Our Week: The Moon, Owls, and the Crusades

The Three Rs

I got Colin started back with RightStart Math E this week. He doesn't want to stop doing Life of Fred so he has decided to do a lesson from that on top of his regular math. Caleigh had games in her math lessons a few days and she always likes that. Molly had a couple of worksheets this week. RightStart relies more on games for learning, especially for kindergarten, but she did well and liked them.

Everyone is progressing well with spelling, handwriting, phonics, writing, and grammar so there's nothing too exciting to report.

Astronomy

Astronomy this week was all about the moon. We focused on the phases of the moon, the moon's atmosphere, and lunar eclipses.
We'll be continuing to study the moon next week.

Some of the books we're reading about the moon

Using Oreos to learn about the phases of the moon



Phases of the moon
Ignore that they're red; I bought them on clearance after Christmas and didn't want to buy another package for this.




Using an orange and a flashlight to demonstrate why the moon seems to change shape.
This room wasn't dark enough so we had to move to the theater.



We spent some time outside observing the moon. Here is the night of the full moon.

History

The main topic this week was the Crusades. We learned why Christians, Jews, and Muslims believed Jerusalem was a holy city. We read about how the crusaders went to fight the Islamic empire to take Jerusalem and succeeded after a few years. Then we found out that Saladin defeated them and took Jerusalem back. After that there were many unsuccessful crusades.
We then read about El Cid helping the Christians to defeat the Moors and reconquer Spain.

One of the project suggestions from the Activity Guide was to learn to play chess. It was played by knights to practice strategic skills. Colin starting learning to play chess a few months ago. Caleigh seems to be picking up a little too. I got this book that he spent some time looking through.

Unit Study

To go along with studying the moon, our Five in a Row book this week was Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.





We learned about owls, the moon, similes, metaphors, imagery, tracks, and much more. I'll do a separate post soon with more on what we did and pictures of the kids digging through an owl pellet, our owl craft, notebook pages, and the cute owl cookies we made.

Everything Else

Colin didn't have hockey this week, but he has practice today (Saturday) and a game Sunday.

Colin's First Lego League team, which we're now calling Robotics Club, met at our house. The boys are going to work on learning more about the robots, programming them, sensors, etc. now that the competition is over.

We went to a program about raptors at the library this morning. They had different owls and hawks for the kids to see and talked about them. They also had a vulture even though it's not a raptor. They showed them what the eggs from each one look like and discussed some of the rescues they've done.

I have pictures of the owls that were there too, but I'll put them in my Owl Moon post.



Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Beach- Birthday Celebration

Caleigh said her favorite part of our trip was getting to go to the beach. Even though it was way too cold to get in the water, she loved walking along the beach collecting shells. We must have a million shells around here.

View from our balcony

The Birthday Girl

Molly writing Mom I heart

Happy Birthday to My Wonderful Husband!

There's another birthday in our house this weekend!

Krispy Kreme donut breakfast

With presents

This is what you end up doing on your birthday when your daughter's birthday is the day before yours.

Caleigh's 8th Birthday

My little girl is 8 today!

She asked for a sing-a-ma-jig cake.

I used one of hers to choose the colors.

She picked Olive Garden for lunch.

Opening Presents (I was able to bring most of her presents with us, but she'll have 2 to open tomorrow when we get home. One was too big and the other is heavy.)

Ordering pizza was all she had asked to do before she knew we were going on a trip so she got pizza for dinner (yes for the 2nd time today). She picked Littlest Pet Shop plates, napkins, and cups.

Caleigh wasn't sure what she wanted to do for her birthday when we asked her. So I just planned a surprise weekend. They knew we were going somewhere on Friday (the day before her birthday), but they thought it was close to home. We secretly packed their clothes, swimming stuff, the presents, and the cake without them noticing. We went to Ripley's Aquarium. Once we left there, we drove to the hotel and told the kids we were spending 2 nights. From the parking lot, they could see part of the indoor waterpark so they were excited about that. The hotel is right on the beach and we have a view of the ocean. It's too cold to do more than walk on the beach, but Caleigh's favorite thing about the beach is collecting shells so she was happy.
I'll be posting more pictures soon of the aquarium, beach, and waterpark.


