Week in review....

Well, I think that instead of a day to day 'What's Happening at our School' post, I will do a week-end review for the week.  I cannot seem to get on here enough to post our day plus other daily stuff that I want to share.

MONDAY  - We read our Bible story for the day - Noah. After that, they got right on their seat work - Spelling, Handwriting, Reading and Math.  Once they were finished with that, I read to them Chapter 2 from Story of the World, while they worked on the color sheet that went along with it.  We did the map work for the chapter, went to our big wall map and found where we were. We tried the Defeat the Romans game, but they were not into it to much.  For Five In A Row, we started The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack. We colored a map of China, added the Yangtze River and the Great Wall.  We compared it to our big map.  We colored the flag of China, made a Chinese lantern to hang, made a Chinese fan and played the really cool game Hurry Ping that I beleive I found at Homeschool Share.  We also talked a bit about the diference in cultures and how the people who lived on the river did some things different than we do here.  We discussed life on a boat - that turned into something fun - we decided that while it would be fun to live on a boat for a time, BUT we wouldn't want to do it for always.

TUESDAY - Our Bible story for the day was Ark and Animals.  They breezed right thru their seat work of Spelling, Handwriting, and Reading again. Then we moved onto science. Our second day of Ping, we made a picture showing the overcrowding on the boat (and on their picture) we colored, cut and glued all of Ping's family - Ping, his mother, his father, 2 sisters, 3 brothers, 11 aunts, 7 uncles and all 42 of his cousins. That was a lot of ducks to fit on one page.  We also practiced writing some chinese numbers. We had fortune cookies for a snack while we played Hurry Ping.

WEDNESDAY - Our Bible story today was The Flood.   They have figured out that one or two pages of seat work is not really all that hard...and that the quicker they sit down and do it, the quicker that we can move on to things that are more hands on.  Reading, handwriting, spelling and math all together take them about 45 minutes - most of the time, not quite that long. We had to finish up our Solar System Detective pages, where they wrote the name of the planet, colored it the appropriate color, marked where it was from the sun, marked the size of it in comparison to the other planets and how far it was from the sun.   We  read Ping again and talked about fiction and the once upon a time stories.  We read the poem by Ogden Nash - The Duck and they both drew a 'bottom's up' duck. We played a squencing game (from Homeschool Share) and we played Hurry Ping again. Oh, we munched on rice cakes while we played the games -- and  not the yucky ones - I bought caramel rice cakes...

THURSDAY - We read The Raven and The Dove for our Bible story. Breezed thru math, reading, handwriting and spelling and went straight to Ping. I had on the plans for history to play the Defeat the Romans game, but since it wasn't really a big hit, we skipped over that. Today we drew a picture from the story using color pencils (their all time favorite for whatever we do - we go thru abut 3 boxes a year). We also talked about movement in still pictures and they drew a picture with ripples in the water to show Ping moving.  They wanted to play Hurry Ping again, so we did that.

FRIDAY - Our Bible story today was God's Promise - PERFECT!!!  It was also part of our science lesson!!!  For science, we talked about the earth's inner layers and the made a little book to put in their notebook. we talked about the earth's outer layers and they glued a little puzzle together showing where things are in the atmosphere, then we talked about light - and rainbows - they learned a little poem about Rainbows Over You, God's Blessed Vow to help them remember the order of the colors in the rainbow.  There was also a little book that makes a pop-up rainbow.  We finished up Ping today.  We did a buoancy experiment in the bathtub and charted 'sink or float' on a few household objects. I read them a poem called The Mirror from When We Were Very Young and we made our own reflection pictures- they both drew a picture of the sun reflecting off of the Yangtze River from the book. We collected all of our Ping related stuff and added it to our spiral bound notebooks that we made into passports. It took 4 pages of our notebooks for all our our Ping stuff. Once we finished up all of that plus or seatwork, it was time for lunch, so they opted not to play Hrry Ping today.

We have made a few changes in our curriculum. I dropped Alphabet Island Phonics. They had completed it all up to the late 2nd/early 3rd work book and we are not reading at that level yet, so I felt the spelling rules they were learning in that were a bit irrelevant for now.  I have put it up and will come back to it  may come back to it  probably not come back to it when they get to that level. Between the reading andthe spelling program we are doing, that should cover it. We also dropped FIrst Language Lessons - I really like it, but my kiddos really seem to be more hands on than sit on the couch and discuss something. 

That was the extent of our week.  It was really so much easier to come in at the end of each school day and jot down what we did and save as draft to make a full week's post on Friday.