Wordless Wednesday

Education of Me

Ok, so I haven't done a post on this in quite awhile, but that's because I haven't done much self-education. I've been mostly on survival mode as moving overseas takes alittle out of you. So I plan to try to get back on track this week and I'm writing it here for accountability.

Over the last two months I have...

1. Read the Tempest. It was a great play by Shakespeare and I read it in preparation for our own Shakespeare study. We read Lamb's tales, but I wanted to become familiar with the story.
2. Read absolutely nothing from my history list, but I did read Five Little Peppers and how they grew, that counts, right?

What I plan to do next week...

1. Begin to read A Winter's Tale. This is our next Shakespeare play and I have the next three weeks to read it.
2. Read 60 pages in the Saying of Confucius. I still need to download this book from Google, but once I get that worked out I can begin reading.

Hopefully my goals aren't too lofty seeing that I still need time to work on learning a whole new language. I guess we will see how things go.

Outdoor Hour Challenge #45 Squirrels

We began this challenge by watching the videos that Barb had linked the the callenge, which we enjoyed immensely! It was so much fun to watch the squirrels. We then read about squirrels in our animal encyclopedia and headed out for our walk.

I would love to show you a picture of the squirrel we found, but it appears that none live in our city. So we decided that we would just have to go on memory. Before we moved, we used to sit and watch a squirrel try everything it possibly could to get into our bird feeder. It never suceeded, but it was fun to watch!

Anyways, we listened to Chapter 5 of the Burgess Animal Book from Librovox while filling out a page for our journals. Princess enjoyed the story and here's a look at her journal.

Weekly Report-March 13, 2009

We finished up week 20 this week, only three more weeks left in our term. Which means I need to get going on planning next terms artist/composer studies and our character study. I have an idea of what we will be doing, it's just a matter finding time to write it all out. Which is a problem, because between trying to learn a new language, dealing with computer frustrations(I can't get my Adobe to work right) and putting together the last bit of my chemistry program time is nearly non-exsistant here. Deep breath, this to shall pass!! Sorry about the slight vent, now on to the weekly run-down.

Language Arts: Princess finished up another Amelia Bedelia book this week. We completed the review lesson in Explode the Code. We also read some poetry about spring, which is slowly trying to arrive here.

Math: We wrapped up our two facts for multiplication quicker than I had planned, so we spent the rest of the week playing math games and working on mental math. We also did a few pages in the Miquon blue book on odd and even numbers.

Science: We began our look at the human body this week! I was ready for a change of pace. We talked about cells, hair and skin this week. We also did an experiment that looked at the ridges on our fingers and why they were important to us. Here's a look at her sheet from that...

History: We hung out with the Greeks this week, mainly in Athens and Sparta. Nothing much to report here except that princess is really enjoying our timeline and starting to make some good connections about the flow of history from it.

Others: We did our nature study, which you can read about below. We also started to read The Winter's Tale from Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare this week. It's a new one for me, so I'm looking forward to it. Finally, we finished our three week mural project, framed it and hung it up in the school area. I'm so proud of the job princess did (I only helped on the tree-she did the rest)! Here's how it looks...

I hope you had a great week also, now I'm off to get some more studying in!

Outdoor Hour Challenge #44-Rabbits

We are back with the outdoor hour challenges and today's went well. I never really thought I would have to do nature study in an urban environment. We have always lived in the country or very near to it. Now living in the big city overseas I'm starting to understand that urban nature study requires that you take advantage of all the reasources availble! So we began our study by going over some facts from the Handbook of Nature Study. We then watched these two videos on you-tube to observe rabbits in the wild and baby rabbits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbfrBq5WCOw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cv14BYah4o&feature=channel

Finally princess drew rabbit tracks in her nature journal and colored a picture of a rabbit to go with it. We talked about what she had learned and put some of that in her journal. Here's a picture of the page we made.

Not exactly a walk in the woods looking for nature, but we did walk to lunch afterwards. Seriously, although our nature study is taking on a new form, she is still learning about nature and that's the whole point anyways.

Wordless Wednesday

Weekly Report

We had a so-so week. We had a great field trip, but then I got the stomach flu. Dad stepped in to teach a few days for me and he did a good job, I just felt very disconnected to her schooling this week. So with that background, here's our week in review....

Language Arts: Princess read Amelia Bedelia and completed a lesson of Explode the Code. Very little grammar or copywork were done this week. We did begin a new read-aloud, the Year of Miss Agnes, one of my favorites when I pre-read books for this year.

Math: We completed our intro to division early in the week and then just spent time working on drill and solidifying addition and subtraction. I really wasn't up for teaching something new.

Science: We started the week with an experiment. We used suction cups to open the fridge and saw that the more we used the easier it was to open. Here's a picture from that...

I then tied this into a lesson about the starfish and how he uses his "suction cup" to open a clam shell. It was alot of fun, but after that not much science got done. We will be doing some science this weekend to make up for it which is ok with princess because she loves science.

History: We are back to the Greeks again. Princess got a real kick out of righting her name in Greek and declared that she wanted to study greek right now. I'm not quite ready for that, but it's on the list for later, maybe.

Other: We worked on our mural project but didn't get to finish it, maybe next week. Here's a picture of princess hard at work on it...

Other than that, we didn't do any of our typical extras this week due to the teacher being out of commission. Hope you all had a better week, thanks for reading about ours!