Week 12 in CTG

This week covers from The Burning Bush through the first five plagues in Egypt.

At first, the kids were excited to act out the plagues. Rabbit was Pharaoh, Pooh one of Pharaoh's priests/magicians, and Tigger was Moses.

However, by the end of the first day of acting out the plagues, well Rabbit was in tears about being Pharaoh, because he was the bad guy. This upset Tigger and Pooh, and well, things only went downhill from there. So, to ease tensions, I agreed to play Pharaoh for the rest of the plagues and Rabbit got to be Aaron. It went much better after that.

For the river turning into blood, I got a large cake pan, and just put about 1/4 inch of water in it. We set it on the floor, and then I dropped some red food coloring in as Moses pretended to strike the river. Very cool effect. We only made about 40 or so frogs, but did spread them out all over the living room floor. Here is our frogs piled into a heap, as described in Exodus:

We didn't do anything extra for the plagues of gnats and flies, but we did talk about how there is one rest stop in our state where we have stopped to have lunch has lots and lots and lots of flies. (My husband said, "Yep. That rest stop did have a plague of flies!") We decided it must have even been worse than that place in Egypt.

The plague on the livestock is the first plague where there was a distinction between the Hebrews and the Egyptians. So, we took half of our stuffed animals and put them in one corner of the room, and half in the other. After we "acted" our parts, I sent the priest to check on the livestock and report back his findings. We talked about how God protected the Hebrews from harm.

We didn't do any science experiments again this week. I think we needed a break. (As a side note, I've read ahead to next weeks experiments, and I think we will try those - they look interesting.) But, we read through them and discussed them as best we could.

The book basket list was light for this week, so I got books about the animals you might find in Egypt during that time - sheep, goats, camels, etc. Not sure that Rabbit really enjoyed those, though.

Rabbit got a little tired of our Pathway reader (we're almost done with it anyway), so we've switch to the Abeka 4th grade readers for now. We're reading Song of the Brook and enjoying it.

Rabbit is doing well with the vocabulary. Right now I'm just typing up matching quizzes for her to do by herself, but I help her with most of the steps of learning the new words.

We're already on step 13 in All About Spelling Level 3. One thing I started doing about 4 or 5 weeks ago during dictation is saying, "Sentence check," which is a hint for Rabbit to check punctuation and capitalization of her sentences. At first, I said it for every sentence. Then I started only saying it for sentences that she missed one or the other. Well, this Thursday or Friday, I didn't have to say it for a single sentence, and she didn't misspell anything on dictation that day. I am so proud of her. Slowly, I'm starting to see the spelling carry over to her writing some. Once, she knew something was spelled wrong, but she couldn't see how to spell it correctly. I am just glad she is beginning to recognize when she is making mistakes.

In Math, we finished lesson 6, and have started lesson 7. She seems to be doing fine with it, so we'll continue on.

In Writing Strands, we're working on a lesson to show how characters in a story "think." We have a story from personal experience, so it's going pretty well. Again, I'm helping a lot, but I think modeling how to do this stuff is a legitimate way to teach writing.

We didn't paint a stone, because by the time we got to a day to work on that project, we had 6 inches of snow on the ground. I told Rabbit we'd pick another day to try to do that lesson.

Star of Light was a terrific book to read. The kids loved the story and always wanted to know what was going to happen next. I'm looking forward to our last of the Patricia St. John books from the Deluxe package.