School Over Christmas

Originally, my husband's last day of work was going to be Tuesday of this week. But, then he found out he could still use some of his vacation days the first week of the new year, so he's going to take a few days off then. So his last day will be Friday. Since our weeks are out of alignment from the teacher's manual, I didn't want to do 3 days of school of a week, and then take 2 weeks off, and then finish off the last 2 days of a week. Rabbit needs a little more continuity than that.

The plan for Rabbit is to work on Math, Spelling, Writing and her AWANA T-n-T verses for the rest of this week. The boys are going to be doing Math and Reading/Phonics - focusing on word families for practice. And then, we're going to do a lap book I found at CurrClick called "The Arrival of a King." It is all about the birth of Jesus and all the people in the Bible story. That will cover our Bible and History and Writing and Art (cutting and gluing) for the next 3 days, and maybe even Monday and Tuesday next week. Plus, we'll throw in a little home-ec class with baking some Christmas treats for the neighbors. This will give us our 4 hours a day as needed by state law in order to count as school days.

I've been wanting to try more lap booking, but I didn't think I could design my own. I think doing a big one like this may give me more ideas on some to do next summer.

Week 17 in CTG - Halfway Done!

Whoo-hoo! Half-way done! It is great to get to the half-way point before Christmas.

Bible this week was encouraging. Reading about Joshua's faith as he lead the Israelites into the Promised Land was just uplifting. There was one verse, when we read about when he died, he told the people, "Be very careful to love the Lord your God." I just thought that was so interesting. We usually say, "Be careful!" to our kids when we think they are about to get hurt or do something wrong. And here is Joshua saying, "Be very careful to love the Lord your God." Like you have to watch out for distractions and other things that might keep you from loving Him.

In History we covered basically the fall of Ancient Egypt. It was interesting to read how once the priests were in power, things seemed to deteriorate quite quickly. We read about the Senet game, but didn't make it yet.

We did all the Science experiments this week. We dropped different sized marbles into Moon Sand (tm) to see how craters are formed on the moon. We took a globe, softball, and flashlight into the bathroom to model solar and lunar eclipses. And, we taught Barbie how to bungie jump. That was the favorite - even Tigger and Pooh got into that one. The lesson said to have her dive into a bowl of water, we decided that would be too messy. One thing about Barbie bungie jumping, instead of pushing her off the "diving board" we dropped her from the height of the diving board. We noticed when we pushed her that the rubber bands would reach their maximum stretch at an angle rather than straight down. So, instead of doing that, we held her parallel to the board and then just let her go. For a fun "experiment" I attached another Barbie and asked, "Will they hit the floor or not?" (We had one Barbie stopping about 1 inch above the floor.) The children said they would hit the floor, and they did. Then we talked about how the rubber bands were kind of overcoming gravity when they pull Barbie back. We also talked about how perfect gravity is. It keeps us on the earth, yet we can briefly over come it when we jump. It keeps on on the earth, yet we can lift our hands over our heads. So, it was a good little discussion. Science got an A this week.

In Art, we talked about Warm colors. Rabbit really didn't like making the distinction between warm and cool colors. I had to explain to her that it didn't mean that one set was better than the other, that's just what they were called.

In Reading, Rabbit finished her Pathway reader. We'll start up in the Abeka readers again after the New Year.

In Spelling, we've finished up to Lesson 21 in book 3. Sometimes I'm not sure she has truely mastered a concept. She'll memorize a rule, and can pass the key cards and sound cards and everything, but it doesn't always come out in her writing. But, we keep working on it.

In Math, we're only at lesson 10. But, I am pleased with how she is remember concepts from last year - like multiplying 2 digit numbers together.

For Writing Strands, we are at the lesson describing the placement of furniture in a room. I tried to get her to do Crystal's suggestion of the bathroom, but Rabbit wanted to do the living room. It is fine. We're only going to describe the "major" pieces of furniture, as there is a lot of furniture in the room.

Treasures of the Snow is an awesome book. We are so enjoying it. The kids are always eager to find out what happens next.

