Birthday Week....And honest Abe...

Pikachu Cake...lol.. the Homemade kind.

The girls have spent this week anxiously awaiting their 8th Birthdays. Its been interesting getting any work done... Luckily, Daddy helped us out last weekend by taking the kids of a field trip to the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History. He was dreading this but had resigned himself to it. He actually enjoyed it, and was pleasantly surprised. He was amazed at what the kids could tell him about things in the museum, and once they got the hands on "education center" he was home free. The kids showed him a cotton gin, and explained what it did. Then they found a working telegraph, and spent a long time writing messages. They watched the 20 min movie about " The Great Locomotive Chase" and The General. This is all leading up to our study of the Civil war. Where we live the Civil War is everywhere. We pass monuments daily. "We" as in the state still debate the Stars and Bars annually. Our neighboring church still bears bullet holes in the old sanctuary. So, we are probably going to spend more time and depth in this area the MFW ever intends.

   The question I've heard a lot from friends not living in the south is "how will you introduce/handle the issue of slavery?" Well, the public school system has already introduced that for me. Slavery is introduced in K here. It's called "Black History Month" & Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. My K'ers learned about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, and were read Dr. King's "I Have a Dream". In 1st grade it was George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Institute. When the girls first asked "Why would people keep slaves?", we went back to the bible. Why did Pharaoh want the Israelites as slaves? It was priceless to see their little minds connecting a bible story they knew so well with the realities of modern life. We will keep it maturity appropriate but you can't ignore the history here.

Moving on.... We celebrated the girls birthday @ the American Girl Bistro. We had lunch with their dolls and each one got to pick out a new outfit/accessory for their "girl". Ying is patiently waiting to cut her girls hair off. Told we had to wait until Mommy made an appt with Miss Amanda who does her hair.

Ying with her doll "Mayson".

Yang with "Anna"

The night before their birthday they celebrate with friend from church at our monthly "Celebrate Family" Event. It was a great time of fellowship and roller skating and laser tag.Hubby and I got in on the action and managed not to fall.

Hulk Flying like a mad man with his Helper.

If only she could figure out the stopper....

Everyone also finally got some cold soccer in but they had a blast. We lucked into a great coach who keeps them moving continually. They much prefer this to softball and all the standing around waiting. You could see how much running club had helped as they were still going strong after an hour when others were fading. Luckily running starts back up very soon after the time change. 

Ok... on to the academics of the week...

Bible- Continue memorizing Matthew 28:20. But the girls also got bibles on their Nooks. So they have decided to start reading the Bible from the beginning. They are up to Genesis 6 right now.

History/Geography- OR and MN, Abe Lincoln's early years. Yeah it was dry.

Math- Algebraic thinking... lots of find the missing part of the equation problems. after they got good at solving them they had to make up word problems to represent the problem. This was a little tricky. they could easily make up problems for the equation solution but making the one with a missing piece was more difficult.

Reading- Book 4- Tales from the Odyssey : The Grey Eyed Goddess by Mary Pope Osborne.

LA- Minimal Time4Learning and some dictionary work. The preformed their play "Trouble on the Farm" in co-op.

Sci-Left this to Co-op this week. They did an experiment about the digestive system that lead to me hearing "That's so disgusting, but really really cool!" all week. They built measuring car again in Lego and worked on measurement.

On the Dusty Trails.....

Ying on Guitar

Hulk Banging the Drums

Ying trying her best to hang with some older kids in the outdoor chess match. She did her best.

     Oh yeah! We've finished our "Going West" lap books!!!!!!!!! Both girls were excited and proud of the final products. Took us three weeks to finish but it was a nice bridge thorough the last few weeks of Adventures. This week we finished up the CA gold rush and talking about the three majors trails heading west.
     We concentrated MFW into 3 days this week between our field trip and Co-op. One day we spent on our  CA Gold rush paragraphs. Ying has really had a huge break through on the last two assignments with the post it "notes." She seems to do so much better with taking notes auditoryily ( is this a word?) , and then being able to arrange the noted into the order she wants. She also understanding for of the need to connect the facts for the reader.
      Still searching for the method that is the breakthrough for Yang. She still does very well with a concept map but she must read the facts to be able to process them. She's a much better book note taker, and uses a concept web most times. She is still producing great 2nd grade work (IMO).
     Our other 2 days we finished up talking about the difference between the Trails, and completed our lapbooks.
   

