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A Summary of November 18 - December 6
We've hit the holidays for sure. The younglings are barely containing their excitement for Christmas which is following closely on the heels of a nice family Thanksgiving day with my family and then a Christmas get-together with my side of the family in early December. We're trying to stay faithful with our school work though. We took a whole week off for Thanksgiving (part of our Sabbath schooling schedule), but we split it over two weeks so the younglings could spend some days with Gram and Pop-pop.
Here's what we did over these three weeks:
Things that were scheduled:
Math
Language Arts (Grammar, Spelling, Penmanship, Reading, and Writing)
Tenor has kept on track (for the most part with some heavy prompting from the teacher, ahem, me) with his writing. We've finished up IEW's Ancient-History Based Writing Lessons and began their Medieval-History Based Writing Lessons. I worked out plans for the rest of year lining up the IEW lessons with our MFW history.
Soprano also started a writing curriculum. I found a pay-what-you-want deal via currclick.com for Creative and Crafty Writing. It features lessons based on different types of writing (fable, newspaper article, short story, etc) broken down into well explained steps. Along with each of the 12 lessons, there is a journal assignment and a corresponding craft or art project to do as well. She'll work on these lessons for the remainder of the year.
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| Soprano's Pop-Up Fable Book (The pop-up part is a bit of a fail.) |
Electives:
Typing, Spanish, Civics, and PA History for both.
I can't wait until next year when we'll start studying American history. Not only do I love early American history but I won't need to do separate Civics or PA History. I'm canning Geography too. Woo-hoo!
Tenor had Greek and learned another Greek letter and took his first quiz. Soprano had Home Ec
where reviewed how to use a rolling pin. We made sugar cookies. Yum.
My Father's World Rome to the Reformation-
With our Thanksgiving break, we only did 2 weeks of schoolwork over 3 calendar weeks. Now that Ancient Rome is behind us, we started into the Middle Ages (weeks 14-15), including the Byzantine Empire and the beginning of Islam.
Favorite Books:
Hear Your Heart by Paul Showers
Bible: We are going back in time to go a little more in-depth on Jesus' earthly life and ministry. We jumped over it earlier so that it would match up with the history we were studying. As we started looking at how Islam started, we also spent time praying specifically for Muslims around the world.
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| Tenor's notebooking about Mohammad |
Science: These two weeks
we did several lessons from the AIG Human Body book. We learned about the circulatory system, the heart, blood, and the respiratory system. To emphasize what we learned, we did an activity where we tested our pulse rates after various points of inactivity or activity. We made some sample blood, and while I was away for a girls' weekend, Bass and Tenor dissected a sheep heart. (They were so excited, they forgot to take pictures. I think I'm okay with that.) :)
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| Our blood sample with red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets in a gooey mix of plasma |
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| The flow of blood to and from the heart |
History: We started into the Byzantine Empire with Justinian and Theodora (very cool story) and then spent a week on the beginnings of Islam. It's interesting how from the very beginning Islam was not a 'peaceful' religion but rather it was often more of a political entity using warfare to expand it's geographical borders.
This year, I'm also incorporating Story of the World Volume 1 as well as
Mystery of History Volume 1 and 2.
For week 14, I used Mystery of History 2 p128-131 on Day 2 instead of Streams of Civ. I also skipped Streams of Civ. on Day 4.
For week 15, I eliminated Streams of
Civilization on Day 2 and 3 and added MOH 2 p160-164 on Day 2 and p166-169
on Day 3.
I'm finding though that I really prefer Story of the World to Mystery of History. I might just stick with the SOC readings and not bother with MOH for the rest of the year since there's so much overlap.
Other MFW:
Music: We listened to a few more Mozart pieces and kept up with listening at lunch most days. Christmas music has started to interfere with Mozart though.
Art: We made mosaics (drawn in the art books), drew circles, and worked on color charts.
Extras:
Web:
Videos:
no extra videos this week
no extra videos this week
Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp by Carol Carrick
How You Talk by Paul Showers
Inside the Heart by Karin Halvorsen
Ramadan by Suhaib Hamid Ghazi
The Circulatory Story by Mary Corcoran
Arabian Nights by Jim Weiss (CD)
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