Week 23, Days 3-5 in CTG

Let's see... The rest of the week went good. It was nice to be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

In Bible time, we read about when David was moving the Ark of the Covenant and the first time he did it on the back of the cart, and one of the priests was killed. That was a little shocking, but just understanding how God wants us to follow what he says, exactly. Then we read about God's promise to David that from him would come an everlasting kingdom. It was neat to make the connection to Jesus. And finally we read about Mephibosheth and how David honored Jonathan's son by having him eat at the king's table. It showed us that keeping your word is important.

I've been using Easy Test Maker to make Vocabulary quizzes for Rabbit to do. It's really easy to use, and they have a free version. I've been using it since about week 17. This weeks Greek root was petros, and last weeks was lithos. Petros means rock, and lithos means stone or rock. Those were the only ones Rabbit missed on her quiz this week.

We finally finished our Writing Strands story. I should type it in to be read. She did a pretty good job with it.

Rabbit was having trouble narrating back from The Children's Homer, so one day I had her narrate back paragraph by paragraph. That helped, and she has done much better since.

Otherwise school is going well. The boys still fuss about starting each day, but they do it. I'm amazed that missing so much school due to sickness didn't affect them in the reading department. In fact, at bedtime, they've been reading to me a little bit from their Usborne Phonics Readers (Fox on a Box, Big Pig on a Dig, and Frog on a Log). They haven't learned more than one syllable words yet, and there are some sounds we haven't covered yet (or, ar, and such). But it is fun to see them start to read other books. Pooh has some of the pages memorized, so I'm not sure how much he's really reading at this point.

Geography Fair Highlights

Today was the Geography Fair. It went great. There were 13 presentations in our room, and we finished in just about an hour.

Rabbit dressed up in her Cleopatra Halloween costume for her Ancient Egypt presentation. She really read well with lots of voice inflections and everything.

For Tigger and Pooh I drew pictures on a sheet of paper to remind them of what to say. Tigger was so excited (and just about acted like a Tigger for his whole presentation) that he forgot to look at his paper and kept coming to ask me what to say. The other adults thought that his excitement was great, even if he couldn't remember what he was going to say. It probably would have worked better if I had just asked him questions and let him answer.

Pooh did great. He stood up there and looked at his paper and pretty well remembered. I helped him when he couldn't quite remember. His only downside was he turned and spoke to his board when he was pointing out the animal pictures.

The room we had was a bit noisy with big vent fans running the whole time, so that made it hard. Everyone did a great job and had a good time.

Yesterday we started back on Week 23 and we'll finish it up tomorrow. It is nice to be back in our "normal" routine.

Week 23, Days 1 & 2 in CTG

The reason I'm writing this post is we're going to take a break from CTG for a week to work on the kids' Geography Fair presentations. They've all asked to participate, and each one chose a different area, so we'll need a good week to work on that.

So far we've covered up to Saul's death, and then learned about the Phoenicians. Rabbit loved the activity to write her name in the Phoenician alphabet.

We didn't do the science experiments - still no bugs around here, but we read through them.

Rabbit tried the God and the History of Art lesson from the first day of the week, but got frustrated at her drawing. She basically drew each half of the drawing on a different page in her new sketch book.

Everything else is going the same.

So, this week, we'll just do Math, Math Drill, T-n-T verses, Can-Do-Print, Spelling and Reading with Rabbit. The boys will probably do most of their usual stuff (they've been sick since last Wednesday). Then, we'll work on their Geography Fair things. Rabbit is going to present on Ancient Egypt, Tigger is presenting Russia, and Pooh is doing the Grand Canyon. I tried to convince the little guys to do their room or backyard or something, but no, they shoot for big. So, it will mostly be me putting things together and then helping them memorize their presentations. That's okay, they'll love it. Hopefully, they will get over this sickness soon. It's a bad cold that pretty much sits in the lungs. Poor little guys.

Blog Changeover

I decided to move my blog from homeschoolblogger.com to here. Not that the other site isn't any good. But, I like having all my stuff in one place. Since google has my e-mail, my calendar, and now my blog, it is nice having only one place to "go" for all this. I'll leave the old blog up for a couple of weeks, point people over here.

It's probably taken me, oh, 5 or 6 days to move all the old posts and photos. But it has been a good thing. It's been good to go back and see where Rabbit was last year in things, and see where she has improved this year. The improvements in spelling. The progress in math. The improvement in attitude. The bad thing is I am now a couple of weeks behind on my school posts.

Week 22 in CTG

Bible time this week focuses on Saul going after David up to the first time David spares Saul. It is interesting. David says he doesn't want to take the life of God's anointed (Saul), and make it look like he killed him in order to be king sooner. But yet, he's willing to go after Nabal just because he refused him food. Just an interesting contrast. Not sure what to make of it. We also took a look at a few of the Psalms.

