What We've Been Doing

We are into the next unit on horses and it's been pretty fun. We have been coloring pictures of horses, learning about how to control the horse by using the bridle and the purpose of a saddle, reading books about horses and we even watched "Secretariat" about a racing horse. The girls have really enjoyed it. In the next week or so I'm hoping to visit a horse farm. The weather just hasn't been conducive for such a trip. This week we made stick horses out of Daddy's old socks. We raced them and pretended to ride them to playgroup this week.

For math we are up to about lesson 80 in the Saxon K book, and ahead of schedule to finish on time. I'm so glad! Lately I've been trying to think of more natural ways to teach whatever concept the lesson is addressing, such as by ordering or graphing Caley's toys or suckers instead of some uninteresting thing the lesson suggests. Last week the lesson was on ordering by length left-to-right, longest-to-shortest and I asked her to order my jewelry instead of whatever the lesson said. She really got into it! Another lesson was about ordinal position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) and we were able to work it into dancing to music and making a parade.
I've also been trying to be more intentional about involving the kids in whatever projects I need to get done around the house. They very enthusiastically helped me wash the refrigerator, vacuum the car, sort the toys in the mud room, and Caley just today helped rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I'm thankful to have a lot of time with them that we can work on things like homemaking. In my mind I count it as school, just an additional activity to their academic work.

Caley is also continuing her speech therapy, and still loves going to see Mrs. Rose each week. She loves getting stickers and practicing her words. I have a feeling she'll qualify again next year, as Mrs. Rose said she's doing very well but still not consistently generalizing in her daily speech.

And as always, Amelia is being silly!!

Another post on Missionary Moms

Notes from the Trenches

The Medieval Feast

 While learning about kings and queens, we had a medieval feast with our playgroup friends. It was so fun, probably more fun for us mommies than for the kiddos. I kind of geeked out in the preparation when I found this medieval recipe website. We had a roasted chicken, parsnip pie, saffron vermicelli (or bowtie pasta), canel cucumber, apple muse, and wassail (apple cider). We proceeded into the dining room by family and served the food in courses with entertainment like someone telling a joke or doing a dance in between courses. Then we showed them some clips of "A Knight's Tale" for the jousting and then did our own jousting! It was so fun.

Royalty

We finished up the unit on Kings and Queens and it was so fun! Caley chose to research Queen Victoria. She picked her out of a book of princesses such as Marie Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth. We took the research project very slowly, first checking out books from the library, then looking through them, then synthesizing information from them (and the internet) into a list, studying the list, choosing pictures from the book for each item we learned, photocopying the pictures, then making a poster with the pictures and the information we listed. Caley presented her poster at playgroup in front of her friends. She did very well, with my help. It was good practice for her!
During the unit we made swords and shields and studied the armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18) and we made a sugar cube castle. The girls were so excited about the castle! And they snitched the sugar, surprise surprise  (so did Mommy).
We've also been doing math and are moving into money and we set up a store. We also did a painting day and I just let the girls create! I was impressed with their artistic creativity. I love these children.

During the unit we also did some playgroup activities and we did a medieval feast! That was the best part. Pictures will be added soon.

We have since moved onto learning about military and general obedience. So the last few weeks have been kind of relaxed. It's been nice after a few weeks of crazy time. Caley helped me in the kitchen cutting strawberries and her new job is clearing the table. Woohoo!

Update 2011

Happy New Year!

We are back in action after taking nearly a month off of regular school. It's good to be back. I am doubling up on math lessons so we can finish on schedule for the end of May. Caley is up to lesson 43 in her Saxon Math K book and we are dabbling in telling time, counting money and other fun math concepts. We also started a new phonics curriculum called "The Sorensen System to Succeeding with Reading" by Nancy Sorensen. It's a compact spiral-bound lesson book that we are liking so far. It focuses more on writing and reading, more so than the Engelmann "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" book. I think this curriculum is relatively unknown and not flashy at all, but the principles are basic and frugal. Check out more at the website here. Looking at the website, I just realized the authors are LDS (Mormon). Didn't expect that! But their principles for teaching phonics look pretty good so far so it's worth a shot.

We started a new unit in KONOS about Obedience which includes Authority (light and the Bible) and Kings and Queens. I'm really excited about this mini-unit on kings and queens. We are going to do a medieval feast with our playgroup friends and Caley is going to do a research project about a queen or princess of her choice. By research project I am intending that she learn how to use the library resources to some extent, scan information from books and put it together so she can present it. It's less about her learning the facts about some princess, but more about what she'll learn during the whole process. This is going to be a great opportunity for her to use her library card! We have casually been reading fairy tales and watched Disney's Robin Hood so they can begin to understand the concepts of kings and queens. It's convenient that they are naturally obsessed with Disney princesses for this unit! Recently they have been pretending that they are Ariel and Flounder from "The Little Mermaid" and "swimming" around and getting married to the prince. Wesley usually is Sebastian the crab who they try to run away from.

This week we did some projects about light and I tried to relate it to Jesus being the light of the world. We made candles and observed how a little flame lights up an entire room. They were quite fascinated with it!

I've also been reading "The Power of Motherhood" by Nancy Campbell which has really be helping me not be so crazy about sticking to a strict schedule and just enjoying my children while they are little. It's a helpful bible study and I intend to re-read it again after this first reading, taking notes and looking up the Bible verses.

Hopefully I will post again soon! We are all kinds of learnin' 'round here!