Ying's finished product.

Yang's finished product.

Science this week covered the states of matter. We watched Bill Nye explain the concepts on You Tube. Read some great graphic novels on the topic. The girls highly recommend Werewolves and states of Matter and Max Axiom. Friday we did a quick hands on expire kent with a hot frying pan and ice.

Field Trip!!!!!! Monday we made the trip back to Creative Discovery for their latest exhibit called Healthy Fun on the the Run.

The girl wish they could add something like this in the backyard to aid their fort building.

Yang singing her heart out.

     Math this week we have continued our subtraction and addition review with worksheets for Mathworksheets4kids.com. Ying is still having a huge mental block with regrouping. So we are trying to  give her as much practice as possible before moving on. Yang has it down but "hates" math so she is happy to keep doing something she has mastered for a bit.
     Reading the girls are continuing the Tales from the Odyssey series by Mary Pope Osborne. Read aloud just didn't get done this week and by group vote we are done the the lapbook that goes with On the Banks of Plum Creek. Its just making the book drag and taking the fun out of it for the girls. Its been nice to see that they do remember a lot of what i read aloud to them but even I am sooooooo over this book and lapbook.
      Coop science this week focused on the Respiratory system. The girls found it fascinating to learn that their lungs hold as much air as a basketball. They came home full of fun facts and balloons trying to teach anyone who would listen about their lungs. In Lego they built cars and raced them down inclines. Words of the week were "friction," "drag," "inertia," and "aerodynamic." In play production they continued to work toward next weeks performance of "Trouble on the Farm."

Chemistry has gone to the dogs! Week 25....

This week has been interesting week. Between an ice storm and 3 inches of snow for a 2nd time in 2 weeks, we were home bound for 4 days, again. This storm had more warning and since it was on the heels of the last disaster people listened to the warnings. Taz got to spend this snow time with his parents..lol...We mixed school with play time. I think I was in the minority of parent here at not pulling my hair out as the PS kids here missed another 4 days.
 Here's our run down of week 25...

History/Geography-- IA, WI and continuing with our Going West Lap book... The girls wrote paragraphs about what they think their lives would have been like on the frontier. I was rolling on the floor with Ying's. She said she would have been very frustrated by having to wear dresses all the time just because she was a girl. The girls also had a paper doll to "dress" for the book, and both dressed it as a boy because "overalls are so much more fun"..lol... Yeah, I am raising tomboys for the Lord.

Math- We are still reviewing and reinforcing our addition and subtraction and associated algebra. Lots of word problems, find the missing part of the equation, and some drill.   We also worked more on time and temperature.

Spelling- Lesson 26

LA- We let this slide this week. The girls had writing exercises in science and history.

Reading--- Well the Greek mythology has captivated them. Both girls are now through book three in the Tales from the Odyssey series by Mary Pope Osborne. Is it  American History?..lol.. no... Are they reading avidly?.. YEP! Success ;)

Hulk got a test of real home school with his preschool being canceled due to snow and a weird break straddling the President's Day weekend. He didn't get to play video games all day much to his dismay....

 Read Aloud-- Yeah um I dropped the ball this week. Not enough hours in the day to fit in snow time and everything else.....

Science- We went more in depth with the Atom this week. Had lots of fun with some hands on projects. the girls loved the Bill Nye video on Atoms and watched it several times (We had gotten it through our library on DVD but i found later  most of his "Science Guy" videos are available on You Tube.) The girls were most amused by a short video we found called Dogs Teaching Chemistry- Atoms. Very cute, very elementary explanation of atoms. Great for 2nd-3rd graders.
 We created our own Bohr models on paper with gummy bears, and the built water and sucrose molecules with gummy bears and marshmallows.

Gummy bear Bohr model of a carbon atom

Fighting H2O molecules.....

Our Sucrose Molecule

Nature studies- Winter Wonderland in the South...lol

Hulk and Yang on the largest snowball they've ever seen or been able to make.

