Our Week: Massachusetts, Ducks, and Fall

I finally felt like we were back to normal this week. It was nice to be able to read aloud without coughing the whole time.
The time change actually worked to my advantage because the kids are getting up earlier and we're getting our school work started earlier. I can already see that they're trying to adjust though so I'm not sure it will last long.
A lot of days have been tough for one of my kids' for the last several weeks. She gets so upset if she doesn't understand things immediately even though she does great once she calms down and starts working on it. I'm so happy that she had an awesome week this week even though she started new material in math.

Three Rs

Nothing too exciting going on with this. Everyone is just continuing to do the next thing. I usually forget to take pictures of this normal work, but I actually took a couple this week.

Molly doing math (yes, in her nightgown). She's using base 10 cards to make two 4-digit numbers and then putting the cards together to add the two numbers. She thinks it takes too long to put out all the cards so I guess she'll be happy to learn it on the abacus soon.

Caleigh using setting the table to work on prepositions.

History

The kids didn't really complain about history this week, but I'm not sure the girls really got much out of it. Colin did seem to understand when he took the quiz. The chapter started by talking about which countries control other parts of the world, especially North and South America, during the time in history we're studying. Then it went into more detail about Persia, going through all the groups that had controlled it. It also talked about the Ottoman Turks and their ruler, Murad.

Science

We've finished the insect portion of Zoology 1. I had planned to go ahead and start chemistry this week, but then I thought it might be easier to wait until after our Thanksgiving break to start something new.

We released our butterflies this week.

 

This little guy didn't seem to want to fly away.

We read books about fall and talked about how the leaves change color. We planned to gather leaves to make leaf creations, but it rained yesterday. We'll get some over the weekend and do it.

 

We also talked about ducks to go along with our Five in a Row unit study. See below for that.

State Study

Our state this week was Massachusetts. I thought that went well with Thanksgiving coming and since we just studied the Pilgrims. We read books (which I'll list in a separate post), did a coloring sheet, and filled in sheets for the binders. One of the things we read is that Massachusetts is where the first chocolate chip cookies were made. The kids did remember that from our chocolate unit study earlier in the year. The girls made chocolate chip cookies.

 

FIAR Unit Study

Make Way for Ducklings is one of the Five in a Row books I've always wanted to do, but we just never got to it. It seemed like the perfect time since we were already studying Massachusetts. Besides learning about MA and specifically Boston, we also learned a lot about ducks. I'll be making another post with our book list, activities, and notebooks. We had a special lunch to go along with this study one day.

Tortillas with cheese cut into duck shapes. One of the kids didn't want that and had PB&J instead. The kids asked what the raspberries were for and I didn't know so they decided they were eggs. The applesauce has spring sprinkles, including blue duck shapes. I added a small slice of carrot and peppercorns to boiled eggs for the chicks. The cookie is just because we had it left over.