Monday, February 23, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
We've spent the last 3 weeks studying Africa, with a special emphasis on Kenya. Above is a picture of the kids playing a homemade mancala game. They loved this game! I think they played it for over an hour by themselves with no fighting or whining! We tried several recipes from around Africa, these sweet potato cookies were a big hit! The recipe was in The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook (Kids Can!).
I also made some pineapple tapioca. It was pretty good, but Rebekah didn't like it. The recipe was from A Trip Around the World.
We tried to make Chapatis from Cooking the African Way. I was expecting it to be more like flatbread, but it was like pie crust. The kids liked it, but I didn't. I don't think we made it right because it didn't look anything like the picture. We also did broiled and fried plantains. The kids were eating them raw and loving them, but didn't like them cooked. When our friend from Haiti made plantains, we loved them...
Here they are making cloth baskets. This was a really fun project from Global Art.
Below are their sunset paintings. I followed the directions on Draw the Line. They turned out really pretty! Caleb's is the lion and Rebekah's is the elephant.
Of course, they did a few workbook pages and some map work. We also continue to play the geography game from our curriculum.
I had Caleb do a notebooking page about an animal of his choosing. He used a drawing book to help him make the crocodile. We need to work on writing actual paragraphs instead of sentences soon! The rest of English and spelling went well these last weeks. In math, Caleb learned fractions and time. He is most of the way through Singapore 2B. I think he'll be starting 3A in about a month.
Here they are doing The Complete Book of Animals together!
This was not during school time, but they made up their own card game to play! This made me happy!
Rebekah is still going strong in 1st grade! She loves both math and reading! Below are pictures of our latest math activity. The cards are numbers from 1-18. We practiced adding 1, 2 and 3 by jumping to the correct answer. Then we learned about even and odd numbers, and jumped while counting them of course. Joshua and Caleb also got in on the fun!
She keeps amazing me with her bible notebook. She writes her summary on a separate paper before copying it into her notebook. Then she wants me to correct every mistake! I didn't want to overwhelm her in the beginning, so I only corrected a few, but she got mad at me when she realized I didn't do them all! She likes writing so much more than Caleb! She does not let me help her write or spell at all, and I'm amazed at how good she's doing!
Here's just a cute picture of Matthew "doing school".
Lastly, we went to see a play as a field trip, Curious George!
Thanks for stopping by. Our next country is Saudi Arabia!
Friday, January 30, 2015
This is my best Thomas cake yet! Last year, I made the same one for Joshua, and I've also made it for Caleb's 4th and 5th birthday. With one more boy coming behind Joshua, I have a feeling this pan will be used again! Thanks to my cousin Whitney for the pan!
And then we celebrated at Chuck E Cheese! Happy Birthday Joshua!
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Germany has been on of our favorite countries so far. The kids loved reading Grimm's Fairy Tales and we tried some food from Germany. Above are their pages of German stamps from Stamps Teach, which you can read about in my previous post here. Germany has a lot of really neat stamps! Below is a picture of our German feast: homemade venison sausage, potato pancakes with homemade applesauce and rye bread with butter! It was very good!
My husband was our expert chef!
For dessert, the kids made German Plum Cake, which basically is prune pie! It was really good too! We got the recipes for the cake and the potato pancakes from A Trip Around the World.
School can't be all fun and food, right? They did a few pages about Germany and we read lots of books! As I mentioned before, they loved all the fairy tales.
Below is a picture of Caleb's imaginary world. We read about map makers in Germany, and then they both drew their own maps.
Germany has a lot of castles! Caleb especially enjoyed this book I found at the library, Castles. He copied several of the sheilds from the book. The coloring page of Neuschwanstein Castle came from here, there are several other castles from around Europe to color and study as well.
Our science topic for these weeks was lakes and rivers. We did an experiment with salt water and fresh water, to see what would happen when it freezes. It was interesting to see the difference, and we talked about why salt is used on roads during winter. Maybe one of these years I should buy a real thermometer instead of using our meat thermometer!
After reading about several plants and animals that live in lakes and rivers, Caleb did a notebook page about beavers. I asked for 2 facts... I got lodges and dams... Next time I will specify 2 complete sentences! He's definitely figured out how to do the least amount of work possible! Since he did it with a good attitude and no whining, I let him win this round.
More lake sheets. Getting Caleb to write is still really hard!
After the field trip they both did a nature journal page. Caleb's is on top. We saw 3 bald eagles, so I let them cut out a picture from a flyer! I gave them a list of words to look up in the dictionary too, and then give me an example. I think they did a good job. I love Rebekah's pictures.
Here are a few English papers of Caleb's. The first one was a dictation. We were learning about quotation marks, so I only corrected that, not his spelling. But wow, his spelling is terrible!
This one I had to show you because it was so funny! Caleb hates writing anything that he has to make up himself. This assignment was to look at a picture of 3 girls playing with soap bubbles and write a short story about it. He was supposed to include their names and ages. He had a melt down because he didn't know what to call them, and I refused to help him. Well, he figured it out on his own, can you see the girls names? Joy, Seru (Sarah), and Beans! Ha!!!
She loves her bible reader and has been learning quickly! Here are her most recent bible journal pages:
We found this book at the library and love it! It's a princess that loves God, and she can read it herself! I'm going to try and find more of them!
Here's Joshua playing with one of the preschool toys from My Father's World. He loves puzzles and often does them over and over again.
We also took a field trip to the children's museum in our area. We took a class about our senses, and then played in the museum. I was surprised how much Joshua loved this sorting activity.
And Matthew was just too cute when he fell asleep!