Our Week in Review

We have completed 7 weeks of school already! How the time flies when you're having fun! It was a good week of learning. I am so blessed to be able to teach my children and learn along side them. I thought I had a good education of my own, but I am learning all kinds of things I don't remember learning before!

During time with Little Man this week, the older siblings built towers,



played with the dollhouse (part of our toy rotation - they turned it into a superhero base though. Even Granny got superpowers!),


and played games.


Big sister worked on her science.


We worked on reading,



and spelling.


During history this week we learned about an end to the fighting of World War I - Armistice! We learned about President Wilson's desire to broker a "peace without victory" and how his peace plan, particularly his idea for the League of Nations, fell apart. We wrote down what we learned in our history lapbooks.




For science this week we did a really cool project where we went outside and measured out the lengths of different whales with long strips of yarn.


Can you see the white yarn snaking all the way down the sidewalk?


It was for the Blue Whale, 90 feet long. Biggest animal on planet earth!


We were supposed to put the yarn strips into this little "pocket" in their science books, but the yarn lengths were so fat we ended up putting them into ziploc bags instead and taping the bags over the paper pockets.


Regarding our history studies, I was astonished to learn that estimates put the number of dead soldiers during World War I between 9 and 10 MILLION. Yes, million. A whole generation of young men wiped out. Can you imagine? I thought of all the young women who must've remained single during that generation because there weren't enough boys to marry. Particularly in France and Belgium and Germany. I had forgotten that armistice day was November 11, our veterans day today. The fighting ceased at precisely 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month. U.S. General Pershing kept bombarding the enemy lines right up until 10:59 and then suddenly the guns stopped firing and it was strangely quiet. Veteran's Day has taken on a whole new meaning to me since studying WWI and it will be very meaningful to mark that day with our children this year. These are the things we MUST NOT FORGET! We must teach them to our children. They should know the meaning of the red poppy flower, how it memoralized the war dead and was a significant symbol the world over. That is why veterans standing outside the grocery store still sell little plastic poppy flowers today.

And then, just 21 years later, an even more horrible war started, grown from the seeds of bitterness sown at the end of WWI. If only.......

It all could have been so different.

We must learn these important lessons from history. I am so challenged as we study the 20th century and get closer and closer to a time period that I know of firsthand, to make the connections between what happened before and what's happening now. To help the children understand the bigger picture. Politics without humility will not serve the people. Government as an entity will always seek more and more power. Institutions created without moral absolutes will always corrupt. It has happened before and it will happen again unless we truly learn the lessons God has provided for us in history.