School updates

This was a post I had written the day before Caleb was born, but never got around to posting!

So here is our first nine week school update.

We have now officially finished up our first nine week unit of school!! I had purposely planned the last few weeks to be a bit lighter in the extra curricular items. I keep asking myself why this pregnancy seems so much more difficult than the last two. My Mother and Hubby keep reminding me that I was not teaching school formally during the last two pregnancies, which makes perfect sense!! Even so, we have had a fun time diving into our last few weeks of school before baby brother is born. My plan is to hold off on our extra curricular activities and Tapestry of Grace studies until after the holidays. We will just focus on the 3 R's as soon as we are able to jump back into school after he is born.

First, here are just some random cute pictures of our "students". My lens on my camera has been broken for months, and thanks to my Dad, who decided I needed a new lens before #5 arrives, I have recently been playing with my new lens to practice! :)

Here are Gracie and Jacob working on some of their own schoolwork. Trying to keep them busy and entertained while I focus on the older boys in the morning can be quite a challenge!

Over the last few weeks we continued our study through the early Old Testament. We followed the Patriarchs for a few weeks, then skipped over to follow the Israelite's wanderings in the desert over the last few weeks. We have learned about God's covenant with Abraham, life as a nomad, the 10 commandments, the Tabernacle and Levitical law, and the Hebrew holidays.

Here is our crew pretending to be Abraham and Sarah with a life on the move as nomads. We had a picnic supper in our tent to act it out. Originally I was going to make lentils and unleavened bread, but decided it might be too messy. We ate PB and J instead. We did have chocolate covered locusts (raisins) for dessert though! :)

While learning about the Tabernacle and Levitical law, we were able to learn about the Israelites special call to worship instrument, the Shofar. One craft we did was to make our own Shofar horns. (We rolled up cardstock and put a balloon with one end cut off into our horns.) This made for a noisy crew. Somehow Ben (already our noisiest child) got the loudest Shofar. Unfortunately, we could not keep the Shofar horns for long, the small pieces of balloon was too great a danger to keep out as a toy. They were fun while they lasted.

One book we enjoyed reading was about Yom Kippur, or atonement. The boys really enjoyed this simple but profound story. Learning about the laws God put into place for His people has really opened up interesting discussions of why He gave the laws, and how He intended to point His people to their need of a Savior.
 

For science we spent a few weeks learning about the sun. One fun, and yummy, experiment used magnifying glasses and chocolate to show us how powerful the sun is. (And why we should not look directly at the sun!) Of course once we played with melting the chocolate via magnifying glass and sun they enjoyed eating the chocolate!

Daddy helped us learn a bit more about solar eclipses with another project.

The boys have been doing a great job continuing to work hard on their reading, writing and math as well. I am so proud of all the progress I have seen in just nine weeks!