School Days Summary -- Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph plus more Egypt

The corral moved to the school room!

I respectfully ask that you not pin pictures of my children to Pinterest. Thank you!
A Summary of October 15-19
Two more busy and full weeks have gone by. We're getting lots done but looking forward to our fall break in November.
Here's what we did for school:

Things that were scheduled as usual:

Math

Language Arts (Grammar, Spelling, Penmanship, Reading, and Writing)

Soprano is doing well with her cursive writing using 'A Reason for Handwriting C'. Tenor's writing, using IEW's Ancient History Based Writing Lessons, is improving each week too. I still haven't watched more than 20 minutes of the teaching DVD but it's on my to-do list.

Electives:

Typing

Spanish
I finally realized that the video set that we had gotten for Spanish does absolutely no good if you don't have the accompanying student textbook and workbook. So, that's on hold for now. Tenor will keep doing worksheets from "The Big Book of Spanish" that we have. Soprano's lessons won't change as she's finishing the second half of Switched on Schoolhouse Elementary Spanish that she began last year.

Civics: They read about Librarians this week.
Health: They did a worksheet on trying to be healthy.
Geography: We did a fun activity where the kids layered a country name on top, its capital in the middle, and its continent on the bottom. With all the country stacks glued to a background paper, it became a self-quizzing game.

Co-op: They each had music and gym and their elective class (Soprano-Art and Art History; Tenor-Chemistry).

My Father's World Creation to the Greeks-
We completed weeks 8 and 9 which continues in ancient Egypt studies along with several biblical patriarchs.

Bible: We continued learning the 10 Commandments from Exodus 20. We read and notebooked about Abraham offering Isaac and Jacob's 12 sons.
Keeping all of the Bible families straight can be difficult so I made some cards with the names of Abraham's family down to his great-grandsons (Jacob's 12 sons). We practiced putting them into a family tree order. We also read about Esau selling his birthright for pottage (or lentil stew). We ate some lentil soup for dinner that night to try it out. Both kids gave it a thumbs up.
We read more about Jacob's life including his vision of the ladder reaching to Heaven, when he met and married Rachel and Leah, and then leaving Laban. Then we began reading about Joseph, one of my favorite Bible characters.

Science: Lots of air and water experiments: breaking a ruler that's held down by 2 sheets of newspaper

Trying to break the yardstick without any paper over it.

Trying to break the yardstick without any paper over it.

Broke it!

Broke the other end!

a straw drinking race and an upside-down glass of water; watching water rise in a jar

and putting out a fire with carbon dioxide

Bass did all of the science for the past 2 weeks... results: a happier Mom and experiments that work. :)

 History: We're still all about ancient Egypt. The past two weeks we made papyrus and our own paint and a seal.

(Check out this post on how we made the papyrus.) 

We made colored paint using sidewalk chalk, water, and egg whites.

They decorated their papyrus' with our homemade paint and hieroglyphic stamps.

Potato seals: a bird and the letter 'H' for horse

Using the potato to make a seal out of air-dry clay

Tenor's finished papyrus

Soprano's finished papyrus

 

We talked about Egyptian homes and the kids made 'soul houses' out of play-doh. 

Soul houses were miniature houses placed in tombs with the mummies. (See the book's left-hand page, top right corner.)

We also talked about how they had fun and games they played and began working on Ancient Egypt lapbooks.

Other MFW: 

Music: They listened to "Autumn" by Vivaldi and painted watercolor pictures of what the music represented to them.

Tenor's watercolor of the coming storm.

Soprano's painting of a dancer.

Art: Crosshatching and some Egyptian art lessons: copying a picture using a grid system and drawing an Egyptian person.

Extras: 

Making mummy hotdogs for dinner. I used canned crossiant dough (like Pillsbury crescent rolls). After unrolling and putting two biscuits together, I cut the dough into strips and wrapped it around the hotdog. Cook according to the biscuit directions. To dress them up, I added eyeballs with mustard.

Yummy mummy

Web:

Jacob's Ladder video

Videos:

no videos this week

Favorite Books:

Seeker of Knowledge by James Rumford
Everything Ancient Egypt by Crispin Boyer

How the Sphinx Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland

Joseph by Brian Wildsmith
Solve the Mystery: Hieroglyphs by Sean Callery

Linking up at www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com
and 2 ladybugs and a lizard