Weekly Wrap-up ~ Basically Home

There weren't a lot of exciting things going on here this week, in a collage photo kind of way. But we were hunkered down doing some learning.

Don't you just love when all of your subject matter goes naturally cross-curricular? That happened several times this week and it made me smile.

Our studies of The Chronicles of Narnia and WWII have had several cross-overs. We are reading a great book called Under the Blood Red Sun by Graham Salisbury. It is about the attack on Pearl Harbor through the eyes of Japanese boy living in Hawaii. We are also reading the third book in The Chronicles of Narnia Series: The Horse and His Boy. These are two completely unrelated books. However, their subject matter have criss-crossed with each other and some other resources.

For instance, Further Up and Further In (The Chronicles of Narnia unit study) raised the topic of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World because The Horse and His Boy referred to one of the "wonders" of Narnia. Then on CNN Student News there was a current story about the Great Pyramid of Giza. We watched that episode and then watched a couple of Youtube videos about the 7 Ancient Wonders and the current 7 Wonders.

Further Up and Further In also asked us to do an artist study of Winslow Homer, which we did based on his "High Cliff" painting. Then in preparing lessons for Veterans Day, one of Homer's paintings was a topic of discussion. That always amazes me because I had never even heard of Winslow Homer and then two separate lessons this week directed us to him.

Then, of course, in reading our text, WWII for Kids, we have come across many separate discussions  there and in our other books on The Battle of Midway, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Japanese Internment Camps. The imprisonment of the Japanese in America after the attack on Pearl Harbor was a big topic for us. We watched a video called "Japanese Relocation", which was total propaganda produced by the U.S. Government to convince the American people how happy the Japanese were to do their part for the war effort by moving into the camps. It was really disturbing to watch, and the kids were pretty frustrated by it.

The last subject we learned in our unit studies was about horses. We watched a video about Parts of a Horse and then the kids took an online quiz. We also watched a video about the history of war horses.

We actually spent all week at home again. Hallelujah! It gave us the opportunity to get those basics done and explore some of our WWII topics more deeply.

Veteran's Day didn't turn out as we had hoped. I had plans for us to do some things that we just didn't get to, which was a real bummer. Dawson wanted me to go with him to his college advisor appointment to help him with enrollment for next semester, so that took me out of the house for a couple of hours in the morning. (Thankfully my kids are rockstars and they were able to stay home and do their clipboard lessons and read alone without supervision.)

Eli had speech therapy in the afternoon, and then we had our The Victory Garden enrichment class scheduled for that afternoon for an hour before basketball practice. Some of our Veteran's Day activities were planned for during that time. But Brynne ended up not feeling well so we had to cancel the class, and she needed to skip basketball practice.

We do still have one activity we are planning on doing next week for one U.S. military active duty member. We are going to make a no-sew blanket as part of Soldiers' Angels. I am going to have all six of the kids in our class tie some of the ties and prepare a card to send.

The Basics

We moved right through our core subjects this week. We watched CNN Student News each day, read out of McGuffey's and copied one paragraph from each selection, finished Lesson 8 of Soaring with Spelling learning the exceptions to the ie/ei rules, completed another week of lessons from Fix It Grammar: Robin Hood, finished our final lesson in Volume 2 of Mastering 5th Grade Math doing subtraction word problems, and each of the kids read out of their personal books.

The kids love having daddy home during school days.
Eli said, "Daddy just makes school more fun."

Freedom Friday

We had a big day on Friday! Lots got accomplished!

Brynne started her new Minecraft class called Einstein's Space. She learned about electrons and electricity with magnetic forces and designed her own inventor's home and lab in game. Eli, at the same time, read the book I am Albert Einstein by Brad Meltzer. He will be working the next few weeks with a kit called Inventions by ScienceWiz. This week he did the lessons on Coils, Coils, Coils, built a motor and learned how the motor works.

Both kids also started their new self-paced online classes from UniversalClass. Brynne is taking Dog Psychology 101 and Eli is taking Astronomy 101. Each of them got into their programs and started their lessons. Brynne learned about why we would want to study the minds of dogs. She did her introduction assignment, lesson 1, and took a quiz. So far she has received 30 out of 30 points. Eli's assignment had him locating the moon and a pole star. Lucky for him, I gave Rick one of his Christmas presents early, a telescope, so the two of them spent some time looking at the waxing crescent the last two nights. He will submit his lesson answers tomorrow based on his observations.

Finally, we snuggled up in the living room with popcorn and watched "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

On an unrelated note, this little girl had to deal withs some tough stuff
this week. She is an absolute rockstar and words cannot describe how
proud I am of her or how much I love her.

Other Stuff

I mentioned earlier that Dawson went to enroll for the spring semester at his junior college. He has expressed that he does not plan to go onto college after he receives his associate degree. He has just really had a hard time deciding what he might want to do with his future. At one time he thought he might want to be a history teacher, but he feels that he could not work under the constraints of the federal government in teaching school.

We had discussed that I thought it would be a good idea for him to move more into a direction of a tech degree so that when he completes his two years of college that he would, at least, have something that he could take with him and actually get a job in that field. He talked with his advisor and learned that they have an associate degree in computer programming, which is something of which he is very interested.

He learned that the courses he has taken so far fit in that degree, that he will not have to take College Algebra but can take Business Math instead, and that he does not have to take Public Speaking because he took a bridge course this semester of Comp I and Comp II. He can also complete the degree within the time constraints of his A+ Scholarship. So next semester he enrolled for four courses, two of which are online. He only has to be on campus on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and again on Thursday night. He is pumped!! And I am really excited for him!

Next Year

How early do you start making plans for next year? I always try to have a general idea of what we will study for the next few years. Last night, for some reason, I got inspired to plan our history and science topic areas for next year. I am thinking that we will do a full year study of Greek Mythology using D'Aulaire's Greek Myths and Green Myths study books from Memoria Press. For science we will focus on Astronomy using The Book of Astronomy from Memoria Press and R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey: Earth and Space. We always enjoy spending a whole year reading a related literature series (last year Little House on the Prairie, this year The Chronicles of Narnia), so we are going to read aloud the five books in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

If anyone has any suggestions for additional resources, please pass them along! Or if you own any of these resources that you would be willing to sell for cheap, let me know!!



2015-2016 Hours Logged - 317 1/4 hours out of 1,000 required hours (90 hours outside home)
Plus 167 Summer Hours

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We are linking up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Mary at Homegrown Learners.