Our Week: 9/10-9/14

I'm still surprised with how well we've all adjusted back to school. We're still not starting as early as I would like, but it's getting earlier. Everyone got used to sleeping in later while I was dealing with the tiredness and sickness of pregnancy. I'm still dealing with some sickness, but it's mostly just nausea and has gotten much better. 
The weather was great this week and I wish we had gotten out to enjoy it more. Looks like next week is going to be nice too so I really want to try to get us all outside more.

History

 

 

We ended up getting in a lot of history this week.

We started by reading more about Catherine the Great and learning how she became the empress of Russia. Then we read about the steam engine being used in Britain and how that increased the demand for coal. We also read about Eli Whitney's cotton gin and how he made standardization popular by making interchangeable parts for guns.

 

We finished the week by reviewing a little about the Jamestown settlement, the Battle of Yorktown, and what life was like in Williamsburg during Colonial times to prepare for a trip next week to visit those places.



We made our own cotton gin to help them understand how it worked.

 

Science



We finished the first chapter of Zoology 1.
The girls did a couple of experiments.

The first used a balloon and soda bottle to demonstrate how lungs react when a person dives into the deep ocean.

 

 

The second experiment was to find out if hot or cold water is heavier. This one was a little difficult
 for the girls to see. You were supposed to color the cold and hot water different colors. When the water came out of the cup into the bowl, they should have been able to see where it went, but it was really hard to see. It worked a little better when we tried leaving the water in the bowl clear and only coloring the water in the cup.

 

For General Science, Colin did an experiment that showed two chemical reactions occurring.

 

The girls were very excited when they saw the balloon suddenly blow up.

 

Art

 

This week's lesson from Artistic Pursuits was about form. We read about what form is, looked at a picture to discuss if it had form, and then made animals with form.

 



Molly's cow

Caleigh's dragon

Colin's dog

 

 

Other News

 

 

We drove two hours to go to an apple orchard Sunday. It was a beautiful day and we all had a good time. The kids picked 40 lbs of apples. We had a picnic lunch there, petted and fed some animals, and bought lots of goodies. The only bad thing was that we had car trouble right after leaving there. Luckily, we made it home, but the car wasn't going any farther. We had to have it towed and ended up getting a new transmission, which caused some rearranging earlier in the week with only one car.
 

 

Colin had hockey practice Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. We drove to Richmond, VA today for his first games of the season tomorrow and Sunday. We're planning to get in some history field trips while we're here.





Our Week: Pilgrims and Lots of Insects

Besides two nights of hockey, we didn't have any outside activities this week. It was nice to stay home and have more time for our schoolwork and free afternoons.

We did go to a birthday party last Saturday. It was a dress up party and this is what the girls dug out of the dress up box.

Three Rs

Colin is doing really well with RightStart Geometry. He's doing pretty much all of it on his own. I'm even giving him extra work some days because he's getting through it so quickly.
Caleigh is still working on multiplication and is finding the area of rectangles.
Molly is moving on to larger numbers.

Colin and Caleigh are both doing well with spelling. Caleigh has gotten 100% on every test so far. Colin has only missed one word.

Molly started First Language Lessons. She acts like she loves it, but I think it's because she knows it was both Colin and Caleigh's least favorite subject.

Science

We covered a lot of insects this week: praying mantises, dragonflies, crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, aphids, and cicadas. We spent one day on praying mantises and one day on dragonflies, reading extra books, doing lapbook pieces, and making a dragonfly craft. We also read a couple books on crickets.

Praying mantis & dragonfly notebook pages (I've tired everything, but for some reason I can not get this pic to flip)

We did an experiment to see how shorter wings make higher sounds.

Our caterpillars arrived because our next insect is the butterfly.

Caterpillars the day after they arrived

State Study

Vermont was our state this week. We read a few books and will finish it next week. We had pancakes for dinner with maple syrup.

