Friday, January 14, 2011

Our Week: Knights and a Medieval Feast

I'm so glad we seem to be back on track this week. It probably didn't hurt that we got ice that kept us home. We're still having some trouble getting going in the mornings. I really need to get everyone to sleep earlier and up earlier. Maybe we'll work on that next week. For this week, I'm just going to be happy that we got in all our subjects.

Three Rs

Colin is continuing to do Life of Fred on his own while we get back into the swing of things. I'm hoping to add back in RightStart E soon. Caleigh worked on money and making change. Molly added with tally marks and wrote addition equations.
Colin and Caleigh both started back with grammar. They mostly did review.
Colin started a new chapter of Writing Tales with "The Elves and the Shoemaker."
Molly continues to progress well with her phonics and is reading longer words.
Caleigh reviewed all the cursive letters she has learned so far and started some new ones. Molly started back with letters from Handwriting Without Tears. 

History

We spent a day studying the samurai of Japan, but most of this week was about knights. We did study knights some last year while rowing the book, Duchess Bakes a Cake (see here) and even did some lapbooking about them so we didn't go as indepth as we would have otherwise.

This book was on our reading list for last week, but we didn't get to it so we read it this week.
A Medieval Feast


We had our own medieval feast with recipes from this book.

Days of Knights and Damsels: An Activity Guide (A Kid's Guide series)

The recipe for the main dish is cabbage stew and dumplings. I didn't think cabbage stew would go over well so my hubby made dumplings with help from Caleigh.


Caleigh adding dumplings to the pot


Colin shaking whipping cream to make butter

Molly rolling out pie crust.
Maybe you can tell Colin is getting a little tired of shaking the jar here.

He did finally get butter though.

Butter on Molly's bread


We used bread as a trencher like they did during medieval times. They would have used it instead of a plate, but that didn't seem like a good idea to me. Notice no forks because they didn't have them yet.

We had mead (made with water, honey, oranges, and nutmeg) to drink, but the kids didn't like it.

Cherry pie

One of the knight books I found at the library was The Princess Knight. We spent part of a day reading it and other princess books. The girls aren't always too excited about our history subjects so I thought a day of princess books would be good for them.


Astronomy  

We continued studying earth this week. We read several non-fiction books about earth and one about why we have seasons. We also read a couple different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. After reading them, we discussed how Goldilocks found all the things that belonged to Baby Bear just right. We compared that to how the earth is just right for us. I then had the kids make an advertisement as if they were selling the earth by describing all the great things about it.


Everything Else

Colin had his second hockey game. He has improved already and was able to stop a lot of good shots. He's having a lot of fun.

We'll be taking today off school to start birthday celebrations. Caleigh's 8th birthday is tomorrow and my husband's birthday is Sunday. Caleigh decided not to have a party so we're surprising the kids with a fun weekend trip and will be leaving this morning.

5 comments:

Phyllis said...

Nice feast! We will be doing something similar soon, too!

Unknown said...

Poor Colin! It does take a long time to shake butter! (Did you put a marble in the container with the cream? I found that quickened the process.) Lotsa fun!

Jessy
http://oursideofthemtn.blogspot.com

Stefanie said...

Fabulous feast!!!! It all looked good to me.

Dustine said...

love how preparing a family meal was part of your learning time. making butter ... think we'll have to try that.
have a great weekend.

Anonymous said...

What fun and it looks delicious too!