Weekly Report-Week 18

Well, we finished Week 18 of school today, just in time for Christmas Eve. I will never again school this close to Christmas! Princess had present fever all this week and she found it very hard to focus on learning. We also took a long weekend to do visa paperwork and stop off at one of the places I have wanted to visit for a very long time, Angor Wat. It's one of the benefits of living in Asia, you're close to alot of the ancient wonders of the world :).
All things considered I'm shocked we actually completed another week of school. Gotta keep on schedule though so that we can be done (or at least close to done) before the baby comes. Which is approaching faster and faster! Here's what we did accomplish over the last week and a half...


Language Arts: Princess read an abridged version of Robin Hood while we read Ann McGovern's version aloud together. We also completed another week of Writing with Ease. Princess still doesn't like dictation, but she is tolerating it better and I'm glad that I stuck to the plan on this one.


Math: We started the week studying subtraction within 10,000 and it went well until present fever hit. So we ended the week by playing math games.


History: We read about the Jews and the Diaspora. We also read about Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire.


Science: We finished our astronomy unit this week by reading a biography on Neil Armstrong. We also did a review quiz and I was surprised that princess knew the order/names of the planets right of the bat. I'm really pleased with how much she retained from our astronomy study especially considering we weren't able to get to half of the experiments.


Other: We completed our study of Sandro Boticelli and Antonio Vivaldi this week. We also watched the BBC animated version of The Merchant of Venice. Finally, thanks to a very special friend sending use some glitter pens, we made some Christmas ornaments.


Education of Me: I've almost finished Stories from Dante and we will definately be reading this in several weeks. It's totally appropriate for this stage, so we'll have to find something different for the logic stage.


Thanks for reading about our week. Hope that you and yours have a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends!

Weekly Report-Week 17

This was a tough week for me, as I was sick for most of it. When they say that if your pregnant it will take you twice as long to get over a cold or the flu, they mean it. Luckily princess knows our routine and she can do some of her work independently. I was able to give an assignment and then lay back down in bed while she completed it. Gotta love homeschooling! Thankfully after much rest I actually started to feel human again by the end of the week. Here's a look at what we accomplished this week...

Language Arts: Princess read A Minstrel in the Tower and we finished reading A Door in the Wall together. She completed another week of Writing with Ease and spelling.

Math: We continued to work on numbers within 10,000. Princess had a test this week which she passed without a problem, so we moved onto adding thousands. So far, so good.

Science: We read about astronauts this week and she did her narrations. We also managed to complete our experiment for the week on Friday. We learned all about the importance of insulators in the spacesuit which was fun!

History: We talked about Richard the Lionhearted, Jack Lackland, the Magna Carta and the legend of Robin Hood. We will start working on memorizing the first paragraph of the Magna Carta probably sometime after Christmas.

Other: We did get to our Artist/Composer studies this week. We also combined our art project on stencils with our history project of making a Crusaders Flag. We cut out a cross stencil and them painted red all around it, here's the result..

Education of Me: I was able to get some reading in this week. I started reading Stories from Dante by Mary McGregor and I'm impressed. There was a great, but brief bio of Dante and how he came to write the poem. It was a great introduction. The author has written such a readable version of Dante's Divine Comedy that I think we are going to fit this into our read-aloud schedule for this year rather than waiting.

Well that's what we accomplished this week, thanks for reading about it!

Weekly Report-Week 16

It was a bit rough here this week, princess got sick halfway through the week and was so kind to pass it on to me today. I really don't like being sick when I'm pregnant, tylenol just doesn't cut it for me! We did manage to complete almost a full week despite the sicknesses, here's the run down...

Language Arts: Princess read from several books this week, but mainly we read aloud this week. We did manage to complete a weeks of Writing with Ease. She also practiced some cursive this week.

Math: We talked about numbers within 1000 and how to compare them. We didn't get much farther than that because when you have a head cold it's hard to concentrate on math.

Science: We discussed telescopes this week, but didn't get to our experiment.

History: We read about the Crusades, but didn't get to our project.

Others: These didn't happen this week.

Education of Me: I did finally finish Piers Plowman, but didn't move onto my next book.

It was a light week here, but I am pleased at how much we did accomplish despite not feeling well :). Be sure to check out what others did this week at the Weekly Wrap-up.

Project: Coat of Arms

I've been looking forward to doing this project since I got my plans together last year! I know it's sad, but I remember making coat of arms in school and loved it, so much so that I made many more on my own at home. So I was sure to participate in this project!