I tried to make them into butterflies since that's the state insect

History

We started learning about pilgrims this week. We read lots of books, which I'll post soon. We spent time talking about the reasons they left England, the Mayflower, the journey, the first winter in the New World, the Wampanoag people, and Squanto. The kids used Draw Write Now to draw pictures of Squanto and the Mayflower. They made pilgrim puppets. We also made pilgrim hats for snack. We'll be continuing with this next week.




Since it's actually already Sunday, I'll include our weekend here. Colin's house team hockey games started.

Colin waiting for his team's turn to play

The girls had a fun evening last night playing with two of their friends I was babysitting.

Today we had a Thanksgiving dinner in celebration of our study of the pilgrims.



Our Week: Jamestown, Ladybugs, and Water Park

It was a really good week! The rain cancelled some of our plans so it turned out to not be as busy as I had expected.

We went to an apple orchard Sunday.
On Monday, we met some friends at Great Wolf Lodge and had a great time at the water park.
Colin had hockey practice Monday and Wednesday evenings.
He started a biology class this week also.

The girls were exploring the nature center when I looked out and saw Colin gathering something during his class so I had to snap his picture.

Yesterday we saw the movie, Dolphin Tale. We all really enjoyed it.

Science



We learned about beetles this week. We concentrated on fireflies and ladybugs. I ordered ladybug larvae from Insect Lore. We've been observing them all week. We were able to see them molt and now most of them are in the pupa stage.

We also made some ladybug treats with apples, strawberries, grapes, pretzels, mini chocolate chips, and M&Ms.

Left: Caleigh's
Right: mine
Caleigh said mine were wrong because they don't have 3 body parts so she made hers the correct way.

Left: Molly's (she said the head is hiding)
Right: Colin's

All the rain we've had the last three days has interfered with our experiments. Hopefully it will dry up soon and we can do them.

Colin's biology class is using Real Science 4 Kids. This week they talked about taxonomy, the kingdoms, and classification.

History

We read about King James VI of Scotland and how he also became king of England. We also learned that he sent people to North America to search for gold. They started the Jamestown settlement.
We learned that Guy Fawkes was involved in a plot to assassinate King James, but he was caught. Caramel apples are one of the treats they have during the Guy Fawkes Day celebration so we made some.

Pocahontas was mentioned briefly in our history book. We read some other books about her and did the Pocahontas lapbook from Homeschool Share. We finished our week by watching the Disney movie, Pocahontas.

Notebook pages from Homeschool Share

Our Week: Netherlands, Metamorphosis, and Rembrandt



This was our third week of school. We are almost back to a full schedule. Things are still going well. Having Colin do more of his work independently is making a huge difference in my day. I'm able to start immediately with the girls instead of them having to wait while I work with him. I hope we are able to continue that as he gets further into his curriculum.

 

The Three Rs

Colin did three lessons in RightStart Geometry and two chapters in Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents. I decided to have him repeat some lists from Spell to Write and Read. He finished it last year, but I want to make sure he has the phonograms and rules down. He started with list T this week. He's also doing some dictation, summarizing, and reviewing capital cursive letters.

Caleigh's math is still mostly dealing with multiplication. She started back with grammar and is continuing with learning capital cursive letters. She did two spelling lists this week and the "My Wise Grammar Book" pages that went with them.

Molly started back with The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I can see that her speed in reading has improved over the last few months. I'm still introducing new phonograms to her and she's learning them really well. Her math is still in the reviewing part so it's been very basic.



Science

This week we read about insects' life cycles, finding a mate, the different types of metamorphosis, and the defenses insects use to protect themselves. We went for a walk on a trail in our neighborhood where the kids hunted for eggs. They actually found quite a few on the underside of leaves.

Molly being an egg detective

Caleigh looking at some eggs

We were supposed to do a can trap experiment, but we're having some cool weather so I thought we might have a better chance of getting more insects if we wait until next week when it's supposed to warm back up.

While we were at the park on Friday, Molly found a cricket. She would hold a leaf to its mouth and it would chew the leaf. She said it definitely had a chewing mouth, which she learned about last week. She also told me all the reasons she knew it was an insect.

