Week 20, MFW Adventures & K

 

Have you ever heard of dip painting?  It's when you dip your brush in multiple colors and then paint with it.  Rebekah understood what it was, hers is on the right.  Caleb just painted his normal, so I had him try the dip painting on the top.

 

This was our science project this week.  We had two plates of popcorn seeds.  One we watered, and one we didn't.  Can you guess which one grew?

 

For English, Caleb worked on the months and seasons of the year.

 

 

Our history was about the Louisiana purchase.  I made red beans and rice for lunch for them to try, but only me and Joshua liked it.  They really liked the book: Why Alligator Hates Dog (LittleFolk), which is a Cajun folktale.  We also read about Lewis and Clark!

 

We learned about our flag and the Star Spangled Banner.  Did you know that there are other verses to the song?  I never knew that!  Here's a picture of books we read.

 

We also read the story of the ballet, Swan Lake.  Although I thought the ending of suicide was too much for my young kids.  I ended the story with "she had to remain a swan forever".  I thought that would be tragic enough!  Then we listened to some of the music.

Rebekah finished up Horses and is on to Elephants.  E is her last vowel! 

Happy Birthday Joshua! (Thomas Cake Take 3)

This is the 3rd time I've made a Thomas cake.  (Caleb's 4th and 5th birthday's too.)  I should have made the number 2 instead, but I was just following the outline of the pan.  The face looks terrible, but Joshua loved it!  I really wanted chocolate icing, so I did the edges in chocolate and then the rest in vanilla, it tasted great!

Joshua thought it tasted great too!

Happy 2nd birthday Joshua!

Week 19, MFW Adventures & K

Rebekah finished up her unit on cows this week, so we made homemade ice cream in zip lock bags.  We used almond milk for hers (she's allergic to dairy), and it turned out very yummy!  Click here for the recipe.  I also made the chocolate syrup, it's great!

Here's a random picture of what school looks like at our house, yep, they're in their jammies!  Rebekah had moved on to the letter H, so she's decorating a heart while Caleb is doing English.

 

This is his English paper.  He had a list of animals, and he had to make up a sentence using each animal.  I'm really proud of what he came up with, and that he did it without crying and whining!  Usually, he has a hard time coming up with his own sentences.  

 

This is Joshua being busy!  He's been doing simple puzzles a lot lately.

I started letting Caleb do his spelling review on spellingcity.com.  You can put in spelling words and then they can play games using those words.  Caleb loves computer games, so it's also worked as a motivational tool.  I gave him a choice this week.  If his math and English were done without crying and whining, he could play the games.  If he whined and cried, then he had to write each spelling word 3 times for his review instead.  He chose to get his work done without whining and crying!  I'll be using this trick again!

 

For bible time, we've been learning that Jesus is the Lamb of God.  Below are their sheep pictures with part of our memory verse.

Our postcard exchanging has been going well.  We're up to 26 states!  If you're from one of the states that's not colored on our map, we'd love to exchange a postcard with you!  Send me an email at simplejoycrafting@gmail.com.

We learned about the state of Ohio, and how settlers traveled down the Ohio River in large flat boats.  We read several books, but of course, I already took them back to the library...

For art, they tried coloring with markers and then painting it with water.  The results were pretty neat.  Caleb's is on the left.

 

Lastly, a picture of one of Rebekah's worksheets in Kindergarten.

 

Week 18, MFW Adventures & K

 

We've been back to school for a couple weeks but I'm just now getting to posting about it!  School with a newborn has been easier than I thought it would be.  I've had to sit at the table and nurse the baby, or I nurse him while reading our read alouds.  He also sleeps quite a bit still.  Joshua has been less of a challenge too because he discovered that it's fun to color if you have your own school box!  Above, the kids are looking at our library books, we call it book basket time.

 

 

This week we learned about Eli Whitney and his invention of the cotton gin.  Above is Caleb's summary about him.  Below, we glued green paper "seeds" to some cotton balls and then tried to pick the seeds out of the cotton.  Both kids got frustrated.  The point was to show them how much of a help the cotton gin was.

 

 

We also learned about the state of Tennessee.  

 

 

And played this game, that we gave the kids for Christmas.  Rebekah has a hard time with this game because she can't read yet, but Caleb does really good.

 

 

For science, we learned about living and non-living things and then talked about cells.  We made a chart of the living and non-living things God created.  They also colored pictures of plant and animal cells.



 

The fun activity was making models of cells out of Jello, marshmallows, and a piece of candy!

Here is Caleb's English paper for the week.  His handwriting is getting good, but he holds his pencil wrong...  I'm not sure if I should correct it or not.  He slammed his finger in a door back in kindergarten, and it took months for it to heal, so he got used to doing it wrong...

Rebekah has been doing great!  She's trying to read all kinds of books and surprises me with what she knows already!  Here's a sample of what she's doing in school.

Un-schooling on our Baby Break

Because I was 39 weeks pregnant and hoping to have the baby a few days early, I decided we were officially taking a break starting Dec. 9th!  We still did quite a bit of informal school that 1st week before I had the baby (who didn't come until after his due date...)  I had Caleb do 2 days worth of math and some math fact practice, we finished Farmer Boy, and watched several nature movies (we call that science around here).  We had lots of time for some fun Christmas activities, like making gingerbread cookies shown above.  I took the easy way out this year and skipped the rolling and using cookie cutter part.  We had all round ornaments!  They didn't seem to notice I was cheating!

They also sewed their own Felt Christmas Tree Ornament.

A fellow MFW user shared these nutcracker puppets.  We used a cereal box for the backgrounds.  They were all taped on the top so we could flip them as we went.  I read this book as they performed the show.

We had time for a game of Sorry! 2013 Edition Game as well (while Joshua napped of course).

I had them draw the maple tree in our neighbors yard since it is winter now.  They drew the same tree in the fall.  Rebekah's is on the left, Caleb's on the right.

Our unschooling continued after Christmas too!  Below is Rebekah learning how to sew on her new sewing machine.  I helped her make a doll pillow.

Caleb received Legos, which he had to put together right away!  Here's his finished space ship.  I'm still not sure if I should count Lego building as school.  It seems like it should be!  It could be a little math, maybe the science of building, engineering, creative thinking?  What do you think?

Caleb also got a lesson in how to operate a snow blower, thanks Grandpa!  (Now he wants his very own snow blower!)

Rebekah also received an art kit for Christmas.  We watched an instructional video online about soft pastels, and then she tried to draw this picture from a book we had.  I think that big black smudge in the middle is supposed to be the trees on the horizon line.  I'm actually impressed!  She even tried to blend blue and black for the sky on the top, just like the guy in the video did.

Did you know that Goodwill has outlet stores!  We recently found out about one in our area, it is so much fun digging for treasure!  We found this old phonics game, still in the package.  You pay by the pound at the outlet, so this wasn't even a dollar!  It's perfect for Rebekah, but even Caleb has had fun with it.

We started school back up this week, but we took a couple days off because Grandma came to visit!