Japan was great. It helped that my husband had taken several business trips over there and his employer gave him a bunch of information and fliers about Japan. He also took pictures when he was over there, so we had those, too.
For Geography, we read in the Atlas about Japan and read the interesting facts pages. The day came to make the Japanese flag, and originally, I was just going to have them color the copy from the book, but Pooh wanted to "make the flag." So, I drew circles on red paper, and let them cut them out and glue them on. Instant craft! Pooh loves doing crafts for some reason. Then, on the "colors" page, where we colored the fish, I just so happened to have eyelets left over from my paper scrapbooking life, so the kids cut out the fish, and I put the eyelets on so they could easily string them up.
In science, we had a couple of experiments to do. The first set involved salt water. I didn't have enough salt, so we skipped those. I think I might try to remember to do them this summer or something. The second set involved showing how cold water sinks. Ours didn't work to well. I think an aquarium would have been better. Most of our readings were about oceans, and the boys joined in and made science pages, too, a couple of days. Also, it was warm enough for us to do nature walks this week. We got to go just after the snow melted, and our "stream" through our park was really rushing, so that was neat for the kids to see how the water really moves, but it made me nervous walking over those bridges with no railings!
I just realized I haven't been doing a good job of explaining to Rabbit about why we're studying the biomes. I haven't been explicitly tying in the region. I think it was pretty obvious when we studied Brazil, Mexico, and Africa. But, I think Japan may be more subtle. I'll have to remember to go over that with her.
Rabbit did okay with her copy work, and writing. And, for the vocabulary words, she again wrote several sentences each week. I think having only one to do each week really motivates her to write more for that one.
We keep marching on with Sequential Spelling. I think she loves that she is spelling big words and getting them right (at least during spelling time), but I know she still doesn't like how long the lists are. We often break it up still, doing 13 words, then reading time, and then 12 words.
We've been doing most of English orally. One day I was able to make a fill-in-the-blank worksheet for her out of the lesson. I realize now, after going through the manual, I forgot to do the Haiku lesson with Rabbit. Maybe I'll catch it next time.
For math, we finished off lesson 21, and lesson 22, except the quiz for lesson 22.
For art, we've been doing the Origami - I didn't have the stuff for the art projects. The kids like the origami, and Pooh has done one "dog," too.
We finished up one Abeka 3rd grade reader and moved on to the next one. We really enjoyed Secret in the Maple Tree. It was like a chapter book. This next reader is a bunch of stories in one book. It is kind of funny, because we read some of these stories through the book basket list in ECC. Rabbit gets kind of bummed when I skip the ones we have already read.
We finished Gladys Aylward's book. What a great life, and I love how she lived out her passion. She was the third missionary who really focused on helping children.
We haven't done Spanish everyday, thanks to dance class, but we're progressing. We probably only have 15 lessons or so left. I'll probably stop doing an Spanish when we finish.
We also got two, "Families of Japan" type videos from the library. They were great. We also got "Big Bird Goes to Japan," kind of for fun. It was okay, but there was a scary scene where they show the "guards" of a temple (basically statues that look like goblins). If you have sensitive kids, I wouldn't get it.
Even though they believe in lots of gods, Japan felt a lot "lighter" than China. Perhaps because it is not a communist country.
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