Our ladybug larvae arrived this week so the kids have been watching them and we'll be studying them more next week.

History

We learned about the Dutch revolt and Mary, Queen of Scots. We did a unit study about the Dutch. 

Unit Study



We did a unit study to learn more about the Dutch. We used the Hana in the Time of Tulips study and lapbook from Homeschool Share. They learned about dikes, tulips, windmills, the Netherlands, and Rembrandt. They also made windmills.

Windmills

Art and Music



To go along with our unit study, our artist was Rembrandt. We read books about him, looked at many of his paintings and did an activity from Discovering Great Artists about drawing faces with different expressions.

Molly making faces at herself in the mirror to draw

They also used watercolor crayons to draw a picture with tulips.

In music, we read about string instruments in The Story of the Orchestra.

Everything Else

We visited the Carolina Raptor Center. Colin had two hockey practices. He and Molly had tennis lessons. They played with friends at the park after tennis. We went to our homeschool group's park day on Friday.

Our Year in Review 2010-2011

We've finished our year of kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 5th grade. I often worry about what we're not getting done. I thought it would be good to look back over the year to see what we did accomplish. We had a really good year. We didn't travel as much as some years and we didn't move during the school year, which made a big difference in how much we got done and allowed us to finish the year earlier than usual.

My biggest worry for this year was officially adding in a third child when it seemed like there wasn't enough of me to teach two some days. I have to say I was really surprised by how well it worked out. Kindergarten lessons don't take too long and Colin did a little more independent work. I also tried to do as much with them all together as I could. I would still like to start our day earlier, but we did make a little progress on that.

This was our first year having a room just for school. We loved it and I don't think we could ever go back to doing school in the kitchen or dining room again. It was great having everything together and being able to display all the projects the kids did.

Language Arts

Molly
The biggest success of the year was helping Molly learn to read. I remember teaching them to read was my biggest concern when I first started homeschooling so having the third one reading feels great. She hadn't been too interested before and didn't even know all the sounds of the letters when we started the year. She picked that up really quickly though. She made it through lesson 109 in Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and is reading lots of books.
Her handwriting improved a lot using Handwriting Without Tears.

Caleigh
She started Spell to Write and Read this year. She completed through list L-4. She's done very well learning all the phonograms, rules, and markings.
She did all of First Language Lessons 1 and about half of First Language Lessons 2.
She started learning cursive with Cursive First. We did all the lowercase letters and worked on learning to connect them.

Colin
In Spell to Write and Read, Colin started the year on list S and made it all the way through list Z. He tested at grade level 11.2 after finishing.
I had him start over with Writing Tales and he completed all but the last section. He still doesn't like adding in creative details, but his summaries have improved.
He did all of First Language Lessons 4.

Math

Molly did RightStart A.

Caleigh almost finished RightStart C.

Colin finished RightStart E and Life of Fred: Fractions.

Science

We did Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We learned about the sun, the moon, the planets, comets, meteors, asteroids, famous astronomers, astronauts, space travel, stars, and constellations. The kids really enjoyed it and loved all the experiments. They often said it was their favorite subject. Some of their favorite things were trying astronaut food, making hurricanes in a bottle, making sun bread, a salt dough volcano, and phases of the moon with Oreos.

We also did a few science things as part of some unit studies. We studied clouds, the water cycle, friction, butterflies, leaves, apples, migration, hibernation, pandas, ducks, Australian animals, owls,
groundhogs, and snow.

History

I'm so glad I decided to combine all the kids for history. When I did Story of the World Volume 1 with just Colin, it often got pushed to the side when we got busy with other things. Having everyone doing it made a big difference. Before starting SOTW Volume 2, we spent a few weeks talking about the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to get the girls caught up. We were able to finish all of Volume 2. We read tons of extra books and did lots of projects. Some of the favorite projects were a medieval feast, making Viking ships, ships in a bottle, sand art, and mosaic cakes.

