heartofdakota.com

Hello Ladies,

What was YOUR week Like?

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Hi! I hope everyone had a wonderful week. We finished up early this week so that we could enjoy a day off tomorrow!

I have to say, this was probably one of the most FUN weeks we have had! The experiments were neato and the Roman meal was so much fun! I have tried to make my pics smaller this week because I have QUITE a lot of them!

Creation to Christ

This week, ds11 finished up the book about Galen and the gateway to medicine. This has been his first time studying medicine/human body and he is absoutely eating it up! Here is one of his science notebooking sheets: a bunch of facts about Galen!



He did a fantastic job on his notebooking pages this week as well as his drawing of the chariot. He is really starting to get creative with the 2nd box each week. He tends to make each picture a little bit funny or creative. Normally, I would discourage this is his studies, but he just loves it so much and i figure, why not? I mean, he is definitely being creative!



DITHR has just really blessed us this year in reading. We just started the last genre we plan to do this year. He has 4 genres left and my plan is to go through those next year with RTR and then to just start over and go through the genres and pages again with different books. He is 100% independent on DITHR whenever he can be. I was really impressed to see his pages from this week. He came up with these answers himself...and it broke my heart to see when he wrote that he has faith in God even when his dad doesn't believe. It is true...his father (my ex husband) is an athiest and that is very hard on my son. It breaks my heart to see it coming out in his work, but I am so glad he feels like he has a place to "talk" about it. I know that God can work this situation to His good! I just need to stay in prayer for my son's faith!



The BEST science experiment EVER! ds11 learned about how blood clots by making a mixture of water and food coloring in one bowl, a mixture of oil and food coloring in another bowl, mixing those two bowls together, adding cotton fibers, and then pouring it through a funnel. Check this out! (Oh...and our blood is green because we were out of RED food coloring! OOPS!)



AND...without further Adieu...our Roman meal! We don't have a coffee table, so we did sit at the kitchen table...but we even got dh (ds11's step-dad) involved. It was so much fun for all of us!!

Beyond

We had a precious week with Beyond too. We read about George Washington being sworn in as the very first President of the United States in History. And we learned all about the fruits of the spirit during our Bible time. The song this week was so much fun. At the end of the week, we made a t-shirt, colored it like the one my ds was wearing, and wrote some of the fruits we should hide in our hearts on the inside. Here is ds' shirt:



After George Washington was sworn in, the people set off fire works. We did a little experiment to see the colors of the fireworks. AGAIN, my red food coloring was out and we had to use green...but I still think the project turned out very neat!



Ds is doing well in DITHR also. He started out the Folk Tale genre reading Jeremy - tale of an Honest Bunny. Here is a comparision he did between himself and Jeremy bunny.



Spelling is going really well for him too. He is still doing his phonics program just to solidify everything. We are using Explode the Code for Phonics because that is what he started with in Kindergarten. He enjoys it, so if it works...why change? Here is a page of his phonics (he is on book 7 of 8...so we WILL finish this year! YAY!) and also his sentences for his spelling words this week.



We are LOVING our Story time book right now, Mr Popper's Penguins. Ds7 begs me to read each day and ds11 actually stops his work and listens in too. Here is a drawing he did (refused to color that day for me, though ) to show something funny that happened in the story. This was cute because Mr. Popper let it snow in the house and wet the floors so they would turn into ice for the penguins. ds7 thought his snow was not obvious enough, so he wrote in "snow" and drew arrows. LOL I had to giggle at that about as much as I giggled at Mr. Popper spraying the floor and letting it freeze!



Thank you, Carrie, for all of these amazing memories I am making with my children. I love HOD!

Hope everyone has a blessed weekend!!

I love coming here and seeing what everyone is up to. It gives me more to look forward to! We have finished up our first unit in LHFHG! I am looking forward to the rest of this Kindergarten year! Here is a link to my blog:

http://lllath.blogspot.com/2011/03/lhfh ... arten.html

Mandy

Happy Friday, everyone!

