Bigger, Unit 8 (1/2 speed)
This week I did not do so good taking pictures of our activities!
We learned about "King" Phillip's War or the Indian war and how Phillip had much Wampum, we made Wampum belts from purple and white rice. We did so at co-op and the kiddo's had a blast doing it. I had them look in the history book and practice on a scrap piece of paper first what they wanted to draw. They came out so nice
Since we place most of our art into a "Picture Story Book" and we write key idea, we did not have to do the notebooking! By making the belt the kids realized why Wampum was a good trade since it was very time consuming to make and we did not even bore holes in our beads. How tedious it was.
For dictation we were doing 3 lessons a week and have moved on rather quickly so we are slowing it down to 2 lessons so we don't get in level 3 dictation too quickly since it gets hard fairly fast! Even though the kids seldom make mistakes. The most interesting thing came to me in doing dictation at co-op. The boys (there are 2 boys and a 1 girl) are usually so excited to get together that they rush through their work and make more mistakes than when they are at their own homes. So I spoke to them and cautioned them about rushing and the last 2 weeks they have been fine
For math we will be caught up to the Unit we are in by the time we get to Unit 13. We are going into Unit 4 and Elijah has absolutely loves his "math games" as he calls them and wants to keep playing them! He is doing very well and again with Grandpa here who is in accounting, we showed him some of the ways SM teaches and he was very impressed with it! My Dad was a school principal in South America, but his major was in math and he also likes the way Singapore teaches. That has brought me much comfort since math remains my really challenging area!! Now I am starting to do better at it myself PTL
I did take a picture at piano lesson this week. Ds is doing well according to his teacher and is ready to move to book 2 He is so excited! A friend from church who is a very anointed musician (worship leader) has a music school. Elijah started taking lessons last October and is going to be in his first recital at the end of May
Our science experiment had to be adjusted here in our humid Florida weather! We used a balloon to show static electricity, because nothing we tried made us see a spark. PTL for the internet. I was able to Google it and we watched a video on u-tube that showed us a beautiful spark. It was a great discussion point and the kids all remember the sparks they have felt on our "cold" wintry days. We also went skiing in Colorado this past February and my ds remembered the frequent shocks we got there and how even our hair stood on end when we took off our fleece jackets.
Cursive is another thing we do full speed and we are loving it! Literally the kids can't wait to learn the next letter and learn all the letters in their names so they can start writing their name in cursive. handwriting is not ds's strongest side so I have to be a little lenient with him. As great as he is with gross motor, fine motor is still growing and improving. Even his coloring and drawing skills are slowly improving so I am very encouraged that we do as much drawing for our science notebooks, it seems more meaningful to him and he seems to enjoy it. Even when we do vocabulary he is doing well coming up with drawings.
We now do 3 vocabulary words, just not on the same day
Learning about the planets have been a big hit! He wanted to draw them himself and I pulled it up on the internet like Carrie recommends and he went ahead and colored them as good as he can. We did not do the scale drawing, but I explained to him what a scale drawing is and we had great discussions on the size of the sun from earth and how distance makes things appear smaller. Than we remembered a lesson we did in Beyond where you had to take an object back to see how the size appears smaller.
Thank you again Carrie for a wonderful curriculum to use and follow! Now on to Unit 9!
