Friday, February 22, 2019

Our Week in Review

By the end of our first week of school we had learned about the gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty by the people of France in 1886, the presidency of Grover Cleveland (the only president to serve two non consecutive terms!), and the childhood and young adult years of Teddy Roosevelt.

To cap off this first week of school, I had son C and Little Man work together to build a model of the Statue of Liberty out of toothpicks and packing peanuts!  It may sound silly, but even with these materials, it was a bit of an engineering feat to get this thing tall enough.



They decided to begin with a circular base, but quickly switched to a triangular shape for each layer of the statue, thinking that would save time.  They quickly realized the triangular shape was not as stable as they wanted, but by this time they had built it tall enough that they just kept going.


Little Man built each layer, and then son C added it to the overall statue.



They worked well together as a team, and we could even more easily marvel at the design and construction of the actual Statue!



This past summer I painted, purged, and rearranged the school room.  This is our new couch area under the stairs, which the boys are enjoying very much!


On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we do what we call "morning routine" in our school room, which includes reading devotions from the Bible, singing a hymn, having  prayer, reading a poem (we take turns picking it), talking about one piece of art, learning a Greek or Latin word, and labeling one sentence with its parts of speech.  All of that takes about an hour, and it is time WELL spent.  I love our morning routine.  Here Little Man was labeling all the nouns and the predicate nominatives in the sentence on the board.



We also colored covers for our history binders.


It was a fantastic first week!

1 comment:

Teacher/Mom said...

So fun to see you're still at it. I'm down to just two at home. Well, really only one as Laura is doing private tutoring with a friend who is working with her and three other girls who have similar learning challenges as she has. Molly and I are in our third year of doing Classical Conversations. I also am in my second year teaching an IEW writing class at a local co-op. Hopefully, I will be teaching one or two more classes there next year. We moved over the summer, so we're in a three bedroom townhouse now. Emily is a freshman at a local community college and Sarah is in her senior year at a local high school. Time just seems to go faster every year, doesn't it?!