Home's Cool: Week Six

This was a good week. Busy, but good. Take a peak at what we have been doing this week...

Bible - This week we started learning a new memory verse, John 6:35. "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." We read about how God provided manna and how Jesus fed the 5,000. We talked about why Jesus is called the "bread of life".  And since we were talking about bread, we did a science experiment with yeast.

We mixed warm water, yeast, and sugar and poured it into the bottle. Then we placed the balloon over the top and left it for 20 minutes.

This is what happened

Julia's Jesus poster. (please don't look at that dirty vent.... embarrassing!!)

History - This week was all about Colonial times. We read stories about the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and started the book The Courage of Sarah Noble. I found this gem of a book at the library last week called Colonial Kids. There are tons of activities and crafts to do that would give children a sense of what life was like during the Colonial times. We made butter from whipping cream. We made dipped candles. We made orange peel candy. And we made a homemade spinning top. I wish we had a month to spend on this alone. This book was full of fun activities. Just not enough time to do them all! Maybe we will get to some more next week.

Isaac making his candles

The candles curled up on us, but it was still a lot of fun

Julia's turn

Making home made butter from whipping cream

Everyone enjoyed the butter

Yummy!

Even Caleb thought the butter was delicious. Of course, you could put anything on a cracker and I think he would eat it.

Peeling an orange to make candied orange peel

Yes, I let him use a knife. Gulp!

We talked about how the children in Colonial times would have made their own toys. So we made tops. They didn't work so well which really frustrated Isaac.

Julia had fun anyway

Science - This was project week for science. On Monday we made a model of a flower using play dough, Q-tips, and construction paper. This was a good review of all the different parts of a flower. Wednesday we got to preserve a fresh flower using borax. It will be sealed up for 2 weeks. I am happy to report that our bean plant is thriving and our corn has sprouted. Guess the fish did the trick. However, we still do not have any herbs. :(

Making flower models

Preserving our flowers

Art - It was a pretty light week for art. I wanted to do more, but simply ran out of time. We used our Come Look with Me book and discussed two paintings; The Repast of the Lion by Henri-Juliean-Felix Rousseau  and Summer House, Bayshore by William J. Glackens.

Reading - Both are doing wonderfully with reading. Isaac has been working through some activities with Stuart Little. He has done character descriptions, answered comprehension questions, and learned new vocabulary words. Julia is half way through her chapter book and loving every bit of it. Both of them are such strong readers!

Language Arts - Isaac finally finished his personal story for Language arts. The writing process to Isaac seems to be tedious. He wants to rush through it and doesn't understand why you have to write more than one draft. This may be a challenging area for him in the future. But he did the work, and here is his final draft...

The Twister at Dark

Once I was in a bad storm. It was December 2009. We were in Lewisville, Arkansas to visit Ma and Pa for Christmas. Several twisters came at the same time. There was raging winds, lightning, and thunder. When my parents woke me up at night, I barfed and then we went to the barn for shelter. 

The mobile home was not safe. It was a horrible storm.

Math - GREAT week for math! Isaac is learning about adding and subtracting two and three digit numbers without any remainders. Julia is reviewing her basic addition and subtraction before we move on to ordinal numbers next week.

Spanish - Ok, Isaac has officially passed me up! He is two sections ahead of me in Spanish. He is doing really well and seems to be picking it up fairly easily. The true test will be when they start speaking it regularly. The other day at the dinner table Isaac said something about what he was doing was "corre" which means run. Julia corrected him and said the word was "come" which means eat. And then a few days later she overheard Isaac's spanish lesson and walked around saying over and over and over, "Que es esto?" Well done Julia and Isaac!

Kicking back during his Spanish lesson

Caleb has been doing better the last few weeks. After breakfast, I put him in his room for play time while we do Bible, History, Art, and Science. All of these require read-alouds and verbal lessons. Caleb has done great playing in his room during that time which really helps our school time. He is really getting into the train stage and loves to play with his Thomas trains. 

We also squeezed in some birthday preparations and celebrations for Gabe! The kids helped make his cake and decorated the house. Even though Wednesday was their first meeting of AWANA, I let them skip so we could spend time with Papa for his birthday!

Making the birthday banner for Papa

Making the cake

From the look on Gabe's face, I think he is pretty happy