B is for Blueberry, and Our Week in Review

We had a very busy, interrupted, but still good week in school. We only had 3 1/2 full days of school due to my need to prepare for REAL moms, but we managed to cram a week's worth of work into those 3 1/2 days!

In science we began reading about whales. There are lots and lots of different kinds! Of course, all the different whales can be basically categorized into two types, toothed whales and baleen whales. The boys made whales out of modeling clay for their ocean boxes. Modeling clay is nice to work with because it never dries out and you don't have to bake it. You just shape it and voila! And if curious little fingers happen to touch your creations, they can easily be reshaped (not that that has ever happened here!) :-) Modeling clay is also very inexpensive and usually comes in a pack with a variety of colors. Here is son G's orca whale. He chose to show him "breaching".



This is L's blue whale, also breaching.


This is C's blue whale, "logging" (floating at the surface and swimming very slowly so that he looks somewhat like a log on the water). The blue "wave" looking thing near the whale's eye is a stream of water vapor he's blowing out of his blowhole.


This is Little Man's humpback whale (one of the baleen variety), made by daughter G. He is breaching, turning over and about to hit the water with his back. You can see blue waves splashing at the surface just above his tail.

In history this week we learned more about World War I, its major battles and some of the new weapons used during this war. It was only about 40 years removed from the Civil War, and yet totally different tactics were required due to new weapons technology. Airplanes and blimps were used for the first time during WWI, also submarines, machine guns, and poison gas. The boys were/are quite fascinated with it. They worked more in their lapbooks and really enjoyed our reading. We had a wonderful discussion with daddy at the dinner table one night about the causes of the war, and I was pleased (and slightly surprised) to hear how much G, age 10, understood about the alliances in Europe at that time.

For grammar this week we all played preposition bingo several times. The older 3 played with preposition game boards, and the younger two played with capital letter game boards. I would call out a preposition AND a letter of the alphabet, and everyone looked at their game boards to see if they had that one. If they did, they covered it with a chocolate chip. When we had a winner, everyone got to eat the chocolate chips off their game boards! As you can imagine, a very fun and popular game!

In co-op on Friday, my young 5's class learned all about the letter "B". We read Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey ~ one of my favorite children's books! Then we dropped blueberries into a tin pail to see if they made the sound in the book: kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk. They did!

We learned how to write the letter "B", and we colored things that began with that sound. Here Little Man is coloring his bear.



Then we made blueberry muffins. Yum!




They turned out very well, and were a delicious snack for us. Lastly, we read this big book of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? which was a holdover from my public school teaching days. We took the fasteners off and mixed up the pages and put them back in the right order. By the end, I think everyone knew the entire book by heart!


It was a good week, despite our busyness, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to teach my children at home! I LOVE our co-op! I love spending so much time with Little Man and C on Friday mornings, doing things especially geared for them. I love that our older children are learning systematically to write well. I'm just so glad God led us to do this co-op this year.