Adding in a picture of Caleigh with her new bike she received when we got home.

Our Week: Knights and a Medieval Feast

I'm so glad we seem to be back on track this week. It probably didn't hurt that we got ice that kept us home. We're still having some trouble getting going in the mornings. I really need to get everyone to sleep earlier and up earlier. Maybe we'll work on that next week. For this week, I'm just going to be happy that we got in all our subjects.

Three Rs

Colin is continuing to do Life of Fred on his own while we get back into the swing of things. I'm hoping to add back in RightStart E soon. Caleigh worked on money and making change. Molly added with tally marks and wrote addition equations.

Colin and Caleigh both started back with grammar. They mostly did review.

Colin started a new chapter of Writing Tales with "The Elves and the Shoemaker."

Molly continues to progress well with her phonics and is reading longer words.

Caleigh reviewed all the cursive letters she has learned so far and started some new ones. Molly started back with letters from Handwriting Without Tears. 

History

We spent a day studying the samurai of Japan, but most of this week was about knights. We did study knights some last year while rowing the book, Duchess Bakes a Cake (see here) and even did some lapbooking about them so we didn't go as indepth as we would have otherwise.

This book was on our reading list for last week, but we didn't get to it so we read it this week.

We had our own medieval feast with recipes from this book.

The recipe for the main dish is cabbage stew and dumplings. I didn't think cabbage stew would go over well so my hubby made dumplings with help from Caleigh.



Caleigh adding dumplings to the pot



Colin shaking whipping cream to make butter

Molly rolling out pie crust.
Maybe you can tell Colin is getting a little tired of shaking the jar here.

He did finally get butter though.

Butter on Molly's bread

We used bread as a trencher like they did during medieval times. They would have used it instead of a plate, but that didn't seem like a good idea to me. Notice no forks because they didn't have them yet.

We had mead (made with water, honey, oranges, and nutmeg) to drink, but the kids didn't like it.

Cherry pie

One of the knight books I found at the library was The Princess Knight. We spent part of a day reading it and other princess books. The girls aren't always too excited about our history subjects so I thought a day of princess books would be good for them.

Astronomy  

We continued studying earth this week. We read several non-fiction books about earth and one about why we have seasons. We also read a couple different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. After reading them, we discussed how Goldilocks found all the things that belonged to Baby Bear just right. We compared that to how the earth is just right for us. I then had the kids make an advertisement as if they were selling the earth by describing all the great things about it.



Everything Else

Colin had his second hockey game. He has improved already and was able to stop a lot of good shots. He's having a lot of fun.

We'll be taking today off school to start birthday celebrations. Caleigh's 8th birthday is tomorrow and my husband's birthday is Sunday. Caleigh decided not to have a party so we're surprising the kids with a fun weekend trip and will be leaving this morning.

Christmas at Disney World

There is so much fun Christmas stuff to see at Disney World. We had been once in December before and I'm so glad we got to go again at this time of year. The weather was colder than I would have liked, but seeing all the decorations made up for it.


Love the castle with the lights

We missed the holiday storytellers in Epcot last time so we made sure to get to some of them. The girls liked most of them and Colin wanted to see them all.

Molly with Canada storyteller

La Befana in Italy

Japan storyteller with a Daruma, which the kids remembered from when we studied Japan

Monkey King in China

Colin with Father Christmas in UK

Storyteller in Germany tells about the Advent calendar, first Christmas tree, and nutcrackers.

Then a giant nutcracker came out to take pics with the kids.

Storyteller in Norway, who has a hard time telling her story because of the mischievious gnome.
This was very funny and everyone's favorite.

It's fun to see the characters dressed up.

Santa Goofy

There are lots of decorations in the parks and the resorts.

Real gingerbread house

It's amazing to see all these lights in one place.

In this one, you can see the pretend snow falling.

Mickey's Jingle Jungle Parade

Animal Kingdom tree

Magic Kingdom tree

There are also some normal sized trees around. In Animal Kingdom, they have trees decorated for different characters. We saw Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Donald, Goofy, and Nemo themes.

Colin with the Donald Duck tree

Main Street, Magic Kingdom

Other pictures from our trip are in a slideshow in the post before this one.