Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Outside in Oklahoma

This week we adjusted our schedule to give this mom teacher some down time. I found that with adding a new part-time professional life of my own to my already busy schedule of teaching at home, following up with two public school children, caring for dogs, a home and, too infrequently, my husband, that I was just overdoing it.

Our schedule adjustment was slight but necessary. We arranged for all of Dawson and Brynne's work on Thursday to be independent work so that I could sit in my chair and chill. I am available, just not up running here and there. That means we have to hit it extra hard on Wednesday, but it's totally worth it come Thursday.

Brynne ~ 1st Grade

We are continuing our 3 R's by reading three or four letter-of-the-week books each week, this week being "P". Brynne does letter-of-the-week activities (tracer, mini-book, word search). She does two phonic pages from a workbook we have, and is currently being introduced to verbs (nothing too heavy). Not much actual writing practice happened this week.

It was a pretty week in Oklahoma this week. So we took some of our lessons outside.

We really did this with Math. On one afternoon Brynne would ride her scooter down the driveway and I would yell math facts out to her. She would see how many she could answer on her path down, through the garage and back to me.

On another day we were learning about grouping numbers using tally marks. I made her a scavenger hunt of items found outside and she walked around and tallied how many she could find.

I told her that this next week I will write math facts on the driveway with sidewalk chalk and she can answer them.

We combined science and social studies this week by reading United Tweets of America. This book identifies the state birds of all of the United States. We got out Brynne's U.S. Wipeable Map. She would choose a state and we looked up the state bird. She chose Oklahoma, Missouri (where her grandparents live), Indiana (where her penpal lives), Florida (where we are going on vacation) and Wyoming, North Dakota and Colorado (where we went on our Yellowstone vacation). We also determined which birds were used in the most states.

We read more about the Scissor-tail Flycatcher, which is Oklahoma's state bird, and listened to calls and watched flight videos. She also colored a coloring sheet. We watched videos of the song "Oklahoma", our state song, on Youtube. And we made a 'tornado in a jar' because we live in 'tornado alley'. And we read a couple of books about Oklahoma.

We concluded our week by going to Coop for some play time.

Dawson ~ 8th Grade

The Middle Ages are so interesting and fun to learn about! We focused this week on families and classes of people. Dawson made his own Family Seal, designing it himself with two crossing swords.

He finished his stained-glass project.

For science we observed how well our herbs are growing! We purchased a small greenhouse to keep our herbs in, as well as to start some seeds for peppers, broccoli, spinach and other veggies.

We learned about the topics of vegetative propogation, water movement and respiration, and the roles of leaves, roots and stems. We attempted an experiment to see how water moves up the veins in different leaves. Our leaves around here are all dead, but it did work a little bit.

We are reading Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray. This week it mentioned the London Bridge, so Dawson did some research on the origins of the song and facts about the bridge. He also did some exercises in paraphrasing.

He is one week away from completing Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents and after Spring Break will be moving onto Life of Fred: Pre-Algebra with Biology.

We are linking up to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.