heartofdakota.com

Ok Girls,

What was YOUR week Like?

You can post:

a- A picture
b- A blog Link
c- A written synopsis
d- Your favorite memory
e- Anything you want that shares your HOD excitement!

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Another great week with HOD!

Preparing Heart for His Glory Unit 2

My daughter wanted to do something special to share her poem this week. Click on the link to see it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rly5jNb8Z7M

She is doing a great job with all her reading; she reads Grandpa's Box independently as well because of her age. Here is a picture of her art with warm colors/cool colors:



Resurrection to Reformation Unit 2

My son is doing such a great job with all his independent work. He really loves his science and shares enthusiastically what he's learning each day!





ETA: There is an optional experiment on page 19 of the Exploring Creation with Astronomy book. You're supposed to melt a chocolate bar with a magnifying glass. We didn't have any chocolate so my son tried ice cream and an ice cube. Neither one of them worked very well so he forgot about it. He found out today by accident that if something is black it works much better. He was reading his extension outside and playing around with the magnifying glass. He jumped and we all asked what happened! He was wearing black pants and he said that the magnifying glass caused them to get extremely hot and smoke almost instantly! So he experimented with taking other black things outside and it worked with ALL of them to some extent. It is really neat! He found out that it works with blown up balloons of any color too. It also works with balloons that are filled with water but it takes just a little longer. Here is a picture of part of his experimentation where he tried different ways of coloring a paper black. He said the sharpie spot kept burning longer. *Parental supervision is advised of course*

Another great (though shorter than usual) week of HOD!

We took Friday and Monday off because we had guests visiting. My 6YO actually asked "Mom, aren't we doing school today?" She loves it so much! Which I think is great considering we're now 5 weeks in. She also feels that we should always have another family living in our house, she's such an extrovert!

We finished unit 4 of Beyond and started unit 5. Even though I was personally pretty tired from hosting guests for 3 1/2 days, I found myself able to get through the school time and enjoyed the time with my daughters. DD6 enjoys Emerging Readers but has also asked to read more books to me, she found one that is more challenging and pretty fun so she's reading that too. Of course, it adds 15-20 minutes but I don't want to discourage her from reading! It makes me wonder though if I should push ahead and maybe get us toward DITHOR more quickly... I will have to wait and see. She still needs some solidifying in her reading skills, long words with many syllables are still difficult for her.

The thing that I think has been the most fun and encouraging this week is our worship time. First of all it's been sweeter because my heart has been turned toward the Lord, Praise Him for giving us the gift of music! My DD6 just LOVES the singing and I see so much of her heart come out during this time, her voice joins very strongly with mine since we usually sing songs that they know (choruses, hymns). Such an amazing blessing! She is also learning and growing a lot in the LA lessons, we've been talking about sentences. I'm not sure that I would have thought at her age that she could understand concepts like that, but she's picking up on it and writing sentences (today it was questions and answers) on the whiteboard has really been fun for her. And she's doing really well with spelling too. I love the challenges this has given her and how much she is learning through it!

My kids LOVE the arts and crafts. I guess I should take pictures to post. We made a barn with the verse from unit 4, Matthew 6:19-21, store up treasures in heaven! Today it was the pink tulip from the story of Love Bradford in Boys and Girls of Colonial Days. I almost didn't do it today because I needed to go grocery shopping so badly! We fit it in and they loved it! They enjoyed telling their dad the story at dinner and showing off their artwork.

Leah, what a talented girl you have. She did so well, reading while she does the hoola hoop! How cute!
I admire your sons persistence with his science experiment and I love his art work! Looking forward to CTC

MelInKansas, what an encouragement to have you dc miss doing school even when there is company she enjoys! I think it is a great issue to have, for kiddo's to want to read even more than assigned. Looking forward to seeing pictures of the art work in the future..

LHTH Unit 2

We are moving on and learned about the wickedness that came on the earth, how Noah, his family and the animals were saved through God's mercy and how sad to say the people rebelled again and build the Tower of Babel.

For our letter activity she finger painted with B-B-Blue paint and added b-b-butterflies and put b-b-button stickers on.

We worked on #2 and were supposed to find 2 hands and cut them out and pasted them onto the page. We painted dd her hand, she loved it Than she cut them out and pasted them on her #2 page, and practiced writing her numbers. Hands to show that Noah used his hands to build the ark.

For art we made a rainbow from torn construction paper as a reminder that God promised to Noah that he would never destroy the earth with a flood again. Dd quickly reminded me that it still floods in our back yard So I explained the idea of a global flood in 4 yr old terms:D

Math activity was fun, just as the Tower of Babel was supposed to have been as tall as possible to show how great people are. Dd build a tower 22 blocks high before it tumbled. After that she continued the repeat pattern first with 2, than with 3 different colors. After this dd and ds #2 continued building towers.

Another letter activity that dd had much fun with and did so well on, was to trace the letters with b-b-blocks. She made sure that the blocks matched each other. I love these activities that the children can finish up while you move on to work with the older ones.

Another fun week of doing LHTH

LHFHGUnit 19/20 (thrown off a bit, since we usually do 4 days a week)

How do you make math fun? By following Carrie her hands-on activities!
We are learning about money, value, how to spend, skip counting by 5's and 10's. For one of the activities ds received some money and was able to buy tickets for his fair rides. For the Roller Coaster, I used the ripstik since they are not to ride them during school hours. He also had a slide, Jump-O-Lene and the Carousel. He wanted to do that over and over again and had fun figuring out how much money he had to buy his tickets.

