'12/13 Week 14 Day 5

Andrew's voice is still husky and he is not able to even attempt singing along with the CD in the mornings. Saara is back to her normal self. Thank God.

In our LA class, I did not take out the stopwatch today and asked Andrew to write without the usual time pressure. He did well and was able to focus. The stopwatch has been a tremendous help in getting him concentrate on his task. I will keep using it, but it is good to see that Andrew is starting to get things done without it as well. 

Our studies of the ancient civilizations have been all over the map recently. I can see what the curriculum is doing and I do not think it is wrong, but it can get a bit confusing as to what was going on where and why are we jumping back and forth between the regions. We are using the Timeline book, but to make things clearer and more visible, I printed out maps of the first river civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, The Indus River, and some other places we have covered. I also printed out some pictures or legends to glue on the maps. This way we get a better overview of what was happening at the same time (more or less) in the world. 

And, of course, it was our choir practice day. Children loved it, as always.

It was an unusually quiet recess. Andrew was looking though his history book, Saara was putting together puzzles on the floor, I had my mouth wide open - it was quiet.

The parallel worlds.

Andrew watching and waiting for his note to play.

A fine group of young performers.

A wee Wii session for some exercise in addition to all the running they did outside plus some climbing today on the playground.

Christmas ...

'12/13 Week 14 Day 4

This morning brought Andrew and Saara new Bible verses to memorize. I did not find the ones suggested in the curriculum useful, so I picked my own for the kids to learn. 

Andrew also got a new batch of spelling words. They all belong to the -old family (fold, hold, told, etc.), so a expect the spelling exercises to be rather easy in coming days. 

Other than that, it was an ordinary school day. The weather has been good and the children have been outside as much as possible playing, running, climbing trees, throwing ball, and blowing bubbles. As soon as it gets a bit chillier, we will head to the forest to explore and discover and just have fun.

I introduced the game of Sudoku to Saara this morning. She understood the idea and loved solving it!

Surprise of the evening: "Mom, where is the science book we used last year? I want to look at it." Makes me smile :o)

'12/13 Week 14 Day 3

At first, the morning did not look very promising. Saara and I are almost out of the woods of coughing and sneezing while Andrew just entered in. I set up a Wick's vaporizer in our 'class room', gave Andrew his dose of the cough and cold medicine, and prayed he would be feeling better. He did, thank heavens! 

Among many things we did today, the science class with our further studies of water, was probably the most fun. We revisited the pages about floating in our last year's physics book, watched the DVD, and tried some experiments ourselves. 
I was pleased to hear both kids remembering similar experiments we did last year about floating. I liked the fact that I could tie in Saara's study of the liquids with Andrew's science lesson. She has her nose in everything and knows far more than a typical four-year-old should. What will I teach her when she starts Kindergarten? :o)

Here we are: starting our studies with the vaporizer humming in the background.

Andrew is still looking for verbs.

Both kids writing down their hypothesis and the test results.

A toothpick floating under the surface.

Feeling the upthrust.

'12/13 Week 14 Day 2

We are quite a sight these days, I must say. If we are not coughing, we are blowing our noses. All of us.

These minor short comings did not hinder us from all of our school work, though. In fact, it all went by rather fast and effectively. 

In history, Andrew reviewed a few facts about the Indus River civilization and we returned to the Mesopotamia region to start our studies about the Babylonian empire. 

Both kids' favorite subject today was undoubtedly the science (again). We concluded our studies of the Australian fauna and, as usual, watched video clips on the YouTube. This one about the lyrebird had us in stitches: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y 

It was a good note to end our day on. Now, we just have to get rid of these colds.

Saara came to me and asked if she could sow some buttons. By all means! It will not be long before she will ask me for a sewing machine.

 

'12/13 Week 14 Day 1

We had a great Thanksgiving break - visited the Renaissance Festival, drove out of town to visit with friends for Thanksgiving, the children played their little hearts out outside every day, and indoors they learned the wonderful game of marbles, did a fair amount of shopping with us, chose their own special ornaments for this year and helped me and Dad decorate the house and our Christmas tree. 

Now, we are back to our studies. The children had forgotten almost nothing and did not miss a beat at all as we dove into our letters and numbers and science today. I took a number of pictures, but my blogspot account informed me that I have reached my 1 GB limit and as I am not interested in purchasing extra space, I will have to figure out how to post photos from now on. 

We started out our morning by reading the Bible as usual. Saara's story was about God calling Samuel - a good little story to act out. We do it a lot in our Sunday school and both children liked putting on a short play at home as well. 

Andrew loved his science class. We watched a few videos about the outback and the animals who live there. We could not get over the shudders of watching David Attenborough eat a honey pot ant. Yuk! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnlA8xXCMQ

Saara had plenty of fun of her own. We are studying 'the matter' and our second category after the solids was the liquids. Saara got to do one of her favorite activities - pouring water from one container into another. Honing her skills. Very soon she may be pouring her own milk over her cereal. 

Eli and Samuel

Saara loving her science activity.

While Andrew is completing his independent assignment, the teacher is sneaking in a row or two.

A moment of peace and quiet - the mailman brought the next issues of Highlights and High Five.

The Renaissance Festival

We had wanted to go and check out the Renaissance Festival for a long time. Finally, we bought the tickets and drove up to Plantersville. It sure did feel like stepping back in time. I enjoyed being addressed as 'my lady' the whole time by all the vendors. The kids loved the rides and the Medieval Games performance.
God willing, we might go back next year.

Step back in time to the Medieval England.

People in costumes everywhere!

Circus like back then.

Andrew shooting some dragons.