Geography

Before starting history this year, we did a unit study on map skills. It was review for Colin, but I think the girls really needed it to understand.

We used the maps in the SOTW 2 Activity Guide to go along with our history study.

We also did a lot of geography in our unit studies. Some places we learned about were: Greece, Rome, Egypt, England, China, Japan, Australia, France, Norway, Russia, Ireland, and Canada.

Art

This is the only subject where we didn't finish what I had planned. We started out okay, but then it kept getting pushed aside.
We only got through 8 lessons in Artistic Pursuits.
We used Draw Write Now to draw things that went with what we were studying.
We also used Discovering Great Artists a few times.
We studied Norman Rockwell to go along with a field trip to see some of his work. We also studied Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
We did lots of crafts and drawings to go along with our history, science, and unit studies.

Unit Studies

Maps
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece and the Olympics
Ancient Rome
Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car
Butterflies
Autumn Treasures (DNG): Apples, Leaves
The Story about Ping
Grandfather's Journey
Australia
Mirette on the High Wire
Vikings
Owl Moon
Robin Hood
Groundhog's Day
Russia
Katy and the Big Snow
Plague
Ireland
Christopher Columbus
Canada
Leonardo da Vinci

Activities

Some of the extracurricular activities the kids participated in this year were baseball, basketball, roller hockey, ice hockey, First Lego League, and a geography fair.

Field Trips

Linville Caverns and Falls
Bugfest
Greek Festival
Yates Mill Harvest Festival
Optometrist Field Trip
NC Zoo
Walt Disney World 
Christmas activities at WDW
Vikings
Picking Oranges
Grand Asia Market
NC Museum of Art
Raptors Program
Ripley's Aquarium
NC Museum of Life and Science
Strawberry Picking
NC Museum of History
NC Museum of Natural Sciences- February, May
Downtown Raleigh
Blowing Rock

Our Week: Moving Out

We didn't do any real school this week. On Monday, the kids spent most of the day playing outside while I prepared the house for packing. They rode bikes and scooters, played in the sandbox, and gathered items for this picnic I saw going on from the window.

Most of this week was spent trying to keep out of the way while movers packed up our house and loaded it all into this trailer.

Chad was able to work from home Tuesday and Wednesday so I could take the kids away from the house.

Some friends had the kids a moving away party. It was so nice of them. The kids got to play with the all the friends they'll miss the most. They had snacks, cupcakes, and ice cream. They even made a banner.

I finally took the kids to the NC Museum of History. I've been meaning to go there, but just never made it before. I think the part that excited them the most was a tree with the letters CRO. They remembered reading about it last week in history when we studied the lost colony of Roanoke Island. I love when things like that work out.

Since it's right next door, we also visited the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. We had been there twice before, but both times special activities were going on. It was nice to visit on a day when it wasn't crowded.


Thursday we had to wait for the movers to finish getting everything loaded and clean the house some before coming back to the apartment. Today we're unpacking the stuff we brought with us from the house and getting ready for a weekend trip to stay in a cabin in the mountains.

Colin also got to finish up his hockey season playing games Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. His team ended up coming in 1st place.

Colin stopping the puck

Our Week: Trying to Wrap Up Things

We moved into a temporary apartment this week while we wait for our new house to be ready. We have a few things to finish up so I brought along some of our school supplies.

All the kids have started doing practice workbooks for math, which I plan to continue through the summer. Colin reviewed phonograms and spelling rules. He did writing assignments using story starters. Caleigh continued with her regular spelling lists, grammar, and practicing cursive. Molly continued with her phonics and handwriting lessons.

We did three chapters of history to finish up Story of the World- Volume 2: The Middle Ages. We read about Walter Raleigh, the lost colony of Roanoke Island, John Cabot, Newfoundland, Jacques Cartier, and the war between Spain and England. We also spent some time reviewing and discussing what the world was like at the end of the sixteenth century.

It's rained quite a bit this week so we've spent most of our time in the apartment. The kids have played lots of Uno and some Wii.

