Our Week in Review

This would be for last week. :-) I was too busy last weekend to post this!

I have usually focused on our history studies when sharing about our week in review, and though we learned some great things last week about President James Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine, I am going to focus on science this time. We are using the book Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, from the Apologia Young Explorers Series, and we love it! There are 3 major areas of study in the book: birds, bats and flying reptiles, and insects. Right now we are learning about birds, and I am freshly amazed each week at the creative power of God!

It has been a blessing to teach this class at co-op each Friday. Each family does the reading at home during the week, and then when we are together we do activities that reinforce the concepts in the book, along with notebooking to record what we are learning. The older students are also involved in doing special projects outside of class, while the younger children do lots of hands on activities. Last week we learned about the intricacies of feathers. We looked at a feather under a microscope, and while they look rather ordinary to the naked eye, the microscope reveals the incredible detail God gave to feathers to make them flexible yet strong, able to support the weight of the bird but not break in a strong wind. How can something so soft also be so strong? It was so neat to hear the students say things like, "wow!" or "cool!" when it was their turn to look at the latticework of barbs and barbules under the microscope.

We also learned the correct terms for the markings of a bird so that we can more easily identify them and all be talking about the same thing. We practiced identifying many different kinds of birds. We listened to a variety of bird calls on CD. And then we made corn cob bird feeders in order to attract more birds to all of our yards! We slathered peanut butter on the cobs and then rolled them in birdseed. Here are our older 4 children hanging their feeders in our yard after we got home.






The VERY exciting news in our household last week was that our older 3 children have all qualified for their yellow stripe belt test in Tae Kwon Do!! This coming Saturday they will go to the TKD school, I will pay more money, and they will take the test to earn the next belt (white with a yellow stripe in the middle). Very exciting stuff!

Our TKD school had a halloween party last Saturday that we went to as a family. Here I am with one of the 3 musketeers (see my long tail?).


And our children went as (in chronological order) a pirate girl, a bat, ironman, batman, and a lion.


Here's our Little Man playing "hot pumpkin".


And son C playing "pin the black belt on the mummy."


Son L almost got the golfball inside the open mouthed pumpkin!! That was a HARD game!


Much fun was had by all, and it was a nice ending to our week. Gratitude fills my heart for another week of loving and learning with my family.