Week 16 in CTG

Well, the rest of the week didn't seem as intense as day 1. Whew! I guess sometimes that happens.

For Bible time we are working on memorizing Psalm 23. Rabbit has memorized it before - in Sparks at AWANA. We're doing the NIV version rather than KJV. This week we covered from the Twelve Spies going into Canaan, to Rahab.

In History, it was fun to study what was happening in the Americas during this time period. Some of the similarities and differences between the development of Africa and South America, versus what the North American Indians were doing. Very interesting how the religions between Africa and South America seem similar - with priests in charge, and worship centers and such. Rabbit made the remark at one point, "It just shows you how much they needed Jesus."

We didn't do any of the science. It was too cold to go outside for the Solar Weenie Roaster. And since Rabbit doesn't like fire, we didn't do Solar Peanuts, either. But we talked about how trees take in the sunlight just like peanuts, and when we burn wood, we're burning trees, which means we are releasing the sunlight captured by the tree.

I really enjoyed the lessons from God and the History of Art this week. Rabbit and I did them together, which made it more fun for her, and made it go a little faster.

I love Bach. So much of his music is light and upbeat. We enjoyed listening to the Concertos.

The rest of our topics (Vocabulary, Spelling, Math, Writing Strands, and English) are going well. Rabbit is struggling with divide by 4 and divide by 6, but we'll keep plugging at it.

Week 16, Day 1 in CTG

Well, normally I don't do day-to-day updates, at least not this year.

I am today, just to give a heads up - to me, the Bible and History were especially long today. It took us a little over an hour to get them done. It was good stuff. Rabbit really enjoyed learning about how people first came to North and South America. And while reading the Ancient World book Rabbit dug out our Usborne Book of World History and we looked at some more pictures and ideas of what that time period might be like. So, not that it wasn't good, it just seemed to take a lot longer than usual.

For science, we were suppose to kind of map to scale our solar system. Well, it was snowy and cold, so we didn't do it. But, we discussed the distances and how Jupiter is twice as far away from the sun as the first 4 planets. We should try to do it in centimeters. I'm not to worried about comparing the scale of the planets. A couple of the books in book basket from last week (that we haven't returned yet) had models that showed the planets in scale to each other, but none of them showed distance comparisons.

You know, there's an old joke that goes, "Did you hear about the atheist-insomniac-dyslexic? He lays awake at night wondering if there is a dog." Well, in spelling today, one of our dictation sentences was, "We shopped for dog food and catnip." Rabbit wrote, "We shopped for god food and catnap." Sigh. At least she remember to capitalize and use a period.

English we did on the couch. It was Intermediate Language Lessons lesson 46. We didn't do the dictation part, but we talked about the rest and did the outline.

Math was the area of a triangle. So, I took a couple of pieces of paper, one like a rectangle and the other like a parallelogram and cut them in half to show how they make triangles, so the area is one half of the base times the height. She got it just fine.

We're back to the Pathway reader. The Abeka reader was great. We're almost done with the Pathway reader. I expect we'll be done by the end of this year. I have other Abeka readers, so it's not a problem.

In art, we did complementary colors. I did the lesson with her. I've read about color wheels before, and Primary, Secondary and Tertiary colors and such. But, this lesson with complementary colors just really made a lot of sense to me. I love it when I learn something. It was funny, we were trying to remember the different pairs, and this is what we came up with: red and green are Christmas; blue and orange are the Broncos' (NFL) team colors; and purple and yellow are the colors of the cleaning gloves I use. So, to remember the pairs Rabbit said, "The Broncos played at Christmas wearing Mom's cleaning gloves."

We're at lesson 15 in Spanish. Rabbit told me today she wanted to learn French. Now, why would she suddenly want to learn French? Well, she watched to Barbie and the 3 Musketeers in French in the car on the way back from Thanksgiving vacation. Don't ask me why. I know she sometimes watches her "Bella Let's Dance" DVD in the other languages. I guess she wants to be able to understand all the words. Plus, in ballet, most of the words are French. I said my only problem with that was that I don't know any French. I told her that in Jr. High and High School she could pick whatever language she wanted. She seemed happy with that possibility.