Our Week: American Kingdoms and Stars

The Three Rs

Molly had lots of fun with her phonics lessons this week. One day she reviewed all the ways to say /A/. I wrote words on cards and she had to take them and place them on the items they named. Here she is with the ones she placed on herself.

I don't know what's going on with this crazy pose. I have a hard time getting a picture of her without her doing something silly.

Another day she learned that ea can say /E/. She had to read some cards with ea words. Four of them said, "Eat a Treat." When she read those correctly, she got to have a Hershey kiss. She thought that was great, but had to make it out to be even better since Colin was working across the table from her. She kept telling him how good they were.

Colin finished RightStart Level E this week. Now he's reading through Life of Fred: Fractions and doing the bridges until he gets back to where he was before we took a break from it.

History

We spent a little time finishing some projects from our Christopher Columbus unit study. You can see more about that here.

For the rest of the week, we learned about the American kingdoms of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas. I found quite a few books to go with each of them.

The girls used popcorn kernels to learn how the Mayan and Aztecs would grind maize into meal or flour.

Science

The material this week seemed to be the most difficult of our astronomy study. We learned about stars, black holes, supernovas, and light years.

We used a balloon to demonstrate how the stars are moving farther apart from one another because the universe is expanding.

We made an astrometer to measure the brightness of stars. Unfortunately, it's been cloudy so we haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

Art

The lesson was about using photographs to help you see details of the object you're drawing. The kids chose pictures from magazines.

By: Caleigh

By: Colin (of course, it's hockey themed)

By: Molly
Since it may not be clear, that's a deer on the left side.

Everything Else

Colin had hockey games on Sunday and Monday. There hasn't actually been anything else this week. I got sick as soon as we got home from KY and didn't feel well the whole week. I ended up skipping all of our activities. The kids didn't seem to mind and spent their free time skating in the driveway or sitting in front of our dining room window watching some birds build a nest on our front porch. When we moved here a year ago, we discovered a nest with eggs very close to where this one is now and the kids loved watching it until all the birds flew away. They're excited about getting to do it again.

Here is the mama bird in the nest. She's been working hard building it.