Great, nah, busy first week - Day 1

We started school this week - 3rd grade!  I was ready for a quiet week of school, just to get us in routine, but as homeschool moms know - Life happens and tends to come before school.  We did manage to get almost everything done.  We still need to make a family tree for each of them, but other than that, we stayed on top of things -despite life falling apart around us!

Monday ~ Well, Monday actually starts off on Sunday night.  The Jeep has a flat tire, and turns out it was the valve stem. Rog has to work Monday, so he takes my vehicle - leaving me with the Jeep, that has the spare on it - the 32 inch spare, along with the other three 35inch tires - can we say staying home?  He calls the Jeep place, they tell him it is not under warranty, it is not their problem. Well, not to long after I talk to him, my fil calls - and what do ya know - right there in his consumber reports magazine that he got this weekend - RECALL ~ valve stems!  So, it actually is the Jeep places problem - my fil calls the service manager and as of yet, he has not returned fil's call.  Fil will be calling the AG next week about this. So, in the meantime, my bil takes the jeep up and gets the valves on all 5 tires replaced. We do manage to sneak school in there ~ To start with, we labeled our big mark on map with all the continents and oceans.

Kinda hard to see our labels - they are the same size as the FIAR story disks - you can sorta see that we have been a few places around the world with FIAR (Italy twice, France twice, England, China, "make believe" and now Japan).  The big map is one that we can color on as we learning about - we have mainly been doing this with our Story of the World maps. We are coloring it and placing story disks on it. The portion of the smaller map is a US map, that we have marked with pushpins of all the places we have visited. 

For FIAR, we read Grandfather's Journey.  We found Japan on the map and globe and got to see how far grandfather had to travel to get from Japan to California.  We talked a little about war - they didn't show much interest in it - we made Japan flags, colored the path on a map, and read another story book about Japan - Tree of Cranes. We did a few of the lapbook things from Homeschool Share that go along with Grandfather's Journey, and we still need to make a big family tree.

We started Story of the World Volume III, read about how the King of Spain sent slaves over to the New America ~ South America - to pan for gold.  We made Spanish Doubloons, and we searched for 'gold' in a mine shaft made of flour.

The kiddos also managed to get their math, reading, spelling, grammar and handwriting dome as well.  It appears Monday's are going to be our busy days. That is ok though - we will taper of as the week goes on, working our way to a field trip or free day on Friday!