Our Week 9/6-9/10: Baseball, Ancient Greece, Olympics

Where did this week go? It seems like it just started and now it's Friday. We've stuck with the schedule change we made last week of me working with the kids from oldest to youngest and then having them go on to independent work while I'm working with the next one. We then do all the together subjects after lunch. Things seem to be getting done better that way.

Monday: We took the day off for Labor Day and went to a baseball game.

Tuesday: We worked more on our study of ancient Greece. We talked about the Trojan War and the kids made their own Trojan horses. Caleigh started Cursive First.

Wednesday: We learned all about the Olympics and even had our own Olympic games. Colin had a First Lego League (FLL) meeting, where they continued building the things needed for the table, settled on a team name, and decided on the body part they will be researching.

Thursday: We learned about the gods and goddesses of Greece. Caleigh had a spelling test on the section she completed this week.

Friday: Busy day today. First thing this morning, Colin took a spelling test and did math. Then we went for a walk in the park to do our art lesson. We did a nature hunt for a list of items in our art book.

Then the kids sketched some of the things they saw.

Once they finished, we went over to the playground to play with friends.
We went home for lunch and then had another FLL meeting so the boys could get more of their things built and be ready to move on to working on the robot next week.
Finally, we did history finishing up our study of ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece

We read all of the chapters in Story of the World about ancient Greece. We began with the dark ages and barbarians. Then we read about how the Greeks got an alphabet and the stories of Homer. The kids were especially interested in the Trojan horse. They made their own horses with these templates.

We learned all about the Olympic games and how they started in Greece. I posted earlier in the week about the Olympic games we did.

We compared Sparta and Athens using a Venn diagram. We read about the Greek gods and goddesses. We also read about Greece's wars with Persia and then with each other. We finished up today with Alexander the Great taking over Greece.

Notebook pages

Lapbook pieces: map with Greece colored, Venn diagram of Sparta and Athens, events from the ancient Olympics, Greek life- houses, children, entertainment, & clothing, Homer, meanings of symbols and traditions of the Olympics, Trojan horse with a flap that opens.

Some books we read:
The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus
Look What Came from Greece
The Trojan Horse: How the Greeks Won the War
The Librarian Who Measured the Earth
Daulaire's Book of Greek Myths
Metropolis Greek Town
Adventures in Ancient Greece
Hour of the Olympics
Ancient Greece and the Olympics
King Midas and the Golden Touch
Max and Ruby's Midas

Lapbook pieces from here and here.

I'm hoping we can go to a Greek festival that's happening nearby next week.

Olympic Fun

We're studying ancient Greece this week so we took a day to study the Olympics.

I used pepperoni to make the shape of the Olympic rings on a pizza for dinner, but it was hard to see the shape after it was baked. Here's the cake the kids decorated though.

M&Ms used to make the rings

We had our own Olympic games in the backyard.

Girls with our Olympic torch

Molly passing off the torch

Caleigh passing off the torch

Some events we did: javelin throw, discus throw, races, long jump, dart throw, and shot put.

Then it was time for the medals.

Olympic torch and medals.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

We took the day off from school for Labor Day since Chad was home and went to our first Durham Bulls baseball game. It was pretty hot so we didn't make it through the whole thing, but the kids had fun.

Molly said this was her favorite part

Theseus and the Minotaur

A few days ago, we read about Theseus and the Minotaur in Story of the World. The Minotaur, believed to have the head of a bull and the body of a man, lived in a labyrinth and ate human beings. He was killed by Theseus. Colin made the labyrinth from Legos.

Labyrinth with Minotaur in center

Theseus with his sword and roll of wool to help him find his way out

Here you can see the string behind him as he unrolls it

Weekly Wrap-Up: 8/30- 9/3

This was our second full week back and I've already had to make some adjustments to our schedule. I wanted us to all be starting school at the same time, but it just wasn't working. We started out trying to begin the morning with our read aloud books. Like I had hoped, the kids were much more ready to start school in the morning since our reading time is their favorite part. It seemed to be working well at first when Colin was doing review sheets for math, but as soon as he was back to regular lessons and needed me to get him started, it fell apart. It's just too hard for me to have 3 kids working on things that need me. I think I'm wasting more time going back and forth between them and confusing one because I'm talking to the other.

