Our Weekly Wrap-Up

It was a short school week for us. We spent Monday driving home from Florida. Tuesday was a day to rest and get back to reality. Today, my hubby heard water outside when he was leaving for work and discovered water spraying from part of our sprinkler system. So I spent a lot of time waiting for and talking to plumbers getting that fixed. I'm happy that we got most of what I had planned for school done though. The kids are already asking when Christmas break starts though.

The Three Rs

We managed to get some phonics, spelling, and math in this week.

Astronomy

In science, we learned all about Venus. Some of the things we read about were its temperature, volcanoes, rotation, revolution, spacecrafts sent there, and how it's different from earth.
We learned that there are many volcanoes on Venus. We did an activity to make lava. Butter represented rock. We melted the butter, a solid, changing it to a liquid, just like rock melts and changes to a liquid.

Colin pouring the butter (lava)

This is what it looked like after each of them poured some.

Then we left it to let the butter harden just as rock would.


We also read about how spacecraft studying Venus have to use radar because the clouds are too thick to see the surface. To help the kids better understand how radar works, we did an experiment.

I placed Legos in a box so there were different heights.

Then we made a grid on a napkin and placed it over the box with Legos. To the right, there is a paper with the same type of grid drawn for the kids to record what they found.



They used a bamboo skewer that we colored different colors to poke a hole in each box on the grid. Then they recorded which color the skewer was on when it hit something.


After they finished, we discussed what the colors on their record sheet meant and where they would choose to land a spacecraft before taking off the napkin to see what it looked like inside the box.

History

This week we read about the Vikings invading England, Alfred the Great, and the Battle of Hastings. Since we studied Vikings a few weeks ago, we didn't do any projects or extra books this week. We just read from Story of the World and did the review questions and discussed the map in the Activity Guide. 



Everything Else

We didn't have any outside activities this week. Most things have ended. Sick kids and bad weather cancelled everything else. It was nice having a few days without any running around after a busy trip. If you noticed from the pictures above, the kids enjoyed having some pajama days.

We started reading some of our Christmas books.

I've been trying to finish my Christmas shopping by ordering things online. I think I'm going to have to actually go out shopping tomorrow though. I really wanted to be finished before we left on our trip, but it just didn't happen. I'm getting close now though, but I haven't even started wrapping yet. I just can't believe Christmas is only a week away! I guess I need to convince myself that it is so I can be ready.

Go over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see how other homeschoolers' week went.