Our Week In Review - Ancient Israel

It's been a while since I've posted about school. After our very relaxing Christmas break, we eased back in to our school routine with a couple of half days. We have 30 minutes of book time every day (pleasure reading, and everyone reads, even me!) but on those half days we spent even more time with our beloved books.


We spent the first two weeks back at school finishing up Unit two of Tapestry of Grace Year 1, which took us through the period of the judges in Ancient Israel, and into Saul's kingship. We spent a lot of time reading I Samuel and talking about Saul's shift from predominately good to predominately bad. So many interesting stories and concepts ~ such as the Lord himself sending a "troubling" spirit (some versions say "evil" spirit) upon Saul, after he had disobeyed and ceased to find favor in the eyes of the Lord.

This is son C's Saul booklet.




In case you can't read the words below, C thought that Saul's positive traits were: he was impressive, God changed his heart, God's Spirit was upon him, he prophesied, he was a good fighter. His negative traits were: disobedient, proud, impatient, foolish.



We have found a new morning routine that is working pretty well and allows me to spend time with Little Man doing kindergarten work every day. We got to the point in his math book where he needed to review the concepts each day (rather than doing a week's worth of work in one day as we did for a while last fall). He spent two weeks learning the number value of each of the colored blocks/rods, and now is working on addition!


Snuggling together and watching a science video.


Daughter G is plugging away in her physical science book, and if she stays on track she is set to finish by the end of May. She did a super cool experiment this week involving air pressure. First she lit a candle that was set in the middle of some colored water (colored just so we could see the water better).


Then she covered the candle with a glass. As the candle used up the oxygen inside the glass, water from outside the glass was "sucked" in to fill the void.


Just before the candle burned out, nearly all the water was inside the glass. Can you see the difference in the outside water level vs. the inside water level? It was really cool to watch, and she explained the process very well to the rest of the family.


At the end of the week, body paint during bath time!


Also this week, I cooked an entire five pound bag of dry black beans, which made the equivalent of 12 cans! I will use them in recipes for the next several weeks.

We made some plans for our Unit 2 unit celebration, but I think we will need to hold off on having it until after daddy gets a new job, so we will probably end up combining our unit 2 celebration and our unit 3 celebration into one.

Last week was a week off of history studies (we did all other schoolwork) while we played a little catch up. Now we are looking forward to starting unit 3 tomorrow!