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.

Walt Disney World Trip

Pictures from our most recent trip to Disney World
December 5-13, 2010

Our Week: Rockwell, Castles, and Earth

We were a little slow getting started after being on vacation, but we ended up having a pretty good week. We did spelling, math, phonics, art, history, and science. I hope to get the rest of our subjects added back in next week.

Art Museum Field Trip

We had a field trip this week to the NC Museum of Art. We got to tour the Norman Rockwell exhibit with our homeschool group. I was really impressed with how much of his work they had and they also had all of the covers he did for the Saturday Evening Post. The docent we had did a really good job of explaining things to the kids and asking them questions.
We used Discovering Great Artists for this week's art assignment. The kids had to draw pictures that tell a story like Norman Rockwell's pictures do. We also read a couple books about Rockwell and looked at pictures of many of his paintings to prepare for our museum visit.

We were also able to see some of the other temporary exhibits they have right now. Inverted Utopias are mostly wooden sculptures of people. Some of the people are upside down or flying above you. The kids thought they were neat. Fins and Feathers is a collection of children's book illustrations.

While we were there, we stopped in to check out the Ancient Egyptian collection. I had wanted to do that in September when we were studying Egypt, but didn't make it there.

History

This week we learned about how English is a mix of different languages. We did an activity with Play-Doh to help the kids understand. We started with 5 colors of Play-Doh labeled Old English, Latin, Viking, French, and Celtic. We mixed one color at a time into the red (Old English).

Then we ended up with this brown that doesn't look anything like the original colors.

We also learned about feudalism and stone castles.
For fun, we made our own castle with Kix cereal, marshmallows, and butter. The kids made walls, towers, and the keep in the middle.

It sure was sticky, but they managed to start shaping it pretty well.

The walls weren't enough to protect this castle. The kids started grabbing it as soon as I snapped the picture and they all said it was yummy.

Astronomy

In Astronomy, we started learning about earth. We learned about all the differences between earth and the other planets that allow us to live here. We also learned about the reason for seasons. For our experiment, we used a flashlight for the sun to show how the tilt of the earth causes the sun's rays to sometimes shine directly on us and at other times to be more spread out. 

Everything Else

Colin had his first official hockey game this week. He has said for a long time that he wants to be a goalie. Apparently that's not what lots of kids choose so he is the only goalie on his team. He was so excited and had a great time playing. Here he is somewhere inside all this stuff.

Warming up before the game

We also met with our First Lego League group to play. It's the first time we've gotten together since the regional tournament so the kids were all happy to see each other.

Visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what others did this week.

Skating

We took the kids skating during Christmas vacation. It was horribly busy there. Caleigh and Molly have only been skating once before. Caleigh didn't want to go out with so many people so she sat out for most of the time. She did finally go out and did well. Molly was a little nervous, but she did keep trying. She didn't want to let go of the wall though. Colin was so sweet and would stop skating whenever I asked him to help Molly.

Molly hanging on to Colin and the wall

Colin was finally able to get her away from the wall here

He was trying to pull her away from the wall, but she wasn't going for it

Caleigh finally went onto the floor