This week in Little Hands To Heaven Unit 10 the children learned about Joshua leading the Israelites - and the walls of Jericho. My 4 year old daughter already knows this story from children's church - where they got to march and toot pretend horns just two weeks ago, and she was very excited to be able to do it again. My blog post this week is about our Jericho activities:

http://www.broomandcrown.com/2011/03/wa ... elted.html

Rebecca- I ALWAYS enjoy reading your week-in-reviews!!! CTC looks amazing- I can see how the blood-clot-experiment would be the best!! And, what a wonderful Roman meal!
Also, your sons work in Beyond gets me so very excited for next year, as we are loving Little Hearts this year- I can see how much we will also love Beyond! I'm so glad you take the time to share!

Mandy- hurray for such a wonderful first week(s)!! I think it is so wise of you to be starting out at half-speed- it sounds perfect for your family! Science is a favorite here too- just today Elliana asked, "Do we get to do Science? I LOVE Science!!" I'm so glad because (to be honest) I did not like Science at all growing up... but even I enjoy it now! I also think it was great that you went with the Earlybird Math... it seems so simple, but is a great foundation for our kiddos to have. I know we enjoy it here too. What a great idea to cut up a dollar store map too! I love how you showed all the fun you are having with "Little Hearts"!

Kristin- it looks like you had so much fun with the story of Jericho (even trying to build with crackers & peanut butter on such a hot day)! Your girls sure are cute!!

Well, I am finally getting around to sharing what we have been up to in Little Hearts for His Glory for the last month (or months)! It is always such a joy, but has been even more enjoyable now that I have not been experiencing so much "morning sickness"! Our girls continue to do so well, & enjoy their time doing school each day! This week we started Spelling (from the Beyond guide) & they are loving it! Hurray!
Here's a link to our fun & learning...
http://ourfamilyforhisglory.blogspot.co ... g-fun.html

Blessings!

Aww...thank you Jessica. I made it a goal of mine this year to share each week as a testimony for what HOD is doing for us. I want to be able to show others who are considering it how full and wonderful our days are! I am so glad you enjoy our posts. I hope to keep making them for a long time to come.

I've gotten behind with my weeks in review and finally got a chance to update my blog today. Here's what we've been doing for the past few weeks.

http://cherish-each-moment.blogspot.com ... 27-28.html

Bigger: Unit 30

In history ds is learning about the Wright brothers and their experiments with their gliders and finding Kitty Hawk to test them, because it is the windiest place in North America.
This week we had the most exciting Geography activity, to show that the Wright brothers needed wind to keep their glider in the air. My blow dryer and cotton ball did not work very well (only has heat settings) , so my dear friend send hers and a ping pong ball to try and we had so much fun!

In science we had a neat experiment to show how airflow goes from a high pressure area to a low pressure area, by filling up a square with stuffed animals (high pressure area) and adding a little hallway (low pressure area) to see how if they were stuffed in the room and the door opened, they would empty into the hallway.

For DITHOR ds had to write a letter pretending he was the main character in the book. We are doing Non-Fiction and he is reading :The Year of Ms Agnes. Here is his letter. I choose not to make too many corrections and change it to my way so we can compare as he grows into it. I did help him think of other words to start his sentences with, so the flow was better.

Poetry is going well, he loves reciting the poems and enjoys drawing pictures now to go with his copywork! The questions are challenging, but I can see tremendous growth from the beginning of the year in both of us

Vocabulary has become easier with the great lessons in R&S2 teaching alphabetizing and with all the practice ds had the last 29 units . This week he finished his vocab page, before I returned to help him. Short and sweet and to the point.

Dictation has been going very well. He had a couple of mistakes he caught himself when he checked his work and ended up not having to repeat any passages this week and he was so very excited. Ds still has a little trouble with letter reversals at times, but now he catches himself!!!

The Hymn ds is studying in this unit is "Take My Life, and Let it Be" and he told me it is his favorite hymn! So glad that Carrie has added a hymn study in Bigger. As A.W. Tozer states in The Persuit of God: "Hymnody is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the singer seeks, he knows he has already found". I can hear ds singing his hymns in bed when he can't fall asleep!

For Bible study it is another great character trait: CAREFULNESS, this is something that ds can really focus on and he has been this week. PTL , he has been more careful putting binders away so they don't fall, more careful pouring milk, more careful with is handwriting, more careful checking his work

What wonderful weeks you all had!!! Love reading what everyone one is doing and seeing your sweet children growing and learning so much. Thanks for sharing.