We read a chapter a day in The Children's Homer. Rabbit still doesn't quiet get all of it. I think I need to perhaps discuss it more with her. This is kind of our Greek History right now.

In Science, we did a couple of the experiments. The first one was Fishy Moves. The idea was to see how the shape of the fish and the fins and tail helped the fish move. So, first we made a fin-less fish like this:

Then we set up our tub of water in the bathtub (too cold for outdoors). I used one of those shoebox-sized plastic bins. It is propped up on some other bath toys, so the water will flow out the other end of the box. It is also convenient that we have the shower head on a hose. (Water restrictions due to arid climate means we don't just run the water into the tub for 20 minutes to try an experiment.) Here's the tub all set up:

Then we made the head bigger like this:

Rabbit didn't think it really felt that different in the tub. Next, we added fins. She said it made a big difference on how it felt to go up and down:

Then we bent the tail like this:

Rabbit said it really made the fish seem like it wanted to turn in circles.

The other experiment we did was the Sink or Float. This is one of the things that bothers me in Genesis for Kids - they don't always give 100% clear instructions. For example, in the lesson, it said to make your foil like a "duck-bottomed boat." Well, I don't know what a duck-bottomed boat is. So, I assumed that meant a "flat-bottomed boat," but I don't know if that's really what they wanted, and the picture for that lesson wasn't clear. Anyway, like mfwrocks, the first time we dropped the ball of foil into the water, it didn't float. My guess was that there was still too much air in the ball of foil. So, I found a large flat object and pressed and pressed and pressed, and then we had a very small cube of foil. That did sink:

The other part of the experiment was to measure how much water was displaced by each foil object -whether or not it would be the same. So, we put our dish into a baking pan and topped off our bowl. Then I dropped in the boat. We had some overflow. Problem was, the bowl with all the water was too heavy for me to lift off the pan without spilling the water that was left in the bowl. Even if it had been a very small bowl, I don't know that I could have lifted a small bowl up and not spilled any, because not that much water overflowed.

The next problem with this part of the experiment is how to know if I've filled up my bowl with the exact same amount of water that I used the first time? I used a large bowl (actually a baking dish) and didn't think to try to measure exactly how much water I put in for the first piece of foil. Anyway, we refilled, and dropped in the little squashed square - no overflow. Anyway, if you do this second part of the experiment, use a very small bowl and measure how much water you put in.

We didn't do any of the bug experiments. I don't think we have fruit flies here in the dead of winter anyway. And bugs are pretty much non-existent with 4 inches of snow on the ground. That's alright, though.

We didn't do God and the History of Art this week. Oh, we read through the lessons, and talked about the Art Journal lesson. I actually bought all the kids a sketch book a couple of weeks ago, and they've really been getting into drawing in those.

The rest of school is going well. We're almost done writing our short story for Writing Strands. It has been a lot of me giving Rabbit starter ideas and such. Math is going well for now. And even Spelling is going pretty smoothly. My only thing against All About Spelling is that it is hard to stop at 15 minutes. Just doing the review section with Rabbit can take 7 minutes, and there is usually at least 7 more minutes of instruction, plus dictation and writing station. So, Spelling is usually going 20 to 30 minutes a day. But, I feel like it is something worth devoting that much time to.

All in all, not a bad week.

Week 21 in CTG

This week's Bible covers Saul's sacrifice to David and Jonathan. It is interesting how quickly Saul's character flaws start emerging. He doesn't follow God's commands. Then, David is anointed secretly, and yet God works it out so Saul needs David to play his harp for him.

In History we learned some of the early Russians and Scythians.

We tried two of the science experiments. The first was "Designed for Living Underwater." I found an old medicine eye-dropper, but, it was plastic, so it didn't float in the water the way it showed in the book. However, when we squeezed the bottle, we could see the water moving up the dropper towards the bulb, and when we released, the water moved back out of the dropper. The other experiment we tried was "Motion: Things That Oppose It." This one was kind of neat. First, make sure you have 3 or 4 sections of your newspaper. If you don't, the newspaper will fall to the floor more slowly than the penny. (The Sunday paper would be real good for this one.) So, that was the first interesting thing - the paper and the penny hit the floor at just about the same time. Next, we dropped the toilet paper and the penny. That one was obvious - that the penny was going to hit the floor first. The last thing was to drop the newpaper with the toilet paper square on top. Rabbit thought that it would separate from the newspaper and drift down slowly. But that's not what happened! So, that was a good learning experience.

In Spelling, we finished step one and went on to step two. Rabbit is still having to re-master some of the phonograms, but it has been a good review.

We're making steady progress in everything else, and really enjoying Bach. Rabbit dances around the kitchen when we listen to Bach.

(I'm still catching up my blog, so this is from memory, which is why it is so short.)