Colin gets up earlier than the girls so for the last couple days I decided to get him started first. We do spelling, grammar and/or writing, and math together. Then he works on his own to do math worksheets and any grammar or writing lessons he needs to complete. He's easily distracted by the girls so I feel like we're getting things done much quicker than when they're in the room with us.
Then I get Caleigh and go through the same thing with her. Once she's working on her math worksheet, I move on to Molly. By then it's usually time for lunch. After lunch, we'll do subjects that we all do together. I'm sure there will be further tweaking to this schedule as we more into the books and some lessons get longer. I'm also hoping to find a more independent math program for Colin once he finishes this one in the next few months.

History

Finished up our ancient Egypt study. You can see more about what we did here.
We started reading the SOTW chapters to go with the Greeks.

Spell to Write and Read
Colin- I decided to start Colin back at list S. We're only doing 10 words a day and we're not doing much of the extra activities since we've done many of them before and he's doing another writing and grammar program. He finished 2 lists this week and tested on them.
Caleigh- Caleigh did the consonant/vowel reference page. I started her back with A and she finished that list and tested.

Molly- working on learning the phonograms

RightStart Math
Colin-most of his lessons were on decimals. He's also doing some problems each day from Challenging Word Problems.
Caleigh- She's still in the reviewing stage of a new book.
Molly- Her lessons are focusing on seeing numbers 1-10 without needing to count.

Molly using the abacus and tally sticks for math

Art
Artistic Pursuits lesson 21 that you can see more about in my Egypt post.
Artistic Pursuits lesson 2. We were supposed to go out to observe and draw sketches for the first part of this lesson. I took the kids to a lake today to do it.

Artists at work

Pictures made with watercolor crayons

Writing
Colin- Started Writing Tales again. It got skipped most of last year so we started back at the beginning. He finished the first section this week.
Molly- starting on Handwriting Without Tears, practiced letters in salt box and on chalkboard, working on the way she holds her pencil
Caleigh- she hasn't started anything yet because I wanted her to get farther into spelling before starting cursive

Grammar
Colin- since he's at the beginning of a new book, it's all review still (nouns, pronouns mostly)
Caleigh- I'm trying to get her through the repetitive stuff quickly so she did 8 lessons in 4 days

Science
We're waiting on our caterpillars to arrive so we can start our butterfly study. It's been 4 weeks since I sent for them so I'm starting to worry that there's a problem.

Extra Stuff
We went to our homeschool group's park day today. There weren't nearly as many kids there as usual. The kids played for a little while and then we went over to the lake for our art lesson.

Colin had his first official First Lego League meeting on Wednesday. They spent some time coming up with name ideas, some of which were very interesting. After a vote, some of them still weren't sure about the winning name so I think they're going to discuss it again next week to see if anyone has new ideas and hopefully agree on something. They spent the rest of their time working on putting together pieces that will be on the table.

Checking the computer to see what pieces they need

See the table full of Legos

Colin searching the bags for needed pieces

Visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what other homeschoolers have been up to this week.

Ancient Egypt

The girls haven't really participated in history with us much so I decided to do a quick study of Ancient History before we move on into the Middle Ages. We started with learning about what history and archaeology are and then talking about nomads and how they started becoming farmers. After that, we did a short unit study on ancient Egypt. I used Story of the World (SOTW) to help me divide up the topics.