Little Hearts for His Glory: unit 12 and 13

Ds this week: "Mommy, Do I have more school"? Mom:"yes". Ds:"yeah, I like school". Mom:" I am so glad you like school, I like doing school with you".

We finished unit 12 and began unit 13. Because of our schedule with co-op and piano we do LHFHG 4 times a week. We do the 3R's 5 times a week.

He enjoys his math activities very much and is so eager to share what he learned with Dad. He started off the week writing number words between 11-20. He than moved to learning about halfs and quarters and ds had much fun folding, coloring and cutting his papers to show what 1/2 and 1/4 look like.


Ds absolutely loves doing ARFH and is so excited every time he gets a new page to do. He does a great job taking his time and his handwriting is beautiful. (not trying to compare with older brother, but noticing different strengths) What he enjoys most of all is the coloring activity on the other page and learning about that animal or thing! This week he wanted to use watercolor paint for the ocean around his tropical fish and he glued on cheerios for the bubbles!

This is another activity sheet where he had to write!

Ds is learning about the miracles of Jesus and here he was going along the path as Jesus went along the path to go and raise Jairus his daughter from the dead. He had much fun jumping, hopping, tiptoeing with little sis. At the end of the path he had to tell and show me in what we ways we show love to him! I got hugs, kisses and kind words.

After learning about the wind and waves obeying Jesus as He calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee. One of his science activities was to show how water has a surface tension and how it rolls when you blow it. Than we had a boat float on the water and making droplets next to it to see how the boat would respond. Everyone joined for this most fun activity.

We had a really neat Dramatic Play this week according to the miracle Jesus performed in healing and forgiving the paralytic who was let down through the roof by his friends. Ds build a nice structure, I made a roof with paper towels and he lowered the paralytic in and had him leaping afterward singing :"God is so good". That is one of the songs we do in our Celebrate Jesus Time before school in the morning!

Finding the answers is another one of ds's workbooks that he enjoys doing. He likes the stories where he has to pick out what picture goes with it and is learning to give his own descriptions to me so I can pick from the other pictures which one he is describing. He is able to read some of the directions now and just starts doing the work. So he did today with the phone numbers and did not want me to check till he had them glued on and he did a great job!

Ds loves to sing and dance to the scripture songs and very much enjoys the activities to memorize the scripture verses as well. He does a great job and we find that we can always use the verses in our daily living. His verse this week is Matthew 5:16 "Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. We went to dinner this week and 2 older ladies commented to the kids what well behaved children they were and what a joy it was to watch them. My husband commented that it was the grace of God in our life, teaching us how to raise the children for the glory of Jesus! So, it was a great way to show to the children, that as Christians we can be shining lights for Jesus, and we need to give Him the glory!!!

Thank you Carrie for making LHFHG such a fun way of learning and helping us Mom's to instill a love of learning into our children not just for school, but for the Word of God!

LHTH (just a preview-we are starting it officially in August)

We read the bible stories and do the letter activities, because dd is begging to do school! I am amazed at how much she is picking up, but still wants to have her own special time with Mom doing her own school work
So we are on the letter O and she colored them orange and cut all those oranges I circled from a printed page of clipart. This week dd decided that she would cut the letter page as well. This week she decided she wanted to cut all around the outside of her page off herself and she did great. I used to only have her cut 1 short side.

I also have some little workbooks and other activities that keep her happy while the older ones do theirs, we keep it short and sweet so she can learn that we don't just do page after page and that she all of a sudden gets bored or wants to quit. This way we establish that Mom is the one who is in charge of the activities in school and we have to finish what we start. I did not want to set a bad standard for later on, when she has to do school and thinks she can stop or do whatever she wants.

Dd enjoys being read to from her own bible and answering questions after her bible readings! She is so excited she is getting big as she is close to turning 4!

Wow, I just love reading everyone's posts on LHFHG, Bigger, and CTC! You are all doing such a good job and having so much fun in the process! We'll get to do those programs next year, and reading your posts on them makes it hard to wait!

Well, a HUGE blessing came on Monday of this week, when we learned that HOD is planning on doing high school guides!!! We are so excited! HOD has been a tremendous blessing from God and now it can continue to be a blessing and joy in years to come. All the way with HOD!

