School Summary - Spanish Missions, Hamilton, Jones, and Christmas

A Summary of December 15-24

Another busy week and a half of school led us up to Christmas! Despite being very excited for the holiday, the younglings did stick to the plan and got their schoolwork done.
Here's what we did:

Things that were scheduled:

Math

Language Arts (Grammar, Reading, and Writing; Spelling for Soprano)
We had a full week of school, then a three-day week. They just continued along in their math, grammar, and spelling books as usual.

Electives:

Typing, Greek (Tenor), Spanish (Tenor), Home Ec (Soprano)
Soprano's Home Ec lesson was on candy making. Perfect timing since I make caramels every year to give to family and neighbors.

My Father's World Exploration to 1850

With the holiday schedule, we did one full week of MFW and then stuck with the three Rs for the week of Christmas. We're moving along through history and beginning to learn about all the events that led up to the War for American Independence. This week's work was kind of a summary of what was going on in the world right before the war.  We touched on Italy, Spain, the Corsairs, the Turkish Empire, Spain, Poland, China, and the West Indies as well as the Spanish Mission on the West coast.

Bible: This year we're doing an in-depth study of the book of James and attempting to memorize the entire book. We continued to review chapter 1and finished memorizing chapter 2.

Science: Since we did all of our botany work, using AIG's The World of Plants, over the summer, I'll try to give an overview of the experiments and demonstrations that we did. Currently the younglings are working on a botany lapbook from In the Hands of a Child.
They're reading a section and doing one activity per day to review what we learned.
This week we would have covered lessons 6-8. That included examining grass outside, determining whether a tree is deciduous or evergreen, and studying trees (including drawing it, labeling it, making bark rubbings, and collecting leaves/needles/fruit).
We also did a germination experiment that showed how seeds need water, oxygen, and warmth to grow.

History:Like I said, history was an overview of all sorts of areas of the world right before the time of the Revolutionary War. We had lots of reading and book basket time. The younglings also created their own cross-stitch sampler patterns on graph paper. Neither wanted to try it out on fabric.

No extra map work or timeline pieces this week.

Other MFW: 

Music: We pulled out Mozart again, whom we studied during our Creation to the Greeks year. He was a contemporary during this time period of history. We listened to The Story of Mozart in Words and Music and used The Young Scholar's Guide to Classical Music as well as Meet the Great Composers. For our hymn study, I decided to put "O For a Thousand Tongues" on hold to do Gloria! from Kim at notconsumed.com. They had enjoyed last week's "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" hymn that it seemed like a good fit to continue with more Christmas hymns. We did one of the Gloria! hymns each day.

Art: We read about Gilbert Stuart and Audubon.

Extras:

Web:

You can see them all in my Youtube playlist for weeks 15-34.
Botany extras (we didn't use them)
Seeds video

Audubon resources here and here

Audubon paintings here and here

Cross-stitch sampler patterns

Videos:

no extra videos for week 17

Favorite Books: 

Mozart Finds a Melody by Stephen Costanza
From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons