Weekly Wrap-Up: No field trip edtion

It's that time folks. Time to wrap up our week. And look, I'm writting the post on a Friday. Although I don't know that it will be posted on Friday. LOL Be sure to hop on over to Kris' to see what other folks have been up to this week.

This week was nice. Mainly because we didn't have a lot of "extras". No field trips breaking up our week and lots of time at home. Our only "big venture" was cooking class starting back up this month. Mackenzie takes a cooking class every so often at The Young Chefs Academy. We primarily do this in the winter as a fun activity for the kids to do when it's too cold outside.

For me the class serves 2 purposes:

1) She learns how to cook. I can cook. Not terribly well and I certainly don't enjoy it but, thanks to Quick Cooking magazine, I can get edible food on the table. It's a necessary evil for me. LOL So we don't do a lot of cooking together at home. The extra mess alone is enough to send me right over the edge. Cooking together is not as frequent as it probably should be. I'll work on it. =o)

2) The mom's hang out at the local Starbucks while the kids are cooking for an hour and a half. Okay, so this might be my favorite reason. LOL If they'd only let me enroll Wee Babe it would be perfect.

Now I need to remember the rest of the week. What did we do? LOL Thinking, thinking...

Bible:

We stick-figured our way through the temptation of Jesus. We talked a lot about areas where we both needed to work on not succumbing to temptation. That's a long list. Yikes!

Math:

I think we were skip counting by 3's. Which means next week she'll be multiplying by 3's.

Science:

We are studying birds at the moment. If I were a good mom, I'd take her bird watching. I don't enjoy birds much though. Well except for chickens and turkeys. The others don't taste as good and they poop on my car and make too much noise. LOL One of my favorite things about living in Guam was how clean my car stayed. =o) I should send her with my bird-loving friend. She likes them and can pretty much tell you what any bird is off the top of her head.

Language Arts:

We did a few days on proper oral language, particularly focusing on verb tense. Mackenzie's favorite part was the fact that there was no writing involved.

Social Studies:

We're still studying colonial times. Love, love, love it.

Our read aloud is The Witch of Blackbird Pond. And we're getting to the really good parts. Yay!! If only my sinuses weren't draining so I could read longer.

Mackenzie read The Skippack School this week. She says it was really good. She can't tell me why though. LOL

She also got a good lesson this week on why it's not a good idea to rely on one source for your information. We were studying how the colony of Georgia was founded.

One book painted James Oglethorpe and the colonization of Georgia as this great humanitarian deed. And it was, in a sense. The London poor were given opportunities for jobs, homes, food, etc. That's definately a step up from living on the streets.

What that particular didn't book didn't tell you was how Oglethorpe et. all were really looking out for their own interests. They thought London had far too many poor and wanted them out. What better place for them than across the ocean? And while they're there, they'll work where they were told, eat what they were told, dress how they were told, and basically have no options. And the "best part" was that if Spainish in Florida decided to attack the English colonies, they'd wipe out Georgia first. It's just London's down-trodden, so no big loss, right?

That was a good lessson in "there are two sides" to every story. And as to why our curriculum uses more than one source.

Our history pocket this week was about colonial homes. She got to make a "diorama" HP style of a colonial home, which she thought was fun. I like crafts about as much as I like cooking, so it was a big treat. ROFL

Mackenzie was thrilled when what she learned about colonial homes in the HP showed up in her reading. "I know what a settle is mom. I read about them in my HP." All the pieces are starting to fit together. =o)