Our Week in Review

History

We learned about the African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. We read about how Ghana and later Mali taxed the gold and salt that went through their countries to be traded.
We also learned about India during the Moghul Dynasty.

We made salt blocks and gold nuggets to use for a game from the SOTW activity guide.

The kids took turns running from the salt blocks to the gold trading them to find out if it was better to pay the tax and take a short cut or go the long way and keep all the gold and salt for themselves.

Science

Our planets this week were Uranus and Neptune. We learned about their discoveries, moons, rotations, revolutions, atmospheres, and size.
To understand more about the clouds covering Neptune and Uranus, we made clouds in a jar. The kids were much more interested in seeing the match lit. I don't think they had ever seen one before.

We got a head start on next week's chapter by reading about the Kuiper Belt.

Last weekend we spent some time observing the moon. We had some trouble with clouds, but were able to see it some.

Three Rs

Nothing too exciting going on for this. Molly did start using the traditional names for numbers 11-19. She learned all the tens last week. Caleigh worked on adding long columns of numbers. Colin has been working with fractions and some long division.


Today I had the kids decorate cupcakes like flowers to celebrate the first week of spring. I'll be posting pictures of their finished cupcakes along with our flower lunch pictures soon.

Everything Else

Things didn't work out as planned for many things this week. Robotics Club was canceled at the last minute so I decided to take the kids ice skating. They're always wanting to go, but homeschool skate is on the same day as Robotics Club. Colin needed to take a spelling test first. While we were doing that, he kept wrapping a blanket around himself. He said he was freezing and felt a little tired. I checked him and realized he had a fever so ice skating was out even though he kept trying to insist he could go. He spent the rest of the day in bed. His fever was gone the next morning, but he didn't seem 100% so we didn't go on a planned field trip.

In the last week, Colin has had 3 hockey games. He started ice hockey and loves it. He thinks being the goalie on ice is easier and more fun because you are able to slide. They've won both of their games so far so he's very happy about that. He finished his roller hockey season Thursday. They came in second in their tournament.