door in the Wall together that corresponds to The Plague. But this week we also did a little game. Using our plastic Easter eggs with some chocolate chips, the kids had to find all the "rats" I had expertly hidden in places that real rats could hide in our living and dining rooms. I know they enjoyed this activity and they GOT the point of how the disease spread so quickly.

Pics of the Week

Mud Lessons .... LOL!!