Week 2!

Our second week of school went very well. We are starting to get into a routine. After the summer with busy schedules and lots of running around, it is quite refreshing to stay home and stick to a schedule. Here is a brief look at our second week of school.

We start off our mornings with our Bible study. We continue to review all the books of the Bible the boys have learned over the last two years. This year with MFW we are studying the names of Jesus. This week we looked into what the OT has to say about Jesus. The boys each take turns looking up verses and reading it to the whole family. Starting next week we will also begin some Bible memorization with this study.

One fun thing we have used for school the last two weeks is an entire library of education videos found at  Discover Education Streaming Plus. Our family had a free membership for the month of August for this amazing educational tool. We got the membership through the Homeschool Buyer's Co-op that I talked about last week. Here is the link to the free membership.  It has thousands of videos, clip art, documents, etc. to supplement learning. Unfortunately, I don't think our homeschool budget will allow us to purchase the full membership after our free trial, but it was fun while it lasted!

Here the kids are watching a video about Christopher Columbus, the topic of our history studies this week.

More timeline and notebooking work!

Our family read aloud this week was a SL selection that fit in perfect with our studies.

This book was one we found in our library to add to our book basket for the week. It had several suggestions for activities related to Christopher Columbus.

One activity from the book that we chose was an experiment in making "Hard tack," the cracker like bread sailors used on long journeys that would not go bad for years! Well, that is a pretty good clue as to how that bread tasted I think!

Luke in particular was super excited to try out his masterpiece of cooking!

These pictures are worth a thousand words concerning the impression hard tack made on our children!

 

Ben is in the midst of loosing a couple of his front teeth. We decided he should eat hard tack for a few days and he would have them all out!

Jacob and Gracie would not even try it, and Caleb looked at me like I had tried to feed him poison! I guess we will not be sailing across the ocean anytime soon! Although, in all honesty true hard tack was meant to be soaked in grease or broth to soften it before eating!

We also decided to build our own fleet of ships to sail as Columbus did!

In science this week we had been learning about the effects of air and wind on currents. During our fun Friday swim time we took our ships to the Atlantic Ocean (neighborhood pool) and used our lungs to produce some currents and wind for our sails. 

True to history, our Santa Maria sunk, and the other two did not fair well!

One fun new item this week was in handwriting. Luke and Ben got to use a laser pointer pen to draw on the wall the new cursive letters they have learned. They loved this activity!

School for the little ones included lots of puzzle time for Gracie, her favorite past time.

This was a fun idea I found online. Use colored pipe cleaners to decorate a colander. This is great for fine motor control, and Caleb especially loved it!

Jacob was working on colors and shapes this week.

Caleb was sorting colored counting bears into ice cube trays.

Of course we always love cuddling on the couch to read! We have started working through many of the SL preschool core books that we enjoyed when Luke and Ben were younger. It is like meeting an old friend when we reread these books and enjoy them all over again with the younger set of little ones.

Over the last few weeks we have enjoyed several audio stories from our library including:

You can literally hear a pin drop in the car when we are listening to audio stories. I am always amazed at how much even Caleb loves these stories! I must admit, I have loved hearing all these stories too, and getting a break from reading out loud myself.

MFW only schedules lessons four days a week. This gives us time to enjoy our fun Friday activities as well as our extracurricular studies.

For the next week or two we will be studying Vincent Van Gogh in art class.

The Meet the Masters program we are using breaks each lesson into three parts. The first step is a short video and slide presentation about the artist's life and works. To this we will supplement with library books that we find on the artists.

Here is the library book we enjoyed this week about Van Gogh.

The second step to the art program is practicing different techniques the artist used. Luke and Ben worked on different styles of adding texture to art this week. The final step is creating a piece of artwork in the style of the artist studied. We will finish up that step next week.

Once a week on Fridays the boys will work through this Maps, Charts, and Graphs workbook from Modern Curriculum Press. It is a short lesson that they can work through independently. This workbook is great for teaching the important skills of reading maps, various charts and graphs.

We are excited to have our first two weeks of school under our belt. Stay tuned for more school updates.