Our Week in Review

Yes, this would be for last week again. I can't seem to keep current with my weeks!

Peg boarding and mice petting....

More bird watching and tower building.....

Oh yeah, we did school too! :-) In history last week we learned more about the Texas Revolution, including the Alamo, and figures that were important to that effort such as Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Sam Houston. For our lower grammar boys I picked just one or two people to focus on, and one of these was Davy Crockett. Sometimes the books suggested by TOG for lower grammar are still a little too wordy for my boys, so I usually spend a portion of Sunday afternoon at the library looking for books that fit the bill a little better for us. I found a picture book of Davy Crockett that was just perfect (pictures on every page!) and another one about the Alamo that managed to hit all the main points with few words.



Our daughter read more in depth about the Texas Revolution and also focused on other events during Andrew Jackson's second term as president. We spent some time analyzing his presidency and his character qualities, and took a look at how he measured up to the world's definition of a leader versus God's definition of a leader as described in the Bible. Fascinating! We ended the week by watching "The Alamo" (the 60's version with John Wayne) during pizza and movie night on Friday.

In science we learned about all the different types of birds nests there are (many!) and marveled at God's creativity in making so many different types of animals that we are STILL, centuries after creation, learning more about them and discovering new ones!

We continued our regular work in math, grammar, spelling and writing. G and G are working on learning how to write a report. Once they have practiced a little more with the dvd we have, they will be choosing a bird from science to write a report on. Sons G and L are working hard to finish the prepositions unit in grammar and move on to verbs. Son C is coming along with his reading! It's so cute to observe that he really thinks of himself as a reader now. He reads cereal boxes, road signs when we are out driving, virtually anything he sees he tries to read. He is at that stage where he sounds out the first couple letters of a word and then guesses at the rest, but he's learning to be patient and carefully read the whole thing.

Little Man is learning, learning, learning from all his siblings. He is like a sponge! At meal times we are working on poetry memorization, and it is pretty amazing to me (and extremely cute) when Little Man will just spontaneously start reciting poetry that he's heard his older siblings practice umpteen times at the table! He'll even start by saying the title and author. I'll try to video it sometime and put it on here to share with the grandparents. :-)

In other news, the driver's seat of our minivan broke last week. It was going to cost about $1000 to have it fixed, so instead we went to a junkyard and bought a seat from the same make and model vehicle as our minivan. It's not quite the same color, but pretty close. The shop swapped out the seats for us for $100, so that was a blessing! Three of our boys went with daddy to the junkyard to get the seat, and they LOVED the junkyard! They have been asking every day since then, "when are we going back to the junkyard?"

It snowed for the first time this week and I was caught unprepared in the boot department. We tried on all the boots from last year and found that we need to buy 4 new pair. We also need 2 new pair of snow pants. Thankfully we had already done the coat, gloves, and scarf try on and purchased what we needed, so we are all set there. Just one of the joys of living in a 4 season state!

Already this week we have begun learning about Victorian England. Did you know that Queen Victoria was crowned just one year after the tragedy at the Alamo? It's so interesting to put historical events and people from different places together in the same time period of history!