Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Lots of Christmas, Rome and the Earth

I love to see the two of them working so hard together.

I, for one, was so glad to be back to our school schedule this past week. Although we had a subdued Thanksgiving celebration, we spent the majority of the weekend remodeling our older daughter's bedroom for her 16th birthday. You can see the pics here and here, if you are curious. Because it was such hard work, I was ready for the "normalcy" of our schedule.

We had a great week this week!

Brynne ~ 1st Grade

Brynne's letter of the week this week was "H".  She did her tracer pages, mini-book, letter bag (where she collected a hat, hairbrush and "Halo Reach" video game case), read some "H" books independently and did a word search of "H" words. The cool thing was that she brought me her crossword puzzle and showed me how she had used some of the words and added other words to make a sentence.

Brynne continued to do her phonics pages and we completed the 1st grade unit on addition in her Houghton/Mifflin text.

Probably the most exciting thing for me is her love of books! She has really taken off in her reading abilities and I am so proud of her!

We finished the book "Meet Felicity" from the American Girl series and will be spending the next two weeks digging deeper into life in Colonial Williamsburg in the 1700's and completing her Lapbook. She also watched the "Felicity" dvd and really enjoyed it.

Most of Brynne's week centered around Christmas. We are joining Shannon at Welcome to our Wonderland in her Christmas Book and Activity a Day challenge. This was a highlight of our week! We read the following books and did activities for them:

• The First Christmas Stocking, laced a paper stocking and decorated it
• This is the Stable, made a Nativity scene out of printables and toilet paper tubes
• Bunny Christmas, some shadow box Christmas frame ornaments
• The 12 Days of Christmas, a counting day
• Jingle Bells, a jingle bell bracelet

Yesterday morning was our Homeschool Coop Christmas party. Brynne really enjoyed it! They had carnival type games to play, made several crafts and had cupcakes. It was a really fun morning!

For the next two weeks I am planning to take a break from phonics and math and concentrate on our Christmas studies, including Colonial Williamsburg, and start preparing for our Old-Fashioned Christmas we plan to have this year.

Dawson ~ 8th Grade

Dawson started a new unit on Ancient Rome. He has started learning about the climate and natural resources, types of citizens and family dynamics. He also drew a map of Italy and Sicily.

The Bible text we are studying right now is Luke (which is ironic because the new Bible Study I am doing has us reading a chapter of Luke every day this month in preparation of Christmas. I was planning to have him read it with me, and then saw in his curriculum that he would be reading it anyway. I love when God does things like that!!)

We are also watching the 1992 production of Handel's Messiah, filmed at the Point Theatre, Dublin on the 250th anniversary of the work's premiere. Our A World of Adventure curriculum guides you through the productions, giving you the proper scriptural references and advising you of specifics in the music to ponder. I have really enjoyed it. Dawson hasn't found a love for classical music, as of yet, but he's hanging in there with me. I do think he is "getting it" though.

Dawson has been busy in science. His new unit is on Earth Science. He has studied the Earth's structure and is in the process of making a model of the Earth structures. I will post about that when it is done.

Today we did two experiments:

• Teeny Tiny Rocks ~ this experiment had Dawson look at two samples of sand with a magnifying glass and draw the sedimentary rocks included in each sample.

• Melt Down ~ this experiment demonstrated the melting point of solid rocks by melting a square of chocolate in a heated spoon.

Check back next week to see what other great things we accomplish. In the meantime, you can check in on other homeschoolers at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.