Our Week in Review

Here are a few highlights of our week last week.

In Bible we read John chapter 13, which talks about the Passover Feast which Jesus and his disciples shared together just before his arrest and crucifixion. This is commonly referred to as the "Last Supper". We talked about how this was Jesus' last chance to tell his disciples the important stuff. His last shot at imparting wisdom and truth to them. So we need to attach that weight of meaning to these words. His "last words" actually span the next 4 chapters, so we are not all the way through them yet, but we noted that one of the major things Jesus seemed to have wanted them to get, was to love one another as He loved us. I have been pondering what that means for me as His follower, and what it means for our family. Here are their Bible Journal pages of the last supper:



(Little Man chose to color a page from an Old Testament coloring book instead. A lovely prerogative of being the youngest child!) ;-)


We love our new schoolroom, but it has been rather chilly down there lately, especially since we still don't have a furnace (more on that in another post), so we have done school upstairs quite a bit this fall. Here Little Man is doing a preschool activity at the kitchen table and C is in the background doing math right in front of one of our borrowed space heaters.

Again, right in front of a space heater!


Son G had to do some correcting this week of 5 digit multiplication problems. Daddy helped check his work. :-)


And son C finished his Math U See Alpha book with a lesson on telling time! He was sooooo excited to learn about time, and when I gave him his new Beta book, his eyes were shining and he said, "I'm so tempted to start this book right away today!" Don't you just love that enthusiasm?


We have been working on writing every day this year, thanks to our wonderful little co-op!


I just wanted to highlight this dandy little writing tool that IEW sells, called a portable wall. It is only $7 on their website, and it is a tri-fold cardstock that visually shows all 9 IEW writing models, has an entire page of -ly adverbs, synonyms for the word "said" (which is a banned word), and loads of other helpful tools for writing. And when it's opened up, it helps cut down on distractions too. We use it almost daily and my children LOVE it! (I need to get a couple more!)


Daughter G worked on another science experiment this week from her Apologia General Science textbook. The purpose of this one was to illustrate the process of experimentation, and it was a wonderful illustration. First she had to gently drop an egg in water and see what happened. As you can see, it immediately sank to the bottom of the glass.


Then she added a tsp of salt, stirred it until it dissolved, and then recorded what happened to the egg. The first several times there was no change, but she continued this process 6 times until.......



......the egg floated! It began to float on the 4th attempt, but she continued adding a tsp at a time until the entire end of the egg was up out of the water. We talked about trial and error, and how important it is to not give up when the first experiment you do to explain a hypothesis, fails. We can learn more from our "failures" than our successes at times! (hmmm, great life lesson couched in science here!)

For this week, we are doing half days today and tomorrow, and Wed will be getting ready for Thanksgiving all day long. The kids are super excited for Thursday, and so am I!