Weekly School Summaries - Saudi Arabia (Feb. 6-17)

Tenor's Lego Camel

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 Well, we were finally hit with illness in our little school. It's definitely that time of year, and it seems like everybody has something, is getting something, or is getting over something. It wasn't too bad... just a slight fever, some sneezing, and lots of coughing but it made for a less enjoyable week. Now that the kids are on the mend, they're totally hyper! It'll be nice when they burn off that energy outside. Despite the illness, we still got all our work done (just on a modified schedule.) Here's what we did:

Math: Same as usual. They each had 4 days of lessons and 1 day of math games on the computer. Cutting down the amount of skip counting and meetings Soprano has to do has helped immensely. She's improving on her skip counting and is less apt to fuss about it since we aren't doing the full meeting every day. I'm toying with not even buying the Grade 3 meeting book for next year. I'm not sure we'll need it.

Reading and Language Arts: Soprano spent two weeks on 'Chrysanthemum' from 'Across the Centuries'. She did a couple of worksheets and name activities. To finish it, she watched 'Chrysanthemum' on DVD. We have several sets of Scholastic DVDs that the kids enjoy.

She's about 3/4 done with her second Phonics book and is doing great with it. In English, she's learning about adjectives, while spelling and handwriting are continuing well. We're up to Xx.
Tenor continued with his 'A Reason for Handwriting C' and started his new writing workbook. He's not thrilled with the fact that he has to write but once he buckles down to actually do it, he does a good job. I think he struggles with the anticipation of having to write more than the writing itself.

He started 'Misty' from 'Across the Centuries C Level 1'. He read the first 5 chapters and did a couple worksheets on horse terminology and vocabulary. He also aced his first evaluation.

English (learning the differences between it's/its, their/they're, and you're/your) and Spelling (Rod and Staff Level 4) are going well.  I got to teach him my favorite little grammar reminder: Possessive 'its' never splits.

Electives:
Typer Island for their typing instruction and continuing with SOS Elementary Spanish. 

They did two health worksheets: one on a fire plan for our house and one on our phone number and address. We also talked about the PA state animal and state dog (white-tail deer and Great Dane) and how teachers are community helpers. We got a few books about teachers from the library to help in our discussion.

Phys Ed.: We had to skip Tae Kwon Do and homeschool co-op the week they were sick. We didn't do much working out together at home either. Next week, we'll get moving again. 

Bible: The past two weeks included:
Reading about Saudi Arabia, Islam, and the Kurds
Reading Matthew 16:5-18:14
Memorizing Matthew 6:33 (one of the few I actually know the verse and reference for!) and beginning to memorize The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9b-13). We're memorizing the alternate version of the Lord's Prayer that's given in the teacher guide. That's the one that I grew up with so it's easy for me to lead the kids in it. Our printables from Mama Jenn have both versions included.

Geography:
We've traveled on to a new continent...Asia.

Things we did included:
Filling out our passports to travel to Saudi Arabia

Coloring the Saudi Arabian flag and writing down interesting facts about it. Also discussing what the saying, "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet" means to Muslims and what it means to us as Christians.
Reading about the People and Places, and Nature, Farming, and Industry of the Middle East and reading about their language. The kids tried copying the Arabic alphabet and numbers too.

Because they were sick and we're a little low on cash, I didn't get to the store for art supplies. We decided to work on Camel lapbooks and a mini-book of Asian animals instead. We used the entire camel lapbook from Homeschool Share.

Soprano's cover

Tenor's inside, unfolded pages

Tenor's inside-fold pages

For their Asian animal books, we used the animal classification cards from Homeschool Share. I folded 3 sheets of construction paper in half and had them glue down an animal picture and corresponding info on each page.

Illustrating notecards for gulf and sound. Week 22 was a review week for geography notecards. I had the younglings review and then take a short quiz to match words and definitions. They both got 100%! I was very impressed.

They really missed playing the geography game these past 2 weeks. I know they're looking forward to playing again next week.

Tenor's Asia pages from World Geography were Physical Features and Rivers. He's only doing 1 page per week during our Asia studies.

Science: Discussion on Man's Impact on the Environment, Endangered Species, Extinctions, Pollution, Acid Rain, and Global Warming. There were quite a few science activities these two weeks. We skipped the trash activity because we recycle all of our recyclable glass, plastic, newspaper, and glossy magazines. We also take all metal to a local salvage yard. It recycles it and gives us a little extra cash. We burn most of our paper trash in our fireplace (which is a secondary heating source for our home.) At that rate, it didn't seem as worthwhile to do the activity especially for this slightly germaphobic mama.
We did experiment with sand to show how God designed the camel's foot to work well in the desert. We did the greenhouse effect experiment with good success... the second time. The first time, I wasn't supervising the temperature recording, just the timing, and didn't realize that Soprano had opened the jar in order to read the thermometer. She didn't reclose the jar lid so all our results were skewed the first time.

Greenhouse Effect Experiment

We're 2 days into the acid rain experiment. I'm interested to see how it will turn out.

Soprano worked on a few of the Asian Animals pages from The Complete Book of Animals. She's doing 3 sheets or mini storybook per week for the 10 weeks we're studying Asia.

Other MFW: Wee sing: Ali Baba's Farm and their absolute favorite song thus far, Zum Gali Gali

To supplement, we read other books about Middle Eastern countries and animals and borrowed DVDs from the library.Since we're planning to continue with MFW curriculum and study history from Creation to the Ancient Greeks next year, I tried to not supplement too much about Israel. I figure we will be reading a lot about Israel next year.
We also had a field trip this week. Missions Fest, a local organization, hosts a missions-focused weekend each year. This year, they had a special children's' program, which happened to be held at our church. I took the kids for a few hours after lunch and the got to sing, learn about Thailand and Trinidad, and discover they could be missionaries 'here', 'there', and 'everywhere'. (Acts 1:8). The team that presented did a fantastic job.

 

 

 

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