Sunday, September 23, 2012

6 weeks home school review

  Well as the title suggests it has been 6 weeks already that school has been in session, and for us here it has been an exciting time thus far. We have learned so many things like languages' and how they began. Below are pictures of the cuneiform that each child made for their own language. The cool thing was as they dried out they became pretty brittle which is exactly what happened the real thing if it wasn’t protected:

For history we learned about how God watered the earth before there was rain, and he did so by condensation. The kids got to see this in action as the photographs show below. They put rocks in the bottom of a jar and then dirt on top of that. Then they put a plant in the jar and added a little bit of water. the next day they saw the water all over the inside of the jar:

All of these fun things were in between the typical reading, writing, and arithmetic that we study each day. Not much to photograph in those classes but they are doing very well in all of them. We like to mix in these little projects to break up the day so as not to just be stuck in a book for the entire day. Learning needs to be exciting as well to keep their interest as high as we can get it. You will spend time doing what you love so we just want to make school something that they love to do. We also like to take mini field trips as well to give them some hands on things to teach in conjunction with what they are studying. Last week I took them to the library in town that has story time and it just so happened that they brought a live piglet for the reading of “Charlotte’s web”. This was a lot of fun for all of us.

Another cool experiment we did for history was to make and old looking map. To accomplish that we boiled tea on the stove and then let it cool down. Once it was cool we dipped a piece of cloth into the tea and scrunched it in our hands and let it out to dry. Once it was dry we drew the map onto the cloth and now we have an old map. Tristan and I really had fun doing this together! It turned out really great and we even left the frazzled edges to make it look more authentic.

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We also did a replica of Stonehenge. There is a lot of speculation as to what these rocks were placed like this for and one of the theories is that it was built to tell the rising and the setting of the sun to measure the moon and seasons. Why else would someone go through so much trouble to hoist rocks that weighed 28 tons each and bring them from 300 miles away! All this before there were cranes. whew that is one heavy rock. Below is a much lighter version of Stonehenge.

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The last item we wanted to share was our timeline. We do this to follow along with all the historical facts and then when we are complete there is a complete time line in chronological order that they can see:

More School Stuff 

So this is a synopsis of the first 6 weeks of school and we are having a ball teaching. We look forward to the rest of the year and we can only hope the next 6 weeks is as exciting as the last 6 weeks have been. More to come later! Be Blessed!

July 4th 2013

Here are some of the pictures from our 4th of July day this year. We had my Sister in Law Pam, Brad, and Linden in for a visit and we did a ...