MFW EX1850: Week Nine

Week nine of our school year...so far, so good.  We did get behind a bit this week, but went into the weekend to make up for it.  Not ideal, but with Chris deployed, the weekends don't seem all that much different that weekdays.  

A sample of each of my boys' history note booking about a battle between colonists and Native Americans...

Gabriel, age 6

Christopher, age 11

Matthew, age 9

Who owned which land during this time period.

Pennsylvania becomes a colony.

We're still studying the animal kingdom for science and this week we are reading about reptiles.  The kids had to draw a picture of a lizard camouflaging itself and Christopher drew his lizard blending in with fireworks.  He's so fun.

A few of the read-alouds we've enjoyed lately.  We've just started reading Madeleine Takes Command, but like the others, the boys, especially Christopher, asks to do more than one chapter a day.

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Monarch Madness came to our city park and I took the girls after co-op Friday.  We read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" pretty much every night for the girls' bedtime so they were both very excited to see the butterflies there.

They let Leah hold a butterfly to release it and she loved it.  They offered one to Anna, but she didn't want it to touch her.  She still enjoyed looking at it though.

And, of course, my sweet craft-loving girls loved coloring their flowers and adding thumbprint butterflies to them.

Have a great week!

MFW EX1850: Week Eight

A friend told me recently that someone she knew schools through the summer and takes the fall off.  Another friend once started right up in early summer and was finished when the weather turned nice for spring.  Between being on my MOPS leadership team, flag football, homeschool co-op and my husband being deployed, that doesn't sound like too bad of an idea, this taking a school break during the busy school year. 

My planner is always looking way too full for this stay-at-home mom  I like to do all the fun stuff going on...base events, church events, homeschool group events, MOPS events.  I like to do the preschool stuff that is for my girls...open gymnastics class, library story time, play dates with other moms with preschoolers.  I like to take my boys to their own Bible study group.  I like to help out friends who need meals, childcare, and just a friend to hang out with sometimes.  I like to have a clean house when I host the weekly Bible study group at our house.

All of these are good things. And I have a hard time saying no when something fun comes up.  But I'm getting better.  Some weeks.  I've actually given up some activities this year that I really enjoyed.  But I find us making up school we've missed during the week on the weekends  more often than I'd like to.  Not whole days worth of school, but a spelling tests or letter writing that we didn't get to during the week...math that didn't get finished because a child asked for a break and it was forgotten for the rest of the day.

My dad is still visiting and I've tried to take advantage of him keeping the girls occupied on the backyard swing set to actually keep up with school this week.  It went pretty well.

Virginia becoming a colony got attention this week.  My first grader is getting better at having a good attitude about having to write so much, which makes the time he spends on it much shorter.

We also gave attention to the king of France during this time period.  Christopher's notebook summary...

And Matthew's notebook summary.

In our 2nd/3rd grade supplement book, Pioneers and Patriots, we read about a French family in America and how they would carry their canoes from one river to the other to travel.  So we made our own canoes. Not very waterproof, but a big hit with my children.

                                  

And we can't go very long with Legos getting added to whatever we do.  :)

By the way, I'm not going completely crazy from busyness....most days.  I still have down time at the end of the day, once all of the kids are in bed or at least in their rooms by eight to read or blog or watch a movie and sometimes clean or do laundry.  :)  I get to Skype with my hubby regularly and I've started calling all of my kiddos into bed with me when I wake up to start our day by praying together (which I really recommend you if can't seem to get them all together once everyone is up).  I take a shower most days and what keeps me sane most of all...I talk to God throughout my day.

MFW EX1850: Week Seven

This week we were excited to have a visitor...Grandpa (my dad)!  He brought two chihuahuas with him to add to our already highly energetic home.  The kids love them all...grandpa and his two pups, and although they were quite yippy, they provided entertainment for my little ones and we were all happy for the distraction of waiting for daddy/hubby to come home.

Meanwhile, no break from school was had for Grandpa's visit.

We're now in the time period of the beginning to mid 1600s.  The Catholics and the Protestants were still battling against each other and the "Thirty Years War" was fought.  Maryland became a colony. The plague and fire swept over England.

For our study of fish this week, we pretended to be an archerfish...which spits streams of water at insects above the water to knock them into the water for lunch. We saw how that's not so easy since light bends as it passes though water and where it looks like the bug is (a paper bug in our case), is deceiving.  We used a pencil as our stream of water and looked through the water filled base to try to land our pencil tip on the bug.  It was pretty hard.

I hope your week was great!

MFW EX1850: Week Six

Few words, several pictures this week...

Making butter from cream in a glass jar.

A snack of crackers and fresh butter.

Making bird nests for science...chow mein noodles, shredded wheat, peanut butter and chocolate.  Add a few m&m's for eggs.  Snack.

Owl pellets.  Which for those who don't know, (I didn't until this year) are the coughed up remains - bones and fur - of swallowed-whole rodents.  (It's not poop.)

Our three pellets all turned out to have, what we determined to be, vole remains in them.

We've also been continuing our read-aloud of Amos Fortune, Free Man.  Again, MFW picked a winner and I'm asked most nights by my oldest son to read double what the teacher's manual suggests.

I hope you had a great week too!

MFW EX1850: Week Five

This week found us reading more about the early settlers...those in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  We continued to work on the Pilgrim activities in the History Pockets:Life in Plymouth Colony book and the boys had fun choosing their occupation and designing their own store signs:

We also talked about quilt making and the boys colored patterned quilt squares and glued them together to form a paper quilt.

We were supposed to do these Indian games last week and squeezed them into this week instead.  In this one, we played Twig Toss using a craft stick.  You start with the stick on the back of your hand, toss it in the air and catch it in the palm of your hand.  I think we were supposed to use two hands, which would have made it much easier.  Next time I'll read the instructions better.  It was challenging, but we still had a lot of fun with it and caught it a few times.

In this next game, Almond Toss, you mark one side each of six almonds and place them into a bowl.  Toss them into the air, catch them in the bowl again, and for every almond that lands with its marked side up, you get a stick (or a toothpick in our case) to keep track of points.

Gabe won!

We finished up the history pockets book with a letter "home" from Plymouth to England.  In our home, I let the boys be creative and silly a lot as long as they are getting the basics of writing down.  And they love to be silly.

This fun little activity was an example of entertainment for children back in the day.  It's a simple little game where you pulled a lever and the geese went back and forth, snacking on the bush in between them.  My boys all thought it was pretty fun too (for a little while anyways).

Math.  Not Christopher's favorite subject but he likes it a bit more when he gets to use cool math tools.

And finally...Leah makes several requests a day to do preschool until I either make time to do BFIAR with her or I find her some worksheet to do school with while I'm doing school with the boys.

I hope your week was great!