Our science experiment was a taste test. We read a about Augustine, how he and his friends stole sweet looking pears, that turned out to be bitter and how he realized his sinful ways and later on became a devout Christian and Bible teacher. I love the analogy of sin starting off being sweet, but ending up bitter and how we need to heed the Holy Spirits guidance to walk away from sin or lead us to repentance. We compared salt and sugar, un-sweet cocoa and powdered hot choc mix, lemon vs orange juice.

As Charles the Great believed in the importance of education he opened schools and in one of his school he realized that the Rich boys were lazy and the Poor boys were very hardworking. He separated them in the class to teach the Rich boys a lesson. Here we had to get magazine clippings of what Rich boys would buy compared to Poor boys. It ended up being a great instruction on wants and needs being fulfilled. How one would choose necessity over luxury.

We finished "Grandfather Frog" this week. We had such a cute narration with props. The pictures would not do it justice, but it was much fun.
Ds is doing well with his critical thinking activities and has enjoyed them. After co-reading the instructions, he finishes on his own.

As Jesus covers our sins completely we got Daddy's coat first to demonstrate full coverage and ds had to button and zip it himself. Than take it off and start all over. He enjoyed this very much. He already buttons his own shirts so he had much fun doing Daddy's big coat.
We started TRL half way into the summer and he is loving this. We did a program in K that I had used with my older son. We are on lesson 13 and I love the way they teach phonics.
Another fun filled learning week with HOD, thank you Carrie!

Ladies,

I loved reading about each of your weeks! We are not underway for school here yet, but reading your posts is getting me geared up to get ready to start! Your sharing brought back so many wonderful memories of my own kiddos doing those very things. What a joy to have those memories hidden in my heart. It made me realize how much we really do accomplish during the school year!

I am actually starting to miss the routine of school a bit, so it will be good to get ready to begin in a couple of weeks. I pray the Lord's blessing on each of your families and upon your school days! May He walk with you!

Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to share with us!

Blessings,
Carrie

Preparing at 1/2 pace with LA and Math daily Unit 2

Ds finished his rainbow on his background scene. Since he made the top light blue and swirly, and the bottom dark blue and swirly. I asked where he would have been to see a sight like this and he said the beach! Than I discussed where the rainbow would be in that scene and to think of the placement of the colors before starting. I also had him use some acrylic paint to assure total coverage of the colors.
He followed the directions from the book with just a little guidance on where the indigo goes, it says under the green, so I helped him figure that out!

We made a collage with warm and cool colors. Since we are not the most artsy people we kept it simple and I had ds figure out what placement he wanted. This I have to say was trial and error. His first one were teeny tiny piece cut out of a magazine placed in groups of their own color on the paper. So, I told him to try cutting them a bit bigger.

"The true story of Noah's Ark", is such an amazing book, we have both been amazed at the story telling and the pictures. For Independent History ds had to draw a replica of Noah's Ark and he said: " I love doing this". This for a child that did not care for coloring drawing or anything artsy. He even noticed the different color nuances in the book and did his very best! I was amazed at the end result By the end of Preparing he might become an artist.

Math and English are going very well. For narration he had a bit of trouble getting back into it for the Arctic Tundra, since it is more factual. He came to me and was not able to put his thoughts in order. I told him to just relax and we would try again later. So later on he went to his room, prayed, read it again and did a fantastic job!
I know that this is going to be a great learning experience and a great year of growth once again for us, Thank you Carrie for your hard work and dedication to partner with us in giving our children a Christ centered education .

I love reading these, and what beautiful, colorful pictures this week.

We're not updating much lately because we have traveled and then had my husband's parents staying with us for 10 days, which makes me a little shy about schooling. We did it when they were out for a walk or showering, but without photos or much fanfare. Perhaps I'll be able to take pictures next week now that the house is quiet (for one week, until our next round of houseguests when we'll take a week off from school). We only have two weeks left of LHTH (which is a little sad) and then we take another couple weeks off for family visits, and begin LHFHG in October.

Thanks moedertje! Your kids did so great on their rainbows, and your son's ark is very good! I loved the pear story too.

I've enjoyed these updates too. It's fun to look back... though I have to say with LHTH you are doing a much more thorough job of it than I did! I plan to do LHTH with my youngest next year and I'm sure we will do more than I did the first time around.

It's also fun to look ahead at some of the things that will be in store for us if we continue with HOD!

Here is our another one of my week in review catch up posts:
http://reachtothemoonandback.blogspot.c ... ek-29.html

Well, we've officially started high school! I can hardly believe how quickly the time has flown!! It seems like only yesterday we were doing pre-school at home, having fun with favorite children's stories and related activities with our beloved "Before Five in a Row" curriculum.

Now, we are equally blessed, as God has led us to "Heart of Dakota"--a Christ-centered, Biblically-based, Charlotte Mason-style curriculum.

http://www.heartofdakota.com

Last year we began the 4-year history cycle again with "Creation to Christ", and we are continuing this year with "Resurrection to Reformation".

Our school year began last Monday, August 15, 2011, with our annual "First-Day-of-School-Breakfast" at McDonald's. But, since we were starting high school, we wanted something a little more special. So, we decided to try a "retro" McDonald's about 9-10 miles away that we have always seen, but never went to before (since there are at least 4 other McDonald's restaurants within 5 miles of our house!)



The inside was nice, but not overly special. (We didn't realize this particular McD's was actually part of a gas station/truck stop along the highway! LOL)

The outside was pretty neat, though--including the old arches that framed the drive-thru!





One thing "Heart of Dakota" does is that they have neat history-related projects to go along with their reading and studies each week. Here is her "Roman Arch" made from air-dry clay:



Even the dogs enjoy homeschooling!



Overall, it was a great first week, even though by Wednesday she had a nasty stomach flu (fever, chills, nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, etc.) She lost 4# in 2 days, which had me worried--but, thankfully, she is MUCH better this week!