Week 27, MFW Adventures & K

This week we covered the states of Minnesota and Oregon, and started learning about Abraham Lincoln.  It's amazing how much I'm learning along with my kids about him.  One thing that fascinated me was the books that he had growing up.  They were the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Life of Washington, and History of the United States.  These books built his faith, his good character, and his patriotism for our county.  He really was an amazing man!  Above are all the books we've looked at this week, and will continue with next week.  This first week we mostly focused on Lincoln's early years.

We started reading Mountain Born, and so far are enjoying it a lot.  It goes well with our bible verse this week, which talks about Jesus being our Good Shepherd.

We had more fun in science too with Science in the Kitchen.  Here is Caleb showing you our cups of ice.  One is covered with a towel and we were watching to see which one would melt first.  They ended up being the same... oh well.

I found this crystal growing kit at Goodwill, so I thought we'd try it.  So far we've only grown one, and it wasn't as amazing as hoped for.

Caleb is still using Singapore 2A, but I'm also still working with him every day on math facts.  I found these neat placemats at Target in the dollar section.  They can use dry erase markers.  Rebekah likes the addition one too!  (I also got an alphabet one for Joshua.)

We're still using Primary Language Lessons for our language arts curriculum.  Below is a dictation that Caleb did, it's part of a poem.  The top is the dictation, and then I had him copy it correctly below.  He tried to squish it all into one line on the bottom so it got a bit sloppy.

 

Art... it's a love and hate subject, usually on the hate side.  The clown pages below were to help them learn the difference between warm and cool colors, thus a happy and sad clown.  You can tell when Caleb got tired of coloring and just started scribbling to finish (the first one).  This drives me crazy!

Enter bubble letters...  I knew this would be tricky, so I copied the page in the book first so they could practice before using their marker card.  Unfortunately, we ran out of ink after only copying one...  I tried to give one the copy and one a blank paper with the teachers manual to copy from...  Bad idea...  Let's just say, I may have gotten a bit upset, and I may have crumpled up their papers and threw them across the room, maybe that was me...  In the end, they did the marker cards by themselves with no help from me and did a really good job.  Caleb's is first again.

Rebekah is cruising through her Kindergarten with no problems.  We finished up the letter J.  I love her picture of a Jumping Jack.  She has had a hard time remembering which way the J goes, as well as a few other numbers and letters.  I wonder if it's because she's left handed.  I'm not worried about it though, I expect it will correct itself eventually.

That's it for week 27!