MFW ECC & 1st Grade, Week 2

This was week 2 of Exploring Countries & Cultures for 3rd grade, and MFW 1st grade. I will be real, and say that schooling with a 2 year old and a baby in tow, is hard work! Joshua sometimes gets into things, and demands my attention. But, I know that it truly is a blessing to homeschool them. I'm sure we'll get in a better routine as the year goes on!

Above, they kids are working on their stamp collection. I bought a bag of 300 worldwide stamps from Hobby Lobby (make sure you print a 40% coupon on their website). The stamps are still on the envelopes, so we had to soak them in water to loosen the adhesive before peeling them off. This was the fun part, of course. We laid them between sheets of wax paper and put books on top so they would dry flat. I also bought some stock sheets for stamp collecting that go in a 3 ring binder, so we sorted the dry ones by country and put them in the binder.

Week 2 continues introducing how God loves the whole world. The kids each made a chain of paper dolls from around the world. We also learned a lot about maps, things like scale, keys, and latitude and longitude. Below are pictures of their hand prints drawn half the size (to learn about scale).

We also drew a map of our neighborhood, but I didn't get a picture of it yet. They took it downstairs right away to play cars on it. It had roads!

On the last day, our curriculum recommended baking a cake and frosting it to look like a world map. However, because of a birthday in our family the next day, I opted to just have them decorate graham crackers with blue frosting and green sugar instead. In order to find the ingredients for their treat, they had to follow the treasure map I made of our living room! I made a key for them to read, with the last thing being "treasure", with the symbol of "X" of course! I hid the box of graham crackers, bowl of frosting, and the green sugar. They LOVED this! After their snack, I had to hid a few more things, then they hid stuff for each other to find using the map!

For science, we learned about cycles in nature, started a leaf collection. Last week, we learned about niches, and made a worm niche in a jar. Below are the pictures. The first one is on the first day, the second one is on day 3 and the last one is on day 7. We could see how the sand and dirt was mixed by the worms, which was neat. (Hard to see in the pictures though.)

I let the kids paint with watercolors one day while they listened to classical music. Rebekah loves art and says she wants to be an artist when she grows up. Caleb gets mad when his artwork doesn't look perfect, it's very frustrating!

We started our read-aloud this week as well, and are LOVING it! We're reading an allegory called Kingdom Tales. I recommend buying this book from My Father's World because they have added in some discussion questions.

Caleb started learning multiplication and division this week as we resumed Singapore 2A. Sometimes, he really seems to "get it", and other times he doesn't. I'm not sure if it's his attitude, or he's actually confused. Either way, we'll be doing a lot of practice! I found this little white board at the Dollar Tree, and it has come in handy a lot! We don't have a large white board on the wall, so I use this one when I need to explain something, and then I use it to put practice problems on.

Rebekah's math has started out with patterns! Joshua loves these cubes too.

Lastly, everyone helped to make applesauce! We bought a new attachment for my mixer that grinds and strains the apples (after they are cooked). It worked well, and we now have several quarts of applesauce!

Caleb used his cast to help him cut the apples! He was a really big helper this year.

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