Day 1
Read SOTW Ch. 2: Egyptians Lived on the Nile
Books: The Nile River, Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile
Activities: locate Egypt and Nile River on map; look here for info on life on the Nile
Lapbooks: where is Egypt, the Nile River, pharaoh

Day 2
Read SOTW Ch. 3: Hieroglyphs
Books: Hieroglyphs, The Day of Ahmed's Secret, Solve the Mystery of Ancient Egypt, started Mummies in the Morning
Lapbook: name in hieroglyphs- looked at this website and then kids drew their name

Top to bottom: Caleigh, Molly, Colin

Day 3
Read SOTW Ch. 4: Old Kingdom of Egypt (Making Mummies section)
Books: Mummies Made in Egypt, Eyewitness Books-Mummy, 100 Things You Should Know About Mummies
Lapbook: making mummies, Book of the Dead
Activities: decorate sarcophagus, take turns going through the process of making a mummy here, look through this, make apple mummies

Sarcophagus pictures

Day 4
Continue reading SOTW Ch. 4: Egyptian Pyramids section
Books: Who Built the Pyramids, Pyramid
Lapbooks: Sphinx, what would I find inside an Egyptian tomb
Activities: word search, play Seega

Day 5
Read SOTW Ch. 12: Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Ch. 13: New Kingdom of Egypt
Books: Egypt: in Spectacular Cross-Section, Adventures in Ancient Egypt, Who was King Tut? (Colin only)
Look at Tut websites here, here, and here
Activities: crossword puzzle, King Tut coloring page, online game

Colin                       Molly                    Caleigh

Day 6
Play Mehen
Lesson 21 from Artistic Pursuits book 1: Art in pyramids

Crawl through the passageway

Climb steps

Arrive in hallway of the pyramid

Our book said the drawings on the wall were of everyday life. They also drew things that they believed would help the person in the afterlife. They believed the drawings would come to life. Here are the kids' drawings.

Not really sure what's going on in Molly's picture. She said she was drawing a pyramid and it didn't look right so she did this.

Caleigh has a pyramid, mummy, flower, sun, tree, & a servant.

Colin drew a pharaoh and a TV with a Wii. He wanted to make sure he'd have the Wii in case the drawings really did come to life.

In the SOTW activity guide, they have directions for making a mummy out of a chicken. I'm just not brave enough for that. I have enough trouble touching chicken to make dinner. So we used an apple instead. I sliced the apple. We put a piece in two plastic cups. We added 1/3 cup salt and 1/3 cup baking soda to one cup making sure the apple slice was covered. Then both cups were put into our pantry. This is what we found when we checked them a week later.

The mummified apple

The uncovered apple

The kids didn't think either apple piece looked that great. We compared the two noticing that the uncovered one had mold on it and was rotting while the mummified was didn't. The mummified was shrunken and dried out and the kids could easily tell it weighed less than the other.

Free Lapbook Resources:

Ancient Egypt unit study and lapbook from Homeschool Share

 Architect of Ancient Egypt Lapbook  from Handle on the Arts

Another Ancient Egypt lapbook

Notebook pages (all of these are from HSS except the picture in the bottom right corner; it was something you could print after playing the online game I posted above):

We've had lots of pyramid building going on around here. Here's one of Colin's:

Learning about Maps

I wanted to help the girls get a better understanding of maps. Often in our FIAR studies, we've found places on the map, but I knew there were some things they still didn't know about them.  Colin participated as a review for him. Some things we dicussed were the continents, the oceans, compass and compass rose, symbols on maps, the difference in globes and maps, the equator, latitude and longitude, hemispheres, and scale.

We did activities from Beginning Geography: How to Use a Map. Some of the worksheets are maps of rooms, streets, and a fairy tale land that give directions to find things or get to a place. They also made their own map of our school room.

Books we read:
How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Priceman
Up North and Down South by Gonzales
Continents: A True Book by Fradin
Miranda the Explorer by Mayhew
Me on the Map by Sweeney
There's a Map on My Lap by Rabe
Mapping Penny's World by Leedy
How I Learned Geography by Shulevitz

Maps and Globes by Knowlton

Katy and the Big Snow by Burton
Oceans: A True Book by Stille
Madlenka by Sis

I used an orange to help them understand how a round object (Earth) is made flat (a map) by removing the peel in one piece and flattening it against the table.

