Weekly Wrap-up ~ Geography

Ever since we downloaded Stack the States onto our iPad, my kids have been hooked on geography! Once they had exhausted that game, they wanted to move on to Stack the Countries. It was hard! But it didn't take them any time before they had mastered many aspects of it. And now they have an amazing ability to identify locations of countries, their flags, monuments, native languages and more. They blow me out of the water. They even want to decorate their bedroom in a geography theme with flags, maps, etc., and I have found the coolest world map rug that would start off the theme perfectly! Christmas gift???

Yesterday, we were reading the book Monkey Colors by Darrin Lunde, which includes a world map on the back page showing where the monkeys live. My kids, seriously, were able to identify which country those monkeys lived in, just by looking at the blank map. I was astounded! (And they proved it to me by bringing up the maps on Stack the Countries.)

Their love of geography made me decide we needed to be constantly doing a geographical study of some kind. Last week we learned about Nigeria and Senegal in Africa. This week (and over the next two weeks), because of a product we are reviewing for the Schoolhouse Review Crew, we are learning about Indonesia. They are loving it and our weeks are flying by with fun!

Now onto what we did this week ...

On Monday we were traveling back from Oklahoma, so it was mostly an iPad learning day. We decided to ease into Tuesday, after a busy weekend, so had a fun activity day surrounding the book Little Hoot as part of the Virtual Book Club for Kids we have joined.

Wednesday was a full school day. We started learning about Isaac in our Bible lessons, did a lesson in All About Spelling, started our new read-aloud Secrets at Sea by Richard Peck, did some reading comprehension on Samson's Classroom (review posting tomorrow), completed a math lesson from Math Enhancement Programme, did some personal reading, and began the pre-writing exercises for our new WriteShop unit on punctuation with a theme of colors.

MEP had us estimating lengths and then measuring to prove or disprove our estimation.

Then the Indonesia fun began! We watched a great video on a particular village's houses, did a Venn diagram comparing their houses to ours, and then made our own Wano house out of materials found in our yard.

Thursday was a similar day. We continued with our study of Isaac, did verb and adjective identification from the book 10 Hungry Rabbits by Anita Lobel, continued with our pre-writing exercises in WriteShop (which incorporated the two books already mentioned: Monkey Colors and 10 Hungry Rabbits), completed another lesson in All About Spelling, did more personal reading, and read more out of Secrets at Sea.

Our Indonesia study had us doing some math! We made a general list of all food we would need to buy for us to eat for a week, then calculated that by two weeks, then calculated it by six months! We watched another great video and then cooked our Indonesian-inspired meal of Satay chicken and peanut sauce. Spicy but YUM!

Eli and Brynne also colored maps of Indonesia and listened to the native language in Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia. Both of these activities were at their request.

The most important thing we learned on Thursday, however, was that a new member of our family was born! My brother, Tim, and his wife, Shawna, who live in Portland, Oregon, had their first baby on Thursday morning, a sweet baby girl named Bell Nora.

Today it's Friday. Dawson didn't have school today because of parent-teacher conferences. I went to pick up his 1st quarter report card yesterday and he has all A's, except for one B. I am VERY proud of him!! He slept in today and hung out with girlfriend watching a movie ... well deserved! I let the rest of us sleep in, too.

After lunch we went to the park for some play time and nature study. We did some bark rubbings of our "trees of the year", collected some leaves and did leaf rubbings for those same trees, finished our acorn and oak study, and worked more on our Fall Scavenger Hunt.

It was a crisp and cold day, but perfect for a day at the park. The kids played, Crusoe ran, and I walked around the perimeter of the park.

We are looking for another fun week studying about Indonesia, and moving along in our regular studies. We are in a groove now, and I don't want to lose any momentum. Everybody's happy ... Hurray!!

Linking up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.