Weekly Wrap-up ~ Week 7 {Nature, Coop, Body, Gods}

I've decided to abandon the "Dawson Says" posts because he really doesn't have much to say every week and it's a struggle to get him to do it with a positive attitude {and I doubt anybody wants to hear attitude from a kid at the end of their own long week of, possibly, having attitudes of their own at home to deal with.} Soooooo ..... here's this teacher's viewpoint of our week:

Brynne ~ 1st Grade

The 3 R's ~ Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic

Brynne started her weekly journal pages by finishing the sentence, "I don't like to eat ... Mostar." Can you guess what that is? Hint .. she drew a yellow bottle, upside down. When you look at the picture straight on it has a capital "W" on it. (It's Mustard and, cleverly, the "W" is really an "M" since the bottle is upside down.)

Every day we got out the workboxes and completed workbook pages having to do with ABC dot-to-dots, sequencing, alike vs. different, Eli's (our public school first grader's) phonics homework page from the day before, and others.

For the Letter of the Week activities Brynne did her "B" workbook pages and mini book. She found "B" objects to put in her letter bag (balloon, block and book). She decorated her "B" collage letters with balloons and beads. She completed her letter spiral by finding "B" pictures in magazines, cutting them out, gluing them in, and writing the words.

She and her brother (and Crusoe) played a spontaneous game of "keep the Balloon in the air." 

They also built a robot out of Blocks.

In Math Brynne does lots of addition and subtraction problems, both from a First Grade workbook we have and from Eli's math homework from the day before that I copy for her. She is a whiz at math! She's also been playing math games online.

History ~ Kaya, an American Girl

Our first history lesson is on Kaya, a Nez Perce indian girl from the 1780's. She is one of the American Girl dolls. We started Meet Kaya. I thought we might read a chapter a week but we have read almost the whole book in just two weeks. So I now have the second book in the series to start. We will work on this until the end of the month.

While I read the book to her she did different activities for her lapbook. She colored different types of salmon (what they fished), colored a picture of a horse and named it "Daisy", decorated a teepee, did a salmon dot-to-dot {numbers 1-94}, and drew trees and insects on a page to show protection of the salmon.

We had a very interesting conversation yesterday that prompted a lesson on the 5 senses! One of the girls in the book is blind. Brynne asked if she could talk, since she was blind. Or if she could taste. I had her close her eyes and smell a crayon, and talk to me, and touch me and asked her whether she could hear me. We talked about how losing one of your senses makes your other senses stronger.

Out and About

On Wednesday Brynne and I went to our public library story and craft time. You can read about that here.

On Thursday we did our first lesson of the The Outdoor Hour. We started with Lesson 1 and will catch up with the group a little later. She was fascinated with the thousands of acorns we found in our yard and the grasshopper on our driveway. More on this in a separate post later.

On Friday we went to our first Homeschool Coop. Brynne had the opportunity to participate in "Fun Class", which this week was Theatre class. They learned all about the different types of stages, stage right and left, upstage and downstage. Then they got to play in the indoor playroom. When we left Brynne said she really had fun. I was glad to see two other moms I knew, who I didn't know attended the coop. It's going to be a fun thing for us to be involved in!

Then in the afternoon we went on a field trip with the group to a pumpkin patch in a nearby town. We decided to take Eli out of school early so he could go with us. You can see the pictures here.

Dawson ~ 8th Grade

Dawson's week was kind of a blur with all of the activity surrounding Brynne. Here's what (I can remember) he did:

A World of Adventure

In Language Arts Dawson did more paragraph re-writing using the method used by the Institute of Excellence in Writing. I just learned this and it made me very happy because it's a highly respected method, and it has great results! His paragraphs have been excellent! He also finished his spelling unit on the /e/ rules and completed some vocabulary. We read many of Jesus' parables, since we are studying fables and myths. Jesus used a similar approach with his parables.

On Friday we began our reading of Classic Myths to Read Aloud, by William F. Russell, Ed.D. This will be our literature text for the next several weeks. With this unit on Greek myths Dawson is making a "Mythical Creatures, Gods and Goddesses" notebook that will contain drawings of the various gods and goddesses we study, as well as factual information about each. He did his first drawing of Athena.

In Social Studies Dawson read and studied about Greek trading ports, the movement from myths to philosophy to science, watched a video about the layout of a Greek town (the acropolis, agora and temples), watched a video called "Clash of the Gods ~ Odysseus" from The History Channel, did some vocabulary from that episode and answered discussion questions. He also finalized his recipes for the Greek meal he plans to cook for our family this Tuesday night.

In Science he continued his study of the Human Body Systems, doing worksheets for each system in his Body Systems notebook. For the Respiratory System we did an experiment  and calculated that in his lifetime (as of that moment) he had taken approximately 81,993,601 breaths which would have filled approximately 20,498,401 2-liter bottles with air. For the Excretory System we did our Phoney Poo experiment. He watched some KidsHealth videos about the Reproductive System.

For Fine Arts, the majority of the week was spent studying the three types of Greek columns, called the Doric Column, the Ionic Column and the Corinthian Column.

He did a Sketch Tuesday entry for "Things you find in an art museum".

And he made a catapult.

Other Less Picture-Worthy Subjects

Dawson still continues to enjoy Life of Fred: Fractions. He did his first "bridge" this week and passed it allowing him to move on.

He continued to work on his Good Typing and Spanish assignments.

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Dawson's 14th birthday is tomorrow. We are still doing school, although trying to keep it as fun as possible. Our public school's Fall Break is Thursday, Friday and next Monday, and he will get those days off.

As always we are linked up to Weekly Wrap-up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.