Creative Corner: Color wheels, watercolor garden, and a cow puppet

The girls and I created color wheels this week based on a picture I found on the internet.  On the outside are primary and secondary colors.  The inner pictures depict the concepts of lines, perspective, value, shape, form, and texture.

Benny created a watercolor garden of root vegetables.

Henry and I made a brown and white cow puppet.  (I'm partial to brown and white since the grandfather had Guernsey cows on his farm when he was alive.)

WW: Sandy creations

In trying to think of new ideas for Henry this week, I broke out some moon sand that we had gotten a while ago.  He had a great time making a dinosaur using the mold in the lid, and for a while it was really neat because he always put the molded figure straight back into the container.  (It's there in the bottom middle.)

Fast forward 20 minutes and there was sand on the table, the chair, his hands, clothes, feet, the carpet, and the kitchen floor.  Benny had joined him with the blue sand, and there was a mix of the two in each bowl and everywhere else.  Note to self, only one contained out at a time and don't leave the room.  Otherwise, he had a lot of fun and really it only took a few minutes of vacuuming to clean up the mess.

Geography for Benny

Benny and I started working on learning the US states last year with a two fold approach.  We sang the "Fifty Nifty United States" song to learn all of the names of the states and were successful with this portion.  We tried using the book Little Man in the Map and building with our Geopuzzles North America puzzle for locating the states on the map.  This approach did not work for us at all, so this year I decided to switch gears. 

A few years back I made US geography lapbooks with the girls.  It was a very successful start for learning the states, and both girls' had still retained a large amount of what they learned when I asked them to fill in a blank US map last year.  Benny has not been a big fan of lapbooks up to this point because of the writing involved; however, since the geography lapbook is mostly stickers with minimal writing, I decided we would give it a try. 

We started last week working with the overall US maps, and this week began with the state of Alabama.  We're off to a great start!  Benny thinks its easy and the stickers are fun.  Yeah!!  I believe the approach of focusing on one state at a time paying attention to its shape and having the practice of locating it several times while completing the booklet will be a much more fruitful approach.  For more information on the content of the booklets and how we use them, please read my original post.  To download the lessons, simply look in the right hand column.

Middle School Mondays: Devotions and Bible Study

I've tried several Bible study courses with the girls over the years.  They've each done some Kay Arthur studies for children but didn't really enjoy them.  We tried a few of these Hidden Treasures series inductive Bible studies by Wheeler  which were slightly better but have only a limited number of available studies.  I've looked at other studies and rejected them because they remind me too much of reading comprehension questions and busywork.  This year I've decided to take a different approach.

For our family devotions, we are using a delightful book based on the Westminster shorter catechism entitled Training Hearts, Teaching Minds by Starr Meade.  For each question there are six days of a short devotional with a few Bible verses highlighting a particular aspect of the question and answer.  With a total of 107 questions to cover, it will last us for awhile.  I've also selected one hymn for each month to sing and learn together.  Since I'm trying to include my 4yo as well, I limited my choices this year to hymns with a chorus so that he could participate.

For the girls' independent Bible study, I decided to challenge them to read and study something new.  Since most of their reading has come from historical books or epistles, they are spending this year reading through the Psalms.  Each day, I've been assigning one psalm to read, a verse or two to copy, and a couple of questions that I write on their check sheets, usually based on what is being said about God or some aspect of how the psalmist is approaching God.  In truth it is a brief rather cursory introduction to the Psalms, but my design is to expose them to the overall beauty and richness of the Psalms.  It is my hope that along the way they will find some bits of wisdom and treasure that will spark their interest to return and give this book a deeper, more thoughtful study as they mature.  Hopefully this first glimpse will lay a foundation on which future studies can be built.

Week 4: Busy, busy, busy

It has been a long busy week with lots of extra projects like canning the 2 buckets of beans DH picked over the weekend and trying to prep some outgrown clothes, shoes, and toys for our local consignment sale.  We did manage to complete most of our school work with only a lab and a project for Henry to finish off tomorrow when we're not catching up on the housework.

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie completed her second chapter of Foerster's algebra this week scoring a 97% on her chapter test. Topics covered included commutative and associative properties as well as expressions and equations.
• In literature, she completed reading Rob Roy and spent 2 days doing research on Sir Walter Scott as well as the historical time period in which the novel is set.  We also read a bit more Pilgrim's Progress but not quite as much as I had planned. 
• In CW, she continued to work with verbs.  On the right, she practiced writing a portion of a chreia in several different verb tenses and moods.  Grammar was mostly a review of clauses and sentences with a quick lesson on topic sentences in paragraphs thrown in for good measure.  She continues to ace her vocabulary quizzes scoring another 100 on the 4th chapter of Word Within the Word Volume 1.
• She completed most of chapter 3 this week in Latin Alive covering uses for the genitive and dative cases as well as the story of Anthony and Cleopatra for her reading/translating.  She struggled a little bit in identifying which dative construction was being used, so I think we'll review those one last time on Monday before her quiz.  In Elementary Greek 3, she reviewed the present and imperfect tenses, deponent verbs, and the present and perfect of the verb to be.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet continued to work with ratios in Singapore.
• In literature, she finished reading From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, wrote a summary of the plot, and began reading Lassie Come Home by Knight.
• In CW, we completed our final lesson of writing a story by beginning in the middle using "The Trial of the Bow" as our model.  We analyzed the model to discuss how the author developed his scenes, manipulated some verbal phrases, did a sentence shuffle, and paraphrased a portion.  We are also continuing with dictation using a passage from her literature reading each day.
• Grammar was more clauses, topic sentences, and sentence word order.  She passed another spelling lesson with a 90% on Friday.
• In LfC C, she learned how to decline 2 termination adjectives and memorized several of the adjectives for her vocabulary.  She is steadily working through The Greek Alphabet Code Cracker and begin learning the last set of Greek letters this week.
• She did complete her geography this week moving up to the level 6 states game.

