Weekly Wrap-Up: Sept. 13th edition

It's time for our Weekly Wrap-Up sponsored by Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Our week was good! We figured out some things that what were confusing us, read some great books, learned some interesting facts, and survived the first soccer game of the season.

Bible:

Thanks to some helpful bloggers, we figured out how to get started on Grapevine Study's Stick Figuring Through the Bible. Mackenzie is LOVING it! She thinks it's the most fun ever! That's always a great way to feel about your Bible lesson. We're just working through the time for the first two weeks, so we're continuing with our Sonlight Bible as they wrote it.

I think, however, once we start the more detailed Grapevine lesson that something will have to give. My plan is to use the Grapevine lesson as our main lesson and she'll continue with her Sonlight Bible readings . We'll be dropping the teacher-led Sonlight readings. We're using the New Testament Grapevine Study and that seems to be what Sonlight's teacher-led lessons were covering too, so it will work out nicely. We might just have a few early repeats.

Math:

We're working on multiplying by 10's this week. That was a piece of cake for Mackenzie. I'm anxious to get into the harder multiplication facts because Math-U-See always has really neat methods for helping the students master facts. They generally make me laugh and wonder why I never thought of that. LOL

Language Arts:

We're still reading The Secret of the Andes for our read aloud. We're really enjoying that fact that the read alouds this year, coincide with what we're studying in history. Mackenzie has even noticed. LOL

Mackenzie's reader was A Lion to Guard Us. She like it so much she finished it early.

In grammar we were studying adjectives. Even I learned something new, sort of. I found it interesting that an apostrophe can turn a noun into an adjective. I've always known how to use an apostrophe but I never thought about them changing a word into a different part of speech.

Mackenzie is also working on memorizing the poem The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson. She pretty much has it down, it just needs a little polishing.

Science:

We are continuing to study the body in science. We focused on things pertaining to the lungs and breathing. For our animal study we learned about zebras and bush babies. Bush babies are just so cute!!!

Social Studies:

We are now studying the Aztecs. We are reading Incans, Aztecs and Mayans. The book is pretty blunt about how the tribes lived, so I was a tad concerned about whether or not it would be too much for Mackenzie. She was properly horrified with the "ugly" parts but didn't dwell on them. I'm pretty certain that, if asked, she'd tell you the most interesting thing that she learned was how the Aztec matchmakers carried the brides to the grooms house. She thought that was hysterical.

Extras:

We still need to add in our art and Spanish. I've been scheduling art twice a week but we haven't gotten to it. Spanish we haven't added at all yet. I think we'll start that next week.

We had our first soccer game of the season and we got creamed. We were playing the best team in the league, so we weren't too surprised. But the kids did manage to score two goals on them so we call that a major victory.

I got lots of great pictures of the game. 643 to be exact. Don't worry! I'm not posting them all. LOL

Here we have Mackenzie "testing" Kayleigh's Tot School activity. LOL

Tot School

Kayleigh is currently 19 months

Well our third week of Tot School is behind us. While we didn't finishe all of our "planned" activities, we had lots of fun. We continued our farm theme and worked on our shapes and colors. Kayleigh's attention span was very short this week. She must have cabin fever because of all the rain that kept us in the house.

Be sure to check out what the other Tots are doing over at Carisa's.

Everybody likes to win a prize

Check out the give away going on over at Ten Kids and a Dog!

This is our second time trying to win one of these. If we can't do it this time I guess I'll just have to break down and buy one because I'm certain that Kayleigh NEEDS one. LOL

Tot School

Kayleigh is currently 18 months

This is was our first week of "planned" Tot School. I decided to try using themes, very loosely.

So our theme for this week was Farm Animals because Kayleigh is very into ducks, cows and sheep lately. Did you know that a cow says "boo!"? Me neither but Kayleigh's pretty certain that it does.

Here are some of our farm activities...

We danced with scarves to "Old Mc Donald"

Kayleigh has started showing some interest in letters, or "AB's" as she calls them. If you show her something with writing she'll shout "AB's!" So I'm gently introducting the letters to her.

We read Little Scholastic's Alphabet over and over and over. Or rather, we sang it.

We also played with the wood pieces from Handwriting without Tears. Mommy squeezed an "A" in there. Kayleigh noticed it and shouted "AB's" before destroying it. LOL


She can also "lip sync" the "AB's" like a pro. I'm trying to get a video of her doing this but she hasn't been cooperative.