I found the mini books on Homeschool Share by just searching since they were in different unit studies. The map to label the continents came from our Galloping the Globe book.

Here are the pictures in Caleigh's notebook.

Weekly Wrap-Up: August 23-27

This was our first full week back. We started out slow, but are almost up to a full schedule now. I think it went pretty well especially considering we were out of the house for part of the day three times this week.

We finished up a map unit study that we started last week. I wanted to help the girls understand more about maps. We discussed globes, maps, directions, continents, and oceans. We started to make a paper mache globe, but if you read my day in the life post you know that the kids got a little wild with the paste and the globe is still unfinished.

We started doing a quick overview of ancient history. For Colin, it's review, but the girls didn't listen in to much of our history last year so I'm hoping it will give them a better idea of what's going on before we move on to the Middle Ages. We started by reading about what history and archaeology are and reading some books on archaeology. Then we began an ancient Egypt unit study, which I will write more about next week.

Colin had been doing review sheets for math because he stopped in the middle of a book. He has now finished that and started into new lessons (working on decimals right now). The girls both started new math books so they've been doing lessons for a week now. We use RightStart Math and my kids have always loved the games, but it's something I dread. When Molly had a memory game in her lesson this week, I had Caleigh play it with her. I hope this is something that will continue to work so I can skip some of these games.

Colin reviewed all Spell to Write and Read phonograms and rules and took a placement test. Next week he'll start on new lists. Caleigh reviewed the single letter phonograms and started multi-letter phonograms. We also went through the cards to see which ones Molly knew.

On Tuesday, we met with Colin's First Lego League team. We moms discussed expectations, ideas, and plans while the boys played Legos and got to know each other. One of the other moms has a 7 year old girl so that gives my girls someone else to play with during the meetings.

On Wednesday morning, we went to a park day for a new to us homeschool group. It was a nice, friendly group. There were quite a few boys around Colin's age so he was very happy.

Today we went to our homeschool group's kickoff at a park. It was great to see so many other homeschoolers. I think that must be especially good for new homeschoolers to let them know they're not alone. We had a potluck lunch and played at the playground. We were there for almost 4 hours, but Colin still didn't want to leave. He got to play with 3 of the friends he's made so he had a great time. 
Unfortunately, I don't any pictures to share because one of my kids threw something and hit my camera knocking it to the floor and now it won't work. Hopefully, I can find the cord for my old one soon.

See more weekly wrap-ups here.

Day in the Life

I was just going to write the tentative plans I've made for our days, but every time I write it out I can't fit everything in. I don't know how, but somehow it usually works out. I try to keep our schedule so that we have entire days at home, but there are field trips, classes, playdates, errands, travel, etc. that often interrupt us.
I decided to try to keep up with the times everything is happening on Monday, a day when we're not going anywhere.
This is only our 3rd day of school for this year so we're still trying to work everything out. I also haven't finished the kids' chore chart so other than Colin unloading the dishwasher, they are only picking up toys and doing things as I ask them. I thought this would be rather boring, but it turned out to have some surprises.

7:30- I'm up. I'm going to be honest and tell you that most of us are not morning people here. My goal is to eventually be up at this time every day, but many times it's closer to 8:30. This day I just happened to wake up early.

7:45- I'm on computer. Molly is up and complaining that she's tired so she lays on the couch and asks to watch TV. She is also not usually up yet. Colin is the only one who gets up early. I sometimes have to wake the girls at 9.

7:55- Colin is up and getting his breakfast. He likes to eat first thing.

8:45- Molly and I have breakfast

8:55- I've heard Caleigh talking to Colin, but this is the first time I've seen her. She gets her breakfast.

9:10- I get laundry out of the dryer. It's a load from yesterday that I forgot about so I had to turn the dryer back on to try to get out wrinkles. I'll tell you that this is often the way it happen. Then I put towels in dryer and another load of clothes in the washer. My hand gets tired from spraying the stain remover so much. Do they have to stain every single item? The girls are getting dressed, brushing teeth, and fixing hair. Colin has already done this, but I didn't notice when.