Benny's 3rd Grade

• Benny reviewed subtraction with borrowing with Singapore math. In Miquon, he struggled with Miquon pages this week which were trying to illustrated the distributive property of multiplication. He had a much easier time with Friday's lesson on fractions. In CWP, he is nearly finished with the review problems at the end of book 2.
• For reading this week, Benny continued reading independently from Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with narrations as well as working on reading aloud from the second grade McGuffey's Reader.  For our read aloud, we began Understood Betsy.
• He completed a narration of "The Fox and the Grapes" on Monday, to which we made a few editing changes over the course of the week.  His copywork has mostly been whatever random sentence happened to pop into my mind.  This week it's been mostly Harry Potter related because he is listening to the 4th book on CD.
• He worked through his first review lesson of the year in spelling.  His grammar lessons finished with sentence types and moved on to direct and indirect quotations as well as proper capitalization and punctuation of direct quotations.
• I had to put his geography lapbook on hold until next week because I had too many other projects on my plate for the week.

HISTORY

The girls made a timeline of the Santa Fe trail using The Story of the Santa Fe Trail by Adler and mapped the trail.  They wrote summaries The Story of the Erie Canal by Stein and drew a map of the canal route.  In SOTW, the outlined the chapter concerning Simon Bolivar and completed the associated mapwork.  They also read Trappers and Traders of the Far West by Daugherty concerning the mountain men and the later fur trade.  I did not require any writing for this topic.

Benny and I spent two days enjoying Jim Bridger  by Luce about the life of this famous mountain man.  We also enjoyed Kit Carson by Gleiter and finished reading Pioneer Sampler by Greenwood.  I was hoping to read The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal by Harness with him, but our library copy was checked out so we had to settle for the Spier's The Erie Canal which really is just the words of the song with pictures, but at least we could discuss the pictures.  He narrated about Bridger and Carson but didn't have any map work this week.

SCIENCE

Jessie completed her second chapter in BJU Physical Science and managed a 90% on her test.  Because she ran late completing her work several times this week, we still have the lab left to complete tomorrow.

Violet and Benny learned about the properties of metals and used his snap circuits kits to demonstrate their ability to conduct electricity.

After reading about halogens, we stuck half an egg down into some fluoride toothpaste and put it in the fridge for three days.  Tonight, we'll wipe off the toothpaste and let it sit overnight in the fridge soaking in some vinegar.  After learning about hydrogen, we scoured our kitchen for products with hydrogenated oil and I'm happy to say on found one item, DH's peanut butter.  (He insists on the Peter Pan kind.)

Finally, we read about carbon and then generated a small amount of our own to look at and feel by holding a small plate over a candle flame.

ART / MUSIC

As usual our art lessons are below in Thursday's post.  For music this week, we finished with the Renaissance time period and entered the beginnings of the Baroque period adding Monteverdi to our timeline and the definitions of opera and concerto to our terms booklets.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I learned about vegetables and gardening this week. His favorite book of the week was How Groundhog's Garden Grew by Cherry.  We learned about different groups of vegetables (root vegetables, leafy vegetables, etc) reading The Vegetables We Eat by Gibbons and enjoyed seeing the wily rabbit put that knowledge to use outwitting his lazy neighboring bear in Tops and Bottoms by Stevens.  For our nursery rhyme/song, we sang Three Blind Mice by Ivemey.  Benny also added the letters Ii and the number 7 to his repertoire this week.  I still plan to plant some carrot seeds in a quart jar with him, but I have to buy some new seeds tomorrow since our last pack was used up.

Creative Corner: Dragons, stenciling, and corn on the cob

 Per Violet's request this year to have some Harry Potter themed art lessons, we drew a two dimensional dragon head this week following these directions.

 Jessie's emerald dragon

 Violet's fiery beast

Benny and I combined art with history this week and tried some stenciling similar to what might have been seen in pioneer days.  If you look closely, you can see the holes from his tin punching last week in the shape of an evergreen tree at the center of the board.  We'll probably add some more to this board closer to Christmas time.

Me:  Henry would you like to make an ear of corn?
Henry:  (wrinkles nose and makes his yucky face)
Me:  You get to stick your finger in paint.
Henry:  Paint!

The Story of Dr. Doolittle - Book 21 of 52 in 52

The Story of Dr. Doolittle by Lofting is a delightful classic children's tale which I've been enjoying as a read aloud with my 8yo boy.  As the story begins, Dr. Doolittle is a regular doctor in a small town who happens to have a fondness for animals and several pets; however, as the number and variety of his pets increases, he begins to lose patients and becomes very poor.  His parrot Polynesia teaches him to understand animal languages, and he becomes a very successful veterinarian for awhile until his pet crocodile scares off his new clients.  Just as the money is about to run out, a sparrow arrives with an urgent message from the monkeys in Africa who are suffering from an epidemic and dying in large numbers.  The good doctor immediately borrows a boat and some provisions and embarks on a voyage to Africa.  Along the way he encounters difficulties with an African tribe whose land he must cross, a group of Barbary pirates whose swift boat threatens to overtake him, and a young boy whose uncle is lost at sea.  Always with each difficulty, he turns to the animals nearby for assistance, which they gladly give. 

I would certainly recommend this as a read aloud for an elementary aged student.  For independent reading, I would estimate its probably on an average third grade level.  It's a great book for any animal lover.