Kenya, Africa - MFW & 1st, Weeks 18-20

We've spent the last 3 weeks studying Africa, with a special emphasis on Kenya. Above is a picture of the kids playing a homemade mancala game. They loved this game! I think they played it for over an hour by themselves with no fighting or whining! We tried several recipes from around Africa, these sweet potato cookies were a big hit! The recipe was in The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook (Kids Can!).

I also made some pineapple tapioca. It was pretty good, but Rebekah didn't like it. The recipe was from A Trip Around the World.

We tried to make Chapatis from Cooking the African Way. I was expecting it to be more like flatbread, but it was like pie crust. The kids liked it, but I didn't. I don't think we made it right because it didn't look anything like the picture. We also did broiled and fried plantains. The kids were eating them raw and loving them, but didn't like them cooked. When our friend from Haiti made plantains, we loved them...

Here they are making cloth baskets. This was a really fun project from Global Art.

Below are their sunset paintings. I followed the directions on Draw the Line. They turned out really pretty! Caleb's is the lion and Rebekah's is the elephant.

Of course, they did a few workbook pages and some map work. We also continue to play the geography game from our curriculum.

I had Caleb do a notebooking page about an animal of his choosing. He used a drawing book to help him make the crocodile. We need to work on writing actual paragraphs instead of sentences soon! The rest of English and spelling went well these last weeks. In math, Caleb learned fractions and time. He is most of the way through Singapore 2B. I think he'll be starting 3A in about a month.

Here they are doing The Complete Book of Animals together!

This was not during school time, but they made up their own card game to play! This made me happy!

Rebekah is still going strong in 1st grade! She loves both math and reading! Below are pictures of our latest math activity. The cards are numbers from 1-18. We practiced adding 1, 2 and 3 by jumping to the correct answer. Then we learned about even and odd numbers, and jumped while counting them of course. Joshua and Caleb also got in on the fun!

She keeps amazing me with her bible notebook. She writes her summary on a separate paper before copying it into her notebook. Then she wants me to correct every mistake! I didn't want to overwhelm her in the beginning, so I only corrected a few, but she got mad at me when she realized I didn't do them all! She likes writing so much more than Caleb! She does not let me help her write or spell at all, and I'm amazed at how good she's doing!

Here's just a cute picture of Matthew "doing school".

Lastly, we went to see a play as a field trip, Curious George!

Thanks for stopping by. Our next country is Saudi Arabia!