I am truly proud of Saara - she is naturally unwilling and shy to try new things but she has been braving out and shown a lot of courage experiencing the new and the unknown, like this bouncer. 

Saara chose to ride the cow on the merry-go-round, but at the last minute decided the cow was moving around too much and she got off. Kind of hard to be a cowgirl in the princess dress, I agree.

Andrew enjoyed his lama ride to the fullest.

We are about to enter 'the arena'.

One can not watch the jousting tournament with out a hefty handful of cotton candy, can one?

One of the knights.

Honoring 'the king'.

Entertaining enough.

The aftermath.

I believe, the petting zoo was the children's favorite attraction.

Saara having a conversation with a sheep.

Mom's favorite - the bagpipes.

'12/13 Week 13 Day 5

We started our school day a bit later today, but still got a lot of things accomplished. In history, we wrapped up our reading about the Minoan civilization on Crete. I found a kid-friendly story of the Minotaur and read it to them. After that we 'walked' over to the Indus river and got our fist glimpse of that great civilization.

Other classes went smoothly. Our new vocabulary learning book is about a teacher and her students in Alaska. The narrator (a little girl) said in the book how much she liked school and wanted to go there. My two kids piped right in that they loved school too, very much. Made my heart glad and it was a good note to end our thirteenth week on. 

We will take a nice week long break now. 

A Blessed Thanksgiving!

'12/13 Week 13 Day 4

Science was our longest class today. We started learning the fauna of Australia (rather Australasia) and we watched two videos that were very interesting. One of them about cassowaries was almost an hour long. Cool stuff though!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUyxzAulkGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPbWJPsBPdA

Andrew got a new portion of spelling words to practice. They should be fairly easy because most of the words fall into the '-all' word family we practiced writing last year. We also moved on to recognizing 'the verb' in a sentence. 

The best part of our school day was the choir practice, of course. Kids have only two more practices left before their Christmas performance. 

Tomorrow is our last day before the Thanksgiving break. I have a lot of things planned - things exiting and fun and educational. We will see how it all will work out.

Andrew underlining verbs in his Highlights magazine.

Saara practicing listening, following and remembering instructions. Her little tasks are getting harder.

No choir practice is complete without a few minutes (at least) on the play ground

'12/13 Week 13 Day 3

The highlight of today was our science lesson about water. You know this gut feeling, the motherly intuition that something can and will go wrong especially when water is involved? I said a silent prayer before the class and the experiments which were fun and the whole class was very successful until Andrew decided to see how far he can lift one end of a plastic tube with water in it. Well, he lifted the water right out of the tube and all over the schoolbook! Thankfully, that was our last experiment and the only place flooded was the counter top. Could be that the accident will help Andrew remember that water stays level, always. 

The rest of the day paled in comparison with the morning mishap. :o) But it was a good day.

Water is 'flat' when on it's own. Kids were 'painting' with a drop of water (with food coloring) on the counter top.

I had Andrew and Saara point out which container had the most and which on the least amount of water.

They were in for a surprise: all the containers had one cup of water each.

'12/13 Week 13 Day 2

Today was very much like yesterday. We did have new assignments and Andrew 'took' an oral test in history, but other than this, it was a quiet school day. 
In math, we spent some time practicing counting down because after all these weeks we are finally tackling subtraction again. Andrew had not forgotten anything and solved his subtraction problems fast and correctly. 

He did not do as brilliantly in history, though. We took a little break to review main facts about the Ancient Egypt. Andrew remembered facts and gave correct answers to majority of the questions I asked him and I believe the 'B-' I mentally gave him is good enough for now but we will come back to all this information in time.

In science, we found some good video clips on orangutangs (children were rolling with laughter watching them interact with the camera crew) and the stinky rafflesia flower in Asia. I am glad one can not smell things over internet. Tomorrow, we will enter the fauna of Australia. Should be fun!

Dot-to-dot to Thanksgiving.

Counting down

'12/13 Week 13 Day 1

We are back from our long Veterans Day week end. I realized this morning that next week is Thanksgiving ALREADY! It is our Thanksgiving break as well. Where have the seven weeks since last break gone? 

Today was a very full day. Very intense, but thoroughly enjoyable. Andrew did a lot of reading. He finished "Pompeii ... Buried Alive!" The book was a bit of a stretch for him, but he did well. By the end of the book, he was actually picking up speed when reading sentences with familiar words. 

I have not been satisfied with the curriculum's Language Arts section recently.  It does not work for Andrew nor me. So, I am doing my own thing which is going to the very beginning of everything. Letters make words, words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs, paragraphs make chapters, chapters make stories. 
Our focus is the sentence and getting to know it. First, I asked Andrew to recognize a sentence in a story. I asked him to circle the first letter of every sentence and underline each sentence with a different color pencil. The story we were working with had long and very short sentences. It also included the period, the exclamation mark and the question mark. The pause that Andrew had when reaching the period and while picking up the next color will train him to make a pause in reading. Once we can recognize a sentence with ease, we will see what it is made up of. 

Our math introduced us to the quarter dollar. The kids had fun examining the different designs on the tails side of the coins. As to the heads, they both surprised me by recognizing Washington's profile. 

Tomorrow will bring to us our last study of Egypt and a thorough review (read: oral test) of the region and the times. Andrew be prepared!

The art of the cold mornings.

Reviewing things from last year, like our phone number and address.

Saara with her song of the week: head, shoulders, knees and toes.

Andrew  underlining the sentences.

Counting by 25s to 100. Just four numbers to memorize. How we get from number to number is spelled out with buttons.

Meanwhile, Saara is making patterns with buttons.

Andrew comparing the coins.