LHTH-Unit 22
My little two have so enjoyed this week! The rhyme "Jesus Is The Son of God" has become a favorite! They did an activity where we made shadows on the wall. They learned that just like our shadows follow us all over, the disciples followed Jesus all over during his ministry. It was so funny because my three year old keeps calling her shadow, her "statue". She kept us laughing through that activity!

Beyond-Unit 22
This week we discussed Benjamin Franklin and how he helped others with the talents that the Lord gave him. We also did an activity about lightening, what it is, and how to measure how far away it is. It was a really fun activity. One of my children has a real fear of lightening, and this really helped him to understand it better and not fear it so much!
We're also learning a lot of geography within this guide. They learned to find the Great Lakes, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia this week. Our poem Little Things also led into some great conversations about streams, rivers, lakes and oceans. It wasn't exactly scheduled within our guide to discuss, but wound up being a great learning time-just from reading our poem together before they began their copywork. So many of the great benefits of HOD come from the things that are unwritten in the guides--Thanks HOD!
On another day's activities we learned about Peter Fenueil and his copper grasshopper on the weather vane at Fanueil's Hall. The kids just loved this story so much, as their Daddy does a lot of welding and working with metal, in his spare time. I'll bet you can't guess what they asked him to make next?!? I don't think we'll have a grasshopper weather vane anytime soon! (At least I hope not! ) They also got to make some edible peanut butter dough to make models of grasshoppers with. They had a ball with this one. It wasn't until days later that I realized they never put the wings on!! Oh, well, it was a lot of fun anyway and taught them a lot about the anatomy of a grasshopper. Here's a picture of the grasshoppers they made:



Preparing-Unit 22
We had a lot of fun this week as we learned about some of the roman emporers and christianity. It is so fascinating to learn more about what the early church was like and about the hardships they faced for their faith in Christ. We are so blessed that we don't have to endure what they did. For storytime, we finished Fountain of Life and have learned so much about Jewish customs, laws and feasts at the time of Jesus. It really depicted the salvation message very well. I can't wait to read it again with my next ones! Next, we started Raiders of the Sea. What a great book! My son and I both are hooked! This book really gets the blood flowing. The suspense is killing us, but we are remaining faithful to only reading the assigned chapters each day and not reading ahead! But I've had to hide the book, because he's so curious to find out what happens to Bree and Devin! I've NEVER had to hide a book before! Did I mention that I totally LOVE HOD!! I tried to find pictures of this week's history project, because we weren't sure exactly what position to put on the laurel leaves, but I couldn't find one. So this is his interpretation of the directions. Here's a picture of the golden laurel wreath for his history project:

DITHR keeps on being so amazing for my son. He is learning so much about digging deeper in the story, and really getting so much more than if he'd just read the book alone. He is applying character traits to book characters as well as himself! It's causing him to think much more than he ever did with other reading programs in the past.
At the end of our unit, he started the book Leif the Lucky for his Independent History Study. He's really enjoying that one. He hasn't spent much time in the past learning about this time period, and it's becoming possibly his favorite so far. He just laughs out loud at some of the superstitions the vikings had at that time.


Well, that's our week, hope you are all enjoying your HOD journeys!

I have not posted in a while but wanted to share just a tidbit from our week. We enjoyed it since it was spring break and we had no other obligations, however, we also implemented something new... My dd 10 has been wanting to get done earlier...well, I was completely on board with that but it just ended up with me constantly reminding her..."thought you wanted to get done...stay on task if you want to get done," etc. So last week I suggested that we try a timer. NOT giving her a certain amount of time but just starting the stopwatch to see how long she was taking to complete each section of work (PHFHG). Well, we were DONE by 12:15! Typically it's 3:00 and we've still got a couple of things to do. I am new to homeschooling so realize there will always (especially now) be some tweaking to the schedule though we are grateful to God for this tweak as it frees up quite a bit of time for me! I'm sure many of you veteran homeschoolers are chuckling to yourself about the newbie taking so long to get done with one child, ha!
For our week, my dd 10 loved the medieval meal...she decorated a menu and served everyone including her visiting college cousin. Very fun!
We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE HOD! As always, Thanks, Carrie!

Ladies,

I loved reading your weekly check-ins! It spurs me on as I'm in my busy writing season now.

Thanks so much for sharing! I am always amazed and blessed at the peek inside your homes! The Lord is using each of you in a mighty way as you minister to the hearts and minds of your children.

Blessings,
Carrie