Skip to main content

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Death and New Life

We had a great week this week! I think we have finally hit our stride. Pretty good considering we are three quarters of the way through our school year, huh?

We have tweaked and changed and come up with a schedule that works pretty good. I think we are all happy with it!

Our schedule is working great for us. And it's not at all how I set out to do school when we started this journey. It's amazing how much I have changed in this process so far.

Dawson ~ 8th Grade

Things were seeming a little stale in Dawson's studies of The Middle Ages, so I made sure he had some other activities to do this week.

He drew a Cartoon castle.


He made garlic chive cream cheese spread and dill veggie dip, using fresh herbs.


We studied the Black Plague, and I wanted to demonstrate it to him. I found a simulated game, but tweaked it a bit. I drew a map including five cities our character traveled in Adam of the Road. I then took 50 lima beans and put them in a lunch sack. On 15 of them there were red dots signifying the Black Plague. (Most reports stated that 1/3 of all persons contracted and died from the Black Plague during the pandemic.) Dawson rolled one dice to tell him how many days he was staying in the first city. He drew out that many lima beans. If none of them had a red dot, he didn't contract the disease and rolled the dice to see how many days he was to stay in the next city. And then he rolled the dice again, drew that number of beans, and so on. The goal was to see if he could make it to the end of his travel without contracting the disease. He and I took turns playing and usually died around the second or third city. He kept playing until he successfully travelled the whole distance while staying healthy. He loved the game!



Since we were also learning about the Battle of Hastings, The Crusades, The Hundred Years War and The War of the Roses we watched Medieval Fight Book from the National Geographic Channel.

He also started his Life of Fred: Pre-Algebra with Biology, is working steadily on his Spanish and typing lessons (where I am seeing great improvement) and started a new spelling list this week.

Dawson and I also had a discussion about how he would like to learn, now that we have spent so much time following our A World of Adventure curriculum. There will be a post about that soon.


Brynne ~ 1st Grade

This was such a fun week! Maybe it was because we were coming off a great Spring Break in Pensacola, Florida. Maybe it was because it was a Spring week and we were just energized because of it. Or maybe it was because we just really enjoyed what we were studying. Whatever it was, it was the kind of week I always dream of having.

This week was all about Spring!

Although I am not a fan of lapbooks (too much busy work, and cutting and trying to arrange things just right, etc.), I love notebooking! Brynne learned about butterflies this week and we took everything she did and made it in a notebook. We just use a manila folder as the cover and use yarn to bind it. She loves her notebooks because then she has something to show her daddy and her siblings about what she has done. She shows them with pride. And she likes to look back at them.


She did copywork on 2 Corinthians 5:17, and made a visual of a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis with the scripture printed on the butterfly. She made a coffee filter butterfly and used glitter paint to decorate a foam butterfly.



She did an addition problem color-by-number of a butterfly, using sidewalk chalk to work out the addition problems on the driveway.

She read a book about monarchs and a book that showed the parts of a butterfly and it's life cycle, and then she completed her own diagrams and a life cycle wheel.


All of these things went into her notebook.

Another fun thing we did was Jelly Bean Math. I used this site, but used speckled jelly beans instead of designated Jelly Belly's. With the jelly beans she did grouping, estimation, sorting, greater than and less than, counting by 10's, 5' and 2's, and patterns. She looked so forward to doing this every day!!



This was also "R" week, so she did her tracer page and mini book, her word search and read three letter "R" books independently.

Today we went to gymnastics day for Coop. She loves doing this!!

Next week we start a three-week unit on Easter. I am really looking forward to this unit!

Great, great week!!!

Head over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what other families are doing. 


Comments

  1. Brynne does such fun, hands-on projects! Such a great job! And Dawson seems like such a good cook! Yum!

    Jessy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great idea on the game. That really brings the stark reality of the situation home.

    I also read your post on "Oh, So She Says...". That is a great introduction to getting started on homeschooling. I love your enthusiasm.

    It does sound like you had a great week!

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a fun week! That game idea for history is awesome! And it looks like your daughter had a great time with the butterfly unit study~and it's the perfect time of year to study that:)

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a great week. Dawson's snack sounds yummy!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

We all know that in this crazy world of homeschooling, we need all the (adult) support we can get. Please leave a comment if you so wish!

Popular posts from this blog

ABCya

Eli's reading resource teacher shared a website with me yesterday that I would like to pass along. It's called ABCya . There are separate educational sections with fantastic games for ages kindergarten through 5th grade. I browsed the 2nd grade level, and it includes age-appropriate games about Letters, Numbers, Shapes, Geometry, Patterns, Mouse Manipulation, Art and Holiday games. There are lots and lots of fun and creative games for children to play. They are fun, but oh, so educational. Eli's favorite, in his short time playing it, was Create a Car . A lot of the games also have Apps available for purchase (99 cents for most of them) for the iPad and iPhone. I have been looking for another free website for games similar to Starfall , for some time. I think I have found it. I can feel confident having Eli and Brynne play these games.

A Thomas Jefferson Education "This Week in History" ~ Schoolhouse Review

Talk about a GOLD MINE! A Thomas Jefferson Education's This Week in History by Rachel DeMille is her "labor of love" ... and I absolutely LOVE it! " This Week in History is a daily resource that brings your home school or classroom to life." For just $9.99 per month, you can log onto TJEd.com and click the "This Week in History" link to obtain many, many, many resources tied to specific events that occurred in the upcoming week in history. Or even better, you can receive the summaries and links to ALL resources right in your email Inbox each week! It doesn't get any easier than that! What does this really look like in real life? Each week, I receive an email from Rachel DeMille that sets out each date of the coming week. Under the date, there are listed anywhere from one to several events that occurred in history on that date. THEN there are ALL kinds of things to do related to that event, such as books to read, websites to visit, ac

Cells ~ It's What's for Dinner

Dawson made edible cells on Friday. He made an animal cell pizza ... and a plant cell chocolate chip cookie ... He reviewed what he's learned about cells the past two weeks, and I had dinner made by someone else. Win, win!! I am linking up at Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.