Our Week: The Moon, Owls, and the Crusades

The Three Rs

I got Colin started back with RightStart Math E this week. He doesn't want to stop doing Life of Fred so he has decided to do a lesson from that on top of his regular math. Caleigh had games in her math lessons a few days and she always likes that. Molly had a couple of worksheets this week. RightStart relies more on games for learning, especially for kindergarten, but she did well and liked them.

Everyone is progressing well with spelling, handwriting, phonics, writing, and grammar so there's nothing too exciting to report.

Astronomy

Astronomy this week was all about the moon. We focused on the phases of the moon, the moon's atmosphere, and lunar eclipses.
We'll be continuing to study the moon next week.

Some of the books we're reading about the moon

Using Oreos to learn about the phases of the moon



Phases of the moon
Ignore that they're red; I bought them on clearance after Christmas and didn't want to buy another package for this.




Using an orange and a flashlight to demonstrate why the moon seems to change shape.
This room wasn't dark enough so we had to move to the theater.



We spent some time outside observing the moon. Here is the night of the full moon.

History

The main topic this week was the Crusades. We learned why Christians, Jews, and Muslims believed Jerusalem was a holy city. We read about how the crusaders went to fight the Islamic empire to take Jerusalem and succeeded after a few years. Then we found out that Saladin defeated them and took Jerusalem back. After that there were many unsuccessful crusades.
We then read about El Cid helping the Christians to defeat the Moors and reconquer Spain.

One of the project suggestions from the Activity Guide was to learn to play chess. It was played by knights to practice strategic skills. Colin starting learning to play chess a few months ago. Caleigh seems to be picking up a little too. I got this book that he spent some time looking through.

Unit Study

To go along with studying the moon, our Five in a Row book this week was Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.





We learned about owls, the moon, similes, metaphors, imagery, tracks, and much more. I'll do a separate post soon with more on what we did and pictures of the kids digging through an owl pellet, our owl craft, notebook pages, and the cute owl cookies we made.

Everything Else

Colin didn't have hockey this week, but he has practice today (Saturday) and a game Sunday.

Colin's First Lego League team, which we're now calling Robotics Club, met at our house. The boys are going to work on learning more about the robots, programming them, sensors, etc. now that the competition is over.

We went to a program about raptors at the library this morning. They had different owls and hawks for the kids to see and talked about them. They also had a vulture even though it's not a raptor. They showed them what the eggs from each one look like and discussed some of the rescues they've done.

I have pictures of the owls that were there too, but I'll put them in my Owl Moon post.



Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers