Week of Aug 28-31

OK, so I have a confession. I am totally addicted to buying curriculum lately. I really love it, but I have made an attempt to stop :) I remember once I read someone suggested that if you want to push your child in a certain area just start studying that material yourself to take that pressure off of your child. Last year I really had 3 different LA programs going and it was way too much. Also I always would get frustrated that I was never getting everything done and wasn't having so much fun with the kids. So, this week I am making a huge effort to do the bare minimum requirements with the kids. OK so I am using R&S 2 with Noah along with Beyond, but other than that we are just doing the HOD guides.
 So for this week Kayla is working on unit 2 and part of 3. Since I just homeschool 4 days a week we don't always finish up a unit a week, but it works out since there are only 34 units in the guide :)

For history we were learning about Noah and building an ark. So we made an aluminum foil boat and later added in coins to see how many it would take to sink it. Hers took 50, Brie (the little one) just kinda dumped a bunch in at once and it went down :) I love how some of these activities are so simple that my little ones can join in, but very fun and engaging for the older ones also. Noah saw what we were doing so he had to build his own ark and made it for his little penguins.

 Thankfully there was enough there was only one fatality...we lost a penguine via my 2 year old, but the boat wars continued for a full 3 days :).

 

Kayla is also working through Getty and Dubay Italic Book A so we were going through our last row of shapes to work on. She did t's and then did triangles. Her last triangle turned into a dog which was made up of all triangles. It was really cute. Her handwriting is going so well. Math is going well too. We have 8 more lessons and then we will be done with Horizons. I do like using it just because it gets the kids more familiar with numbers through 100. Hopefully she can move onto Singapore 1A without a problem. I had tried it before but she isn't one to work through a book. She wants to pick out the page she wants to do and then do that one. I might have to cut out the pages so we don't have that problem :)

  Noah is doing well also with school. In Beyond we finished up unit 8 and are starting unit 9. I am so excited for the Pilgrims to land after being on the Mayflower so long! We did some map work and I am thankful that we are doing this. He is doing so much better knowing where America is and other countries in relation to us. Last week we went on a vacation to Gatlinburg, TN so I was able to show him where we traveled through TN and the different big cities that are in our stage. I was never very good with states and countries since I never had to learn them growing up so I am excited that I might eventually learn them along with the kids :)

In unit 9 we also had a fun Science activity that both the kids did by making a starfish.

I didn't have any liquid glue just the glue stick so the corn flakes didn't stick as well on their stars, but they had fun so that was nice :) Please excuse the messy room too. Next time I will make Noah clean up before I take a picture.
  Math is still going well with him too. He has moved onto the 2nd CD in TT3 and it is getting a little harder. He has a harder time converting a number into words and remembering to keep the comma in and not use and in the word and the hyphen if the number is larger than 20. I truthfully didn't remember all of these rules either after all these years, but he is doing better. One thing that really touched his heart today about not being perfect in math was actually from his R&S 2 English lesson. It says it better than I can so I will just quote it. "We must always check our work. We must be certain that we did not make any mistakes. Only God is perfect. Only God never makes any mistakes. When God made everything, He saw that it was good. He did not need to check His work." I thought that was a nice heart teachable moment because he does get discouraged at times if he doesn't get everything right. It is good to know we are human and do make mistakes. God is the only one that is perfect and wont make mistakes, but we must try our best.

   Finally, we finally have added in DITHOR. We are reading The Littles right now and I am loving this book to go along with our reading. Since this is just the first week we have used it I can't say too much about it, but it is nice to engage more with his readings than just reading it with a few comprehension questions. We actually did a vocabulary assignment that there is in the back of the book and I showed him how to look up words in the dictionary. Daughter was the word we did today. He knew what daughter meant just didn't know how to read it. The lesson also showed him how to figure out by context clues how to figure out what a word is too, so can't wait for more good moments with this program. We also did have a nice conversation with one of the lessons on Friday about Honor God and authority. We were suppose to use our lives as examples and then try to draw out those examples from the book. It was nice to have a moment alone with him that teaches him about the Lord while doing reading too.