Our Week In Review

We had a good week of school last week. Our older students learned about the the Hundred Year's War and the complex relationship between England and France toward the end of the Middle Ages, while our younger ones focused on individual people, such as Joan of Arc. I read a Joan d'Arc picture book to the two younger boys, and then Little Man drew a picture of an event in her life, while son C wrote in this mini book what he remembered from our reading. I love this lapbooking/notebooking method for assessing how much he has remembered and internalized from our reading! He is the perfect age for this... still loves cutting and pasting, and not too much writing to tire his hand.


We have used my Kindle quite a bit this year for school. A couple weeks ago it really saved the day for daughter G. I had forgotten to buy one of the books she needed for her online literature class, and I realized this at the start of the week she needed it. Our libraries didn't have it, no time to inter library loan it, and no time to purchase it and have it sent to us unless I paid for expensive overnight shipping. I checked to see if it was available in the Kindle version, and it was! I purchased and downloaded it, and in less than 5 minutes our daughter was busily reading. Love modern technology when it works well!




What was different about this week:

We were blessed with a "Chaos Tower" which is like Marbleworks on steroids. Super fun to build, and super fun to watch the balls go through the gauntlet!



What worked well this week:

Our schoolroom!!

Having access to all our educational materials is such a JOY! We re-instituted activity time with son C and Little Man this week. Each morning right after Bible time they get to do a learning activity. It is a nice change of pace from bookwork, and nice for them to spend time together. One of their activities was Boggle Jr:




We are wrapping up our studies of the Middle Ages during this current week and will soon turn our attention to the Renaissance and Reformation. Such a fascinating time period to study!

Our Week in Review - History and Science

The boys and I are starting up science again next week, but our daughter G has been working hard all summer to finish Apologia General Science, so she can begin Physical Science this year. She is currently in module 13 (3 more to go and we're done!) and did an experiment this week to prove that combustion requires oxygen.


It involved floating a candle in vinegar inside a bowl with tall sides, and then slowly pouring baking soda into the vinegar. The results were quite dramatic!


So dramatic in fact, that her brothers came running to look and the experiment had to be repeated! The flame whooshed out very quickly once the gas from the vinegar and baking soda took up all the space inside the bowl. We tried for a few minutes to relight the candle, and it took about 5 minutes before all the gas was dissipated enough for oxygen to once again fill the bowl and allow the candle to be relit. Very cool experiment!


In history this week we focused on the role of the pharoah, and the the amazing construction of pyramids. In addition to our assigned history reading, we also drew Egyptian pictures from this book:


It helps the student draw step by step like this:


Our son C ended up with these 3 great pictures!


This was also our first week of virtual co-op, and son G has joined the co-op this year! Here he is, all plugged in and enjoying the discussion!


Soon we will need two dedicated computers, but for now daughter G is able to use my husband's laptop just for co-op. When his contract job ends and he has to turn in his work laptop, he will need this one all the time.


The boys worked on a pyramid mini book for their history notebooks. These are lapbooking elements available from Tapestry of Grace, but instead of making them into lapbooks we glue them onto cardstock and put them directly into our history binders. Below is Little Man's minibook. He drew the picture of a large block of stone being dragged on a wooden sled, and dictated the accompanying words to me. Here is what I wrote for him: "It takes big huge bricks and you put them on sleds and carry them to the pyramid and put them on it." Pretty good for a 5 year old!


Son L working on his pyramid lapbook.


Son C's.



And son G's.


It was a good week!

Colonial Lapbooks are finished!!

The colonial lapbooks are finished! The older 3 children did a great job on them. For those of you who may not know, lapbooks are "books" made out of file folders with small fold-it booklets glued inside. Each smaller fold-it will have some specific information in it on what the children have learned on a certain topic. This has been a wonderful way for our kids to "show what they know" and for me to use as an evaluation tool as well (how much they are retaining). We typically make one or two fold-its per week and then put them all together in the file folder at the very end of each unit.

The fold-its for these lapbooks were primarily taken from the colonial lapbook CD that Knowledge Box Central sells. But we didn't use all the ones included on the CD and we made up a few of our own. We went through a few super busy weeks where we made no fold-its, so our finished products are just one full file folder in size, with half a file folder cut and taped along one side to make a large fold out page. In other words, a total of 3 pages.

It would be over-kill to show pictures of every child's lapbook, so I've included detailed photos of just our oldest child's lapbook. She is very particular in how she likes things, so she put all the fold-its in where she wanted them, even if they weren't in chronological order. :-) She is 10 years old and in the fifth grade. I required her to fill every page of every fold-it with as much information as she could fit on it. Our 8 year old had to write at least two sentences on each fold-it, and our 7 year old had to write just one. If there was more than one sentence worth of pertinent information, I did the rest of the writing for him.

Here is her cover, finished except for the coloring.

When you open it up, you see the flap of the extra page on the right side.

Here it is with the extra flap opened up, so you can see all 3 pages of fold-its.

On the first page she has a colonial quilt, a map labeling the 13 colonies, a picture of a ship with the names of the 3 ships who brought the original colonists to Jamestown written on its sail, and a "who were the Puritans?" fold-it.

This is the quilt fold-it, opened up.

And the map fold-it, opened up. It shows the northern colonies, middle colonies, and southern colonies in different colors.

This is the 3rd page, the extra fold out page. It has a colonial jobs matching game, and 2 of our home-made flap books, one describing each of the middle colonies and the other describing each of the southern colonies.

This is the matching game up close, with the cards showing.

And this shows two pages of her middle colonies flap book, one on New York (on the top) and the other on New Jersey (on the bottom).

Here is the middle, or second page of the lapbook. It has a fold-it on William Penn, a small fold-it telling where the first Pilgrims landed, a Pocahontas flap book, and our third home-made flapbook on the northern colonies.

Here is the Pocahontas flap book opened up. She wrote out Pocahontas's life story in the form of a cartoon strip, so there are small numbers written above the text in certain places that correspond to one of the boxed pictures on the bottom of the flap. There are 3 pages to this flap-book and each one is chock full! This was a project totally self-directed and which she loved.

And last but not least, here is a page from our 7 year old's flap-book on the southern colonies. It illustrates our rule of thumb for one sentence of his writing, and the rest written by me.

I am so glad these are DONE! They are fun to look at and are great tools for remembering all we have studied since September. They will be proudly on display at our unit celebration tomorrow!