Hedwig the Snowy Owl ;) built by Ying

...---... Florida and TX

So, we picked up on week 24 this week after recovering from the snow apocalypse by studying warm and sunny Florida and TX. We continued with our Going West lap book which is coming a long nicely. I think we will finish much of it up next  two weeks as we focus on life of the trails and frontier etc... We did a one day in depth study of Samuel Morse and his invention of the telegraph. I saw huge strides in Ying's writing skill on this one. Mainly because her attitude toward the assignment was so much better than normal. Sticky notes worked wonders. We tried a new method of information gathering this go round. Each girl got a sticky note pad and wrote notes while listening to me read or from a book after I was done. Each note was then stuck to a blank page and then could be organized into a coherent paper. This method worked wonderfully for Ying. Yang had attitude...lol... though she got it done in the end. Here's Ying's noted page, rough draft, and final copy.

So 

This time I didn't rewrite the whole rough draft for her because her errors for only in spelling. Her sentence structure has vastly improved this year. I circled misspelled word and wrote a spelling list on the side. She was responsible for making the correction. You'll see at the bottom where I did let her dictate two sentences to me after we talked about needing to connect two events she had included for the reader.

Final draft

Science this week finished up on the human body. The girls will continue on the anatomy in co-op for 10 more weeks so we will still be doing more even as we move into other topics in MFW. This week in Co-op the girls made sugar cookie models of blood with different kinds of cells. They were having a hard time accept the fact that blood is not really red... only appear red. So we made a candy model at home to explain what the teacher was telling them. Blood is actually a clear suspension, but its packed with red blood cells making it look red... Our model was made from corn syrup as plasma, red and white candy hearts and RBCs and WBCs, popcorn kernels as platelets, and string as fibringogen. The girls really seemed to get the idea after the activity. We even went on the make blood of a person with leukemia. The girls have a friend from church who recently had a bone marrow transplant after his second bout with leukemia @ 8 years old. It was a very concrete way of explaining why goes one, and how the doctors were hoping to "cure" their friend, but in the end its all up to God's design.

Math- this week we have split topics because I was kinda not thinking... I let each girl pick what math module they wanted to do and they of course picked different ones. Ying is working on temperature and reading thermometers and Yang is working on time. I plan on continuing next week with some worksheet I got from mathworksheets4kids.com. We will also add in some practice with addition and subtraction with regrouping.

Spelling--- I feel like a robot here... on to lesson 25. Next year we will rethink this.....

Reading- Yang finished up Seasons on the Trail by Lynn Glaze and has moved on the series Ying discovered last week Called Tales from the Odyssey by Mary Pope Osborne of "Magic Tree house" fame. She has taken Homer's  The Odyssey and broken it down into 6 elementary age chapter books. I think the girl are over American history at this point and need a break. They are eating up the Greek Mythology. Ying is through book 2 and will start book 3 next week.

Read Aloud- We are trudging through On the Banks of Plum Creek. I regret starting the lapbook, because it has interrupted the flow of the book. It's taking forever!

This is Yang with her reading body and the most fought over, sought out book basket book ever called GEE WHIZ... Its all about Pee by  Susan E. Goodman. 

On other notes this week we are starting a new behavior modification approach with the Hulk. Hulk is very jealous of Taz being in our house. I thought he'd be over it by now, but its only getting worse. Part of it is Taz's behavior. Because Taz has had such issues adjusting to the structure in our home and the preschool environment, he receives "rewards" from his parents for things that my kids are just expected to do. With the boys only being 10 months apart , Hulk is having a real difficult time with this. So, we trying some rewards for him ,too. 

This week was also our monthly home school skate @ the local ice rink.They had fun ;)

Yes, 2 inches of snow have shut down a whole city.....

The Cat Ying and Yang helped rescue from the frozen storm drain.

 Hulk playing Sight Word Bombs ( Aka starter foam tennis balls thrown at sight words written in dry erase marker on the sliding glass door).