We also did a few farm related "art activites". Although I think Kayleigh's favorite part of "art" is wearing sissy's old nightgown for a paint shirt. She wore it for 3 days in a row, even when we weren't doing art.

We used dot markers to dot "A".


We made a sheep using Kayleigh's handprint for legs and she stamped the sheep's body with Crayola's Tadoodles stamps in farm shapes.

We worked on shapes and colors using bean bags, puzzles and playing Hullabulloo.

Things Mommy learned...

That Kayleigh does not like "Tot School" in one "session". She likes to spread the fun throughout the day.

Weekly Wrap-Up: Soccer Edition

It's Friday again and it's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris over at Weird, Unscocialized Homeschoolers.


We got a bit distracted this week. Errands, annoying (although sweet) neighborhood child, yard work that had to be dealt with before I got a nasty-gram from the HOA. But we survived and we almost finished everything scheduled despite of the interruptions. (We have 2 chapters of a read aloud and one science lesson left, incase you're wondering. LOL)


Bible:


Mackenzie is continuing to read in Genesis this week. She's been reading about Jacob and Esau. Rebekah infuriates her everytime we read this story. LOL

Together we are reading in Luke. We're reading about Jesus' many miracles.


I bought the Grapevine Studies "Stick Figure" Bible curriculum to add a little visual to our lessons. I'm dying to implement it but it's confusing me. LOL I cannot for the life of me figure it out. The actual lessons are not hard to use but hey have the timeline lessons and then the regular lessons and I cannot understand how they fit together. Do you fill out the entire timeline before starting the lessons? Or do you do each lesson and then go back and add it to the timeline? I have no idea. I think part of my problem is that I bought the e-book and I do not do well reading that much on the computer. I should've sprang for the hard copy of the teachers guide.


Math:

This week in math she studying her 2's timestables and some measurement. Neither presented a particular challenge for her.


Social Studies:


We finished up Columbus this week. We really enjoyed Pedro's Journal and were sad that we are finished with it. We finished up the week using The Story of the USA vol. 1 and learned about other Spanish explorers.


We studied a bit about the Aztecs in the American Indian Prayer Guide. We also started working on our Native American History Pocket but it fell to the wayside early on in the week. We'll work on that some this weekend.

Her reader for the week was Vostaas: White Buffalo's Story of Plains Indian Life . That was really good and we both learned a lot. The author did a very good job explaining the plight the Native Americans suffered with the arrival of "white man" while also noting some of the positive impacts. It really moved Mackenzie.

We are still working our way through The Complete Book of Maps and Geography and Mackenzie is still loving every page of it.

Language Arts:

Mackenzie started diagramming sentences in First Language Lessons. Nothing fancy, just subject and predicates, but she thought it was "fun." I always enjoyed diagramming when I was in school, so it's not just my love of reading that she inherited. We also worked on some dictionary skills and she almost has The Land of Nod totally memorized.

Her ability to summarize what she's reading is really coming along nicely thanks to The Complete Writer. I couldn't be more pleased with this purchase.

Spelling was a little rough this week. We've been on the same series of words for over a week. I think the problem is the way Spelling Power states the rules. She learned this particular rule a couple of weeks ago, in First Language Lessons, and understood it perfectly. But she can't seem to apply it to Spelling Power. I think I'm going to "rewrite" the spelling rules for this program in a language more easily understood. This isn't the first time that they stated the rules in a confusing fashion. Other then that we are LOVING the program.

Science:

We are studying the human body this week. Mackenzie has been enjoying the way Usbornes Book of Everything is presenting the body. She thinks the "body machines" are funny. She particular enjoyed how they compared our body's ability to fight off germs to a castle defending itself from it's enemies. She is a princess after all.

We still have an experiment to get to.

Lastly...

Soccer practice started again. She loved soccer so much last year and she's been waiting impatiently for this moment for a year now.

My black thumb

May have been cured. I am notorious for killing most living things, people being the exception. Every plant I've ever own has died a slow and miserable death.


So it was with great misgivings that I planted a couple of tomato plants this year. The "fresh" produce here is horrid at best and I really wanted to taste a yummy tomato that had actual flavor. So Mackenzie and I bought a couple of plants and planted them in a Topsey Turvey, as seen on tv. LOL We also had one zucchini plant because Mackenzie planted it on a field trip.



It is with great pride that I show you our "bounty".

The tomato plants are continuing to bring in fruit by I'm afraid that was our one and only zucchini. It was could while it lasted.