We're driving down to meet some friends at the park today and I'm planning to go to a used curriculum sale tonight.

We'll be taking next week off to go back to the house and get everything packed. After that, we have a few things to finish for the school year and need to take the end of the year tests.

Our Week: Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, and Finishing Astronomy

Three Rs

Math: Molly finished RightStart Level A yesterday. She was so excited and wanted to know if she was finished with math forever. Colin finished Life of Fred: Fractions. I had Caleigh stop her regular math because she's getting ready to start some new concepts that I want to wait for until after we move. She's just been doing some review work this week.

Spelling: Colin has finished the final spelling list in Spell to Write and Read. I'm going to have him review phonograms, rules, and reference pages. I'll probably quickly go through the last lists with him again next year. They do recommend doing each list twice. He and Caleigh both took diagnostic tests yesterday. His grade level was 11.2. I'm so glad we found this program when he was getting ready to start 1st grade. It's really taught us both so much and Caleigh is doing well with it now. Caleigh's mastery level was the same as the list she's on and she got a few words correct that she hasn't been taught yet. Her grade level was 3.3, which I think is great for her first year since she's getting ready to start some lists that will quickly make that go up.

History

We learned about Queen Elizabeth I. We read Good Queen Bess by Diane Stanely and Colin read Who Was Queen Elizabeth? by June Eding.
We also learned about William Shakespeare. We read Bard of Avon, A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare, Welcome to the Globe, and some of the Shakespeare Can Be Fun series.

Science

We reviewed to finish up our study of Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We read some books that we hadn't gotten to earlier. We had a themed lunch, made a rocket cake, did some mini-books for their notebooks, and made aliens from play-doh. See more about that and pictures in this post. We had a few more things we planned to do, including making a solar system to hang from our ceiling, making a model of a rocket, and making some spaceships from a book I have, but we'll save that for after we move since we'd just have to put it all back in a box anyway.

Art

We did a lesson from Artistic Pursuits, where the kids drew landscapes with oil pastels.

Everything Else

We met with Colin's First Lego League team to divide all the Lego pieces among the boys and to let the kids play. This picture is right before we took the table apart. We're going to miss getting together with them.

They had fun playing Wii

I took the kids ice skating on Tuesday.

Our Week: Astronauts, da Vinci, and the Printing Press

Three Rs

We're very close to finishing up a few things. Colin already finished his regular math book. He's almost finished Life of Fred: Fractions and is working on Challenging Word Problems. Molly is also almost finished with her math book. This week she's done a lot of skip counting and she keeps asking why she has to do it every day. Colin has started on his last spelling list in the Spell to Write and Read book and is just about finished with his grammar program. I can see the end in sight and am just trying to keep us all on track for a little longer.

History

We started the week reading about Gutenberg's invention, the printing press. We read Breaking into Print, Johann Gutenberg and the Amazing Printing Press, and How a Book is Made.

Using directions in the SOTW activity guide, we made potato prints.

We also used broken pieces of spaghetti to make words like a printing press, an idea I saw here. This was good because it also went with our study of Leonardo da Vinci, who we found wrote backward in his notes.

We also learned about Reformation and Counter Reformation. We read some books to learn more about the Catholic faith.

Art/Unit Study

To go along with studying the Renaissance, we learned about Leonardo da Vinci. We read lots of books, did some art activities, and Colin made a lapbook. Read more about that here.

Science

We finished Exploring Creation with Astronomy this week by reading about the International Space Station and how to become a NASA astronaut. We read books about astronauts, what it's like to work in space, and living in a space shuttle. The kids were fascinated about how they just float around, how they have to eat, and how they go to the bathroom. I got them some space food to try. They all really liked the ice creams. Molly didn't like the strawberries, but the other two did.

Everything Else

Molly lost tooth #2 last night.

The eggs in the nest on our front porch hatched this week. The picture isn't very good. They just look like fuzzy balls right now.

 

Today we're going on a field trip.