Our Week: Rockwell, Castles, and Earth

We were a little slow getting started after being on vacation, but we ended up having a pretty good week. We did spelling, math, phonics, art, history, and science. I hope to get the rest of our subjects added back in next week.

Art Museum Field Trip

We had a field trip this week to the NC Museum of Art. We got to tour the Norman Rockwell exhibit with our homeschool group. I was really impressed with how much of his work they had and they also had all of the covers he did for the Saturday Evening Post. The docent we had did a really good job of explaining things to the kids and asking them questions.
We used Discovering Great Artists for this week's art assignment. The kids had to draw pictures that tell a story like Norman Rockwell's pictures do. We also read a couple books about Rockwell and looked at pictures of many of his paintings to prepare for our museum visit.

We were also able to see some of the other temporary exhibits they have right now. Inverted Utopias are mostly wooden sculptures of people. Some of the people are upside down or flying above you. The kids thought they were neat. Fins and Feathers is a collection of children's book illustrations.

While we were there, we stopped in to check out the Ancient Egyptian collection. I had wanted to do that in September when we were studying Egypt, but didn't make it there.

History

This week we learned about how English is a mix of different languages. We did an activity with Play-Doh to help the kids understand. We started with 5 colors of Play-Doh labeled Old English, Latin, Viking, French, and Celtic. We mixed one color at a time into the red (Old English).

Then we ended up with this brown that doesn't look anything like the original colors.

We also learned about feudalism and stone castles.
For fun, we made our own castle with Kix cereal, marshmallows, and butter. The kids made walls, towers, and the keep in the middle.

It sure was sticky, but they managed to start shaping it pretty well.

The walls weren't enough to protect this castle. The kids started grabbing it as soon as I snapped the picture and they all said it was yummy.

Astronomy

In Astronomy, we started learning about earth. We learned about all the differences between earth and the other planets that allow us to live here. We also learned about the reason for seasons. For our experiment, we used a flashlight for the sun to show how the tilt of the earth causes the sun's rays to sometimes shine directly on us and at other times to be more spread out. 

Everything Else

Colin had his first official hockey game this week. He has said for a long time that he wants to be a goalie. Apparently that's not what lots of kids choose so he is the only goalie on his team. He was so excited and had a great time playing. Here he is somewhere inside all this stuff.

Warming up before the game

We also met with our First Lego League group to play. It's the first time we've gotten together since the regional tournament so the kids were all happy to see each other.

Visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what others did this week.