School Summary - Middle Ages Russia, The Black Death, and Joan of Arc

Meteor shower!

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A Summary of February 17-28

We are living in the land that is always winter and never Christmas. Well, not quite that bad but this has been a snowy season that seems to be dragging on and on. We're still getting school work done but we're all looking forward to sunnier days outside.

Here's what we did for the past two weeks:

Things that were scheduled:

Math

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

Soprano has been enjoying her writing curriculum, Creative and Crafty Writing, which is good since Tenor is fighting tooth and nail to complete his writing assignments. He's now about 4 weeks behind but with some persuasion from the principal, aka Bass, he's going to get it done.

Electives:

Typing, Spanish, Civics, and PA History for both.

Tenor continued with Greek while Soprano had her Home Ec lessons - beginning stitching. 

My Father's World Rome to the Reformation

After two weeks focusing on the history of the far East, we finished up with Genghis Khan and Marco Polo and then shifted to Russia; then back to Europe for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and Joan of Arc.

Bible: We are still reading through Luke and studying the life of Jesus. We continued learning our passage in Philippians. (Chapter 2:3-11).

Science: We completed several lessons and a quiz from AIG's Our Universe. We talked about various heavenly bodies (stars, nebulae, quasars), then went more in depth about asteroids, comets, and meteors.

Our town awaiting a meteor strike

Sprinkling salt to represent the majority of meteorites that actually hit the earth. Zero damage to the town.

And a large meteorite hitting the town... flour went everywhere! It made a crater and knocked some things over.

We also did an overview of our solar system and discussed the difference between astronomy versus astrology.

History: 

Reading about Russia's origins was well-timed with the Sochi Olympics taking place. The opening and closing ceremonies were fascinating to watch having just read about how the country began. We did however skip cooking Borsch.

I decided that Mystery of History wasn't working for us. Earlier in the year I had been using it in place of some of the Streams of Civilizations readings. I was struggling with the emphasis of the author's opinion over historical fact and didn't really enjoy the writing style. I know lots of families use and love MOH which is great. It just isn't a resource that I was gelling with. There were only a few more places I was going to substitute it anyway so I decided to just be done with MOH instead. We ended up selling both volumes on-line and recouping most of my original cost.

Other MFW: 

Music: We finished up listening to the assigned Mozart pieces. Then we began the Beethoven biography. We have missed out on using our lunch break as a listening time so I'm going to need to be more intentional about that again.

We also borrowed "The Planets" by Gustav Holst from our local library to listen to. Soprano loved "Jupiter" which she said sounds very wedding-ish. The main melodic theme was also borrowed for the song, "I Vow to Thee My Country". (Charlotte Church has a beautiful rendition of it here.)

Art: They designed and drew towers and read about Giotto.

Extras:

Web:
We are really far behind on watching our web videos but they're saved in my playlist. You can see them all in my Youtube playlist for MFW weeks 19-34.

Videos:
Marco Polo by Nest Entertainment

Explorers of the World: Marco Polo by Schlessinger Media
Beethoven Lives Upstairs by The Children's Group DVD

Joan of Arc by Nest Entertainment

Favorite Books: 

Ludwig Van Beethoven by Mike Venezia
Stars: Lights in the Night Sky by Jeanne Bendick
Joan of Arc: the Lily Maid by Margaret Hodges