We started out by looking at some different coat of arms on google pics. That way princess could get an idea of what they looked like. We then decided how we wanted to divide our fields on the shield template from the SOTW activity pages. (As a side note, I recently downloaded the activity pages from Peace Hill Press and I'm kicking myself for not getting the activity guide this year. We loved it last year, but I thought I could pull it together on my own, wrong-get the activity guide, it's worth the money!) Anyways here's princess drawing her fields...
We then chose a symbol to go in the center of our shield. You could choose an animal, a man-made object (like a castle) or something from nature. We decided to go with animals. Princess chose a rabbit; I chose a turtle, great mascot, I know. We colored and cut out our animals.
Next we chose our colors, You are suppose to choose one metal (gold, silver or copper) and a color or colors for the coat of arms. Since we didn't have any metallic crayons or paint, we decided that the yellow colored pencil would be our gold. I opted for one additional color, princess opted for a few more...
We pasted our symbol in the middle of our shield. Then we chose a brief motto and wrote it under our shield. Here are the finished products...
We really enjoyed this project. Princess even went on to make another shield later that day. Gotta love when learning is fun!

Weekly Report-Week 15

We ended up doing a full week of school, despite the Thanksgiving holiday. They don't celebrate the holiday here, so it made it easy :)! Here's a look at what we did...

Language Arts: Princess finished reading an abridged version of Black Beauty. She decided in that end she really liked the book, for which I am grateful! Once again she's seen the value of finishing a book and not giving up on it too early. A skill I'm sure she'll use throughout her life. We also finished another week of Writing with Ease which went much better this week.

Math: We began 3A this week, our topic was numbers within 1000 this week. It went well, so we'll keep on going!

Science: We continued to study constellations and thier stories again this week. We been using a book that my mother-in-law gave me awhile back called Heavenly Zoo. It tells the stories behind the animal constellations in the sky. It such a good book, but unfortunately it's out of print. If you find this book at your library, I really recommend it, princess loved it and learned quite a bit!

History: We talked about knights and samurai's this week. We made our own coat of arms, which I'll post more about later, for now, here's a picture of hers...

Other: We studied another of Boticelli's paintings and we listened to more of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Concerto. We also read more of a children's version of Merchant of Venice. For art this week, we made some Thanksgiving crafts.

Education of Me: Still plugging away at Piers Plowman. (I got a bit distracted by Squanto and Johnny Tremain this week!). Maybe this weekend :).

Thanks for reading about our week, hope you had a great week too!

Weekly Report-Week 14

Ok, I'm alittle late in writing this, but by the time this weekend got here, I just crashed. I forgot how much fun it is to be pregnant (said with quite a bit of sarcasm). Be sure to check out others at the Weekly Wrap-up. We had a great week of school though, here's what we did...

Language Arts: Princess finished reading Viking Adventures and we started reading Castle Diary together. She continued to practice her cursive and phonics. However, we had a melt down over writing this week though. Princess felt that the dictation was too hard. Which lead into a nice discussion about how school is going to be challenging, that's how we learn. We disscussed the reasons I want her to learn dictation and how it will help her in the future. After she understood the purpose, she was willing to give it another go. We adjusted the way we are doing dictation to challenge her, but to still give her the confidence that she can do it. Let's hope that next week goes better.

Math: Princess passed her final exam for 2B this week! Some of the things she missed I wasn't completely surprised as we are working on them already. Others I was really surprised as they were things that I knew she had down cold. I'm thinking that she just got anxious because it was a test. So now I'm looking at adding a few more tests in to reduce her anxiety over them. If you've got a better suggestion, please leave a comment! I just don't want to send her off to college dreading having to take a test. I realize that we've got plenty of time before that, I'm just trying to be proactive :).

Science: We began studying constellations this week. The plan was to make a shoebox planetarium, but since I don't have a shoebox or index cards or a flashlight, we decided to make a book about them instead! Here's a look at that...

History: We started talking about medieval England this week. We learned all about nobles, serfs and castles. We made our own model of a castle, here's a picture, but you can also read more about it below.

All and all it was a great week for history!

Other: We completed our artist and composer studies this week. Our composer right now is Vivaldi and we have been having alot of fun listening to his Four Seasons Concerto. We also began reading Lamb's Tales version of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. So far, so good and I'm really glad that we are back to our Shakespeare studies! We didn't do art this week because I figured that our castle project was enough :).

Education of Me: I haven't been the best about keeping up with my reading this week, my brain just hasn't been able to handle it. Maybe next week will be better.

Hope you had a great week, thanks for reading about ours!

History Project: Building a Castle

We started studying castles this week so we decided to make one of our own. I've been saving toilet paper tubes and paper towel tubes for weeks so that we would have enough for towers. I would have saved cereal boxes too, but cereal is kinda expensive here, so we don't eat it regularly, instead we used cardstock. We started by laying out the design.

This was so that we knew how many pieces we needed to paint :). Next we mixed some black and white paint to make grey and then we started to paint.

And we painted and painted, I really recommend spray paint for this step, as we painted for nearly an hour! Once all the pieces were done, we let them dry.

Then we started to assemble our castle. It was at that point that I realized that we should have painted both sides, but since we were out of paint there's not much we could do. We used masking tape to put it together, but again I recommend that you use a hot glue gun. It would make the job much easier!

Our castle had 4 towers, with two more guard towers outside, a peasants house, a peasants jail on the other side, a king's great hall and a moat.

We were both very pleased with the finally product, plus we had alot of fun making it!