9:30- Everyone upstairs to school room. I remind them to feed the poor fish they're always forgetting.
Read aloud time. Here they are waiting.


Read Bible story and books to go along with our map unit study.

10:30- Everyone to the table to do oceans lapbook & Beginning Geography worksheets. In the background you can see that Molly, who still says she's tired, is having some trouble getting off the couch to come to the table.


One of the worksheets is following directions to a treasure and I gave them all a few M&Ms as their treasure.

10:50- Break for Molly; I work with Caleigh doing math; Colin is still doing review sheets so he does math on his own.

11:15- First Language lessons and Spell to Write and Read with Caleigh

11:30- Caleigh has a break; I work with Molly on math and phonograms. Then she practices writing letters in her salt box.


11:50- Both girls on break; Colin copywork; then with me: review phonograms, Writing Tales, we go over math he did earlier correcting anything missed

12:30- Lunch: I help girls get their stuff; Colin makes his own; I get towels out of dryer & move clothes to dryer.

12:45- I sit down to get on computer when I hear Molly say she sees a bug. I go back in to see that we've been invaded by ants during the time we were upstairs. They are all over the floor near the window. I start searching for them and discover there is a small crack at the backdoor that they're coming in. Colin goes out to get the ShopVac and vaccuums them up. I then try to search to find something to get rid of them. I end up spraying Windex all around the outside of the door and I sprinkle cayenne pepper all over the area near the crack in the door (I think I read somewhere that they didn't like that). That will have to do until hubby comes home to take care of it. Now I feel like everything is dirty so I scrub the whole kitchen and lose my free time.
During this time, the kids have run off to play.

2:00- Back upstairs to do history. We're doing a quick review of ancient history to get the girls caught up. We read the intro about what history and archaelogy are and read a couple books about archaeology. Then the kids are supposed to do timelines of their lives. It turns into something crazy and only Colin gets any pictures drawn about his life so I give up.

3:00- Quick clean up of school room/play room and then the kids are free to play.

3:30- I make paste and start cutting paper strips for our paper mache project. Colin unloads the dishwasher, which is normally done earlier in the day, but didn't happen. As you can see here, it's a dangerous job and you should always have your weapon ready.


4:00- Kids' snack; computer time for me and at this point I realize I forgot to eat lunch so I get an orange and some water.

4:30- I go to the kitchen to make spaghetti sauce. After I get everything out, I realize we don't have any garlic so I put everything away and go back to the computer, where I do some lessons plans, check email, facebook, etc.

5:10- Back to kitchen. I put some chicken in the microwave to thaw. The paste is cool so I decide to let the kids start on the project while I'm making dinner. I notice that there is some stuff on the table on the back porch so I go out to clear it off while yelling for the kids to come out. When Colin comes out, I turn around just in time to see him closing the door and I try to tell him not to, but it's too late. The door is locked. We are locked out of the house. I'm not sure when hubby will be home because he had a meeting. Colin tries to search all around for a way to get inside. A wasp gets into the screened in porch so the girls won't come out of the yard even though it's raining.

6:00- Hubby arrives and we are back in the house. I get the chicken out of the microwave and finally start making dinner.

7:00- Dinner & clean up

7:45- I call the kids back out for the paper mache project. I show them what to do and come back in to get on the computer to search for skating classes. After a few minutes, I go back out to check on them and discover that leaving was not a good idea. They have not followed directions, have used almost all the paste for only a few strips of paper, the table is a mess, and the girls have the paste in their hair. I should have taken a pic of this mess, but I was too upset and just sent everyone back in to clean themselves up.
I start cleaning up their mess. I scoop up the paste they spread all over the table and use it to put the strips on the balloon. I finish covering the whole thing, clean up, and bring it in to dry.

9:00- Put kids to bed; I take a shower and then watch a movie with my hubby.