Journey to Excellence

Another busy , busy week! In addition to our homeschool schedule, I was also confronted with a situation with our youngest child who is in kindergarten in our public school. {There are many, many reasons why our other three children still attend public school, especially as it pertains to our younger two who are in 1st grade and kindergarten. I won't go into all of that now. Public school is what is best for them at this time, or we would have them home. We think it is likely that we will bring them home for school  when they are ready to go to middle school, but we will make that decision when the time comes.} Anyway, our youngest daughter is in kindergarten and has always been a go-getter . She is very smart and needs/wants lots and lots of stimulation, always has. She went to Preschool when she was 3 and Pre-K when she was 4. She is a young kindergartner, but was completely ready and willing to go. She was great for the first month. Then all of a sudden she started crying wh...

What a tedious job this would have been in Ancient Egyptian times! If I would have had to rely on this procedure in order to be able to write, I wouldn't have done any writing. {You were supposed to use green paper and a light green paper, but we used green and yellow because that's all we had.} First you draw a line about 1/2 " down from the top on the long end of one of the pieces of paper and the short end of the other one. Then you cut about 1/2" strips all the way across up to the line. Then you weaved both of the pieces together. This took forever. Dawson thought he was a genius and had come up with a way to lay them out so he didn't have to actually weave. But then he turned it over ... ha, ha, ha!!! He had trouble doing this. He did it for a while and then I finished it for him while he ate his lunch. When it was completely weaved it was dipped into 1 part Elmer's glue and 4 parts water mixed together. It was laid on a paper towel...

Last Monday we started an experiment to determine what mixtures of baking soda (natron), iodized salt and Epsom salt would best mummify a slice of apple. We had the following combinations and apple slice weights (weighed with a control-weighted object): Control (plain apple): 8 oz. 1/2 c. baking soda: 8 oz. 1/2 c. iodized salt: 8 oz. 1/2 c. Epsom salt: 8 oz. 50:50 baking soda and iodized salt: 8 oz. 50:50 iodized salt and Epsom salt: 9 oz. 50:50 baking soda and Epsom salt: 9 oz. Equal portions baking soda, iodized salt, Epsom salt: 8 oz. We put the apples aside for one full week and then inspected them this morning. Question : Which substance combination will mummify the apple more? Background Research : When Egyptians first started the mummificaton process, they used natron (baking soda) to dry out the body. Over the years they perfected their processes, using other salts. Hypothesis : Dawson predicted that the combination of Epsom salt and iodized salt would do ...

I have learned a lesson this week: When Dawson has a big project to do, that will be time consuming, I need to consider taking some things out of his curriculum so he has time to work on it. The rough draft of his Desert Book was due at the end of the day yesterday. But, on top of the other work he has had to do it's not going to end up being as well-thought-out and complete as I had envisioned. It's really my fault more than his because of my quest to get things done and checked off a list! And who has been the one stressed out? .... Me! Hopefully, I will remember this lesson in the future. What else did we get accomplished this week? A World of Adventure ~ Lots of subjects and predicates! We completed The Golden Goblet today. The story has been good, and it has provided us with tons of new vocabulary words. Dawson has been putting them on notecards, writing them into sentences and taking tests over them. We compared and contrasted two of the main characters of the bo...

I posted last week about the Ancient Egyptian Relief that Dawson was making. This relief was a really great all-week project. It was so cool that I wanted to repost it with step-by-step instructions and pictures. First you mix Plaster of Paris, according to the instructions. We made two batches. Pour the creamy plaster into a shoe box lid sprayed generously with cooking spray. Use any type of carving tool you would like. We had actual clay carving tools that came with our Sculpey clay. But, a toothpick or a nail would work just fine. Start carving as soon as the plaster starts to harden up. The harder it gets, the harder it is to carve. {Dawson learned that the hard way.} Just keep testing it to see how hard it is. It dried much faster than the instructions said it would. Carve in a picture of your choice. Dawson carved Osiris that he copied out of Ancient Egyptian Drawing Book by Ralph Masiello. We checked this book out of the library. Just carve it as though you are "...

Dawson has a two-week book project to do on deserts. The assignment was for a non-fiction book. I found an excellent rubric with instructions on how to write your own book. But when I saw that it's instruction advised that the student could either write a comedy, mystery or other fictional story I thought, "Why not? Why not let Dawson use his imagination and make this book a fictional one including facts about deserts?" He liked that idea and immediately started brainstorming. He has decided to make his book a fictional story about a nerdy little boy, Clyde, and his dog, Sam, who are looking to solve the mystery about how King Tut died. I thought it was a great idea, on his part, to make the story not only about deserts but about Ancient Egypt, too! We have been studying each of these topics in depth. He has worked out the outline for his story and drawn the characters. There aren't as many desert facts in it as I would like, at this point, but I've instr...

Is it Thursday already?? Are we almost done with a full four weeks of school? Are we exactly two weeks away from finishing our first unit study? Has Dawson almost completed reading three novels? Is this day going to be the first day we have to cut some things out because of an emergency situation {sick pet}? Am I tired? Is Dawson? The answer to all of those questions is .... Yes! .. a resounding Yes! What a week! It seems that our week has been heavy with Language Arts, so much so that Dawson has been getting up at 7:00 a.m., starting school around 8:00 a.m. and not finishing Language Arts until at least lunch time. That's left us with Pre-Algebra, Social Studies, Science, Fine Arts, Typing (one day a week), Spanish (two days a week) and personal reading all to do after lunch!   We haven't finished school until at least 3:30 p.m. every day and Dawson has done his personal reading before bed. {He wants to know what happened to my assurance that we would be done with school b...

This has been an extremely busy week, but a short one as well. We were off Monday for Labor Day as my other three children were out of school those days. Then today and tomorrow we have taken off because Dawson and his older sister take these two days every year to spend at their dad's hometown fall festival. That only left two days of school this week. But, we accomplished much! A World of Adventure  ~ Our Bible lessons right now are centered around not worshiping other idols and beliefs about the afterlife. We made a living timeline across the top of our schoolroom with yarn and index cards. We are going to start charting dates (both Biblical and historical) on the timeline. It will be cool to see it progress throughout the year.  Our curriculum also has us reading The Golden Goblet . Dawson is doing vocabulary, grammar and writing lessons based on what we are reading in the book. Social Studies  ~ We will be continuing our study on Ancient Egypt for about tw...