So this week was supposed to be week 24.... Samuel Morse, FL, and TX. But, Mother Nature had other plans. We had our first accumulating snowfall in 2+ years, and as well documented on CNN, the city of Atlanta looked like the zombie apocalypse.  So, our plans went out the window. Early dismissals from Co-op and preschool. Icy ride to the grocery store. Then home bound for 4 days. Taz was stranded with us for 3 of those, as his mom and dad were each stuck on the other sides of town by the ice sheets otherwise known as roads in Atl. If you live in the north... don't judge us. There are roughly 50 salt trucks to cover a region of 6 million people. Those 50 trucks are coordinated by roughly 100 different governments...  though the Mayor of Atl was the face of the chaos.. cut the man some slack he only represents roughly 500,000 of the 6 million because most of the folks who got stuck don't actually live or work in the city. They commute. The "Atlanta" region is 6 million people who can't seem to live and work in the same area but have to live on the west side and work on the southside, etc.. etc... but I digress...
So MFW  went on hold... While we continued to do LA, reading, math, even some science we intermixed it with snow play time, movies, and in general chaos.....Ying ran a fever for a few days. Yeah! for being stocked up with Ibuprofen and Tylenol......

Ying and Yang were sad because Co-op got released early and we had to book it across town to get the little boys from preschool.

This was enough to impress them.... but was just the beginning. We were lucky. our 10 min drive home from church only took 90 min.

The most snow the kids can remember ever seeing.....

The "The Skating Rink" in front of our house. Otherwise known as miles of ice in a city that doesn't have the equipment to de-ice roads....

Taz trying out ABCMouse.com.....

Ying "quarantined" to the couch.

yes... you still see Christmas decorations.......... Yang trying to do some math amongst the little boys

Hulk chowing down......

And the Lord blessed with safety and sanity through it all. Praise his name!

Week 23- ME, MO, KS, & MI

Monday we squeezed school in early in order to hit the park and a beautiful 60 degree January day. It was MLK day so public school was out and the park was crazy, but they kids were in heaven. Its been a really cold winter for our area and they were just happy to get out and play.

Plumbing problems also jammed us up for the week. Thanks to a clogg and previous renovators who had just enough knowledge to be dangerous 1/2 or kitchen had to be re-plumbed. So no washing machine, sink or dishwasher for the week. Made cooking interesting..... But the Lord blessed us by still having working bathrooms!

So on the school........

Bible- Continues with Jesus as the "head of the church".  After our assigned reading in Ephesians the girls made a lot of correlations to our family rules. Told them Mommy didn't just make'em up!

 History/Geography:

This week was a State Study week covering Maine,Missouri, Kansas, and Michigan. We also continued with our "Go West" Lapbook. We covered Mountain Men and trappers, Types of Wagons, and Some "Western" Vocabulary.

Math- Continued our Money unit on Time 4 Learning. Counting, converting, adding and subtracting....

Reading/LA- Finished Pioneer Cat, read Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express, Ying started Missouri Bound from the Little House Chapter Book Series, and Yang started Season of the Trail by Lynn Glaze. Phonics and writing via Time 4 Learning.

Read Aloud. Continued On the Banks of Plum Creek and the corresponding lap book.

Coop Time-

Science covered the Skeletal system, at home we watched the Magic School Bus episode covering muscles and bones.

Lego- The girls made spinning top and learned about inertia.

Classroom Play production- They continue to work on their production of "Trouble on the Farm"... Ying is one of the trouble making cows and Yang is a Sheep.

Friday was curtail by dental appts, but we had an interesting conversation about arctic vs antarctic animals sparked by the dentists murals...lol

Wagons Ho!

This week has been an very enjoyable one. Probably my favorite in the Adventures curriculum so far. We started the week covering Illinois and Alabama. Then we moved into going west by wagon train.  We've started a lapbook called "Going West" by  A Journey Through Learning ( http://www.ajourneythroughlearning.net/gowelawistgu.html ). It covers many subjects we've already studied or will be studying in the near future. The girls are very into it right now.

Bible-  Jesus is the "head" of the church "body"

Reading/LA- this week the girls are reading Pioneer Cat by William Hooks. Its a very easy read for them but they enjoying it.  We are also continuing our On The Banks Of Plum Creek lapbook. Phonics review and author's purpose via Time 4 Learning. I am also becoming more stringent on our basic standards of writing. That has not been met with smiles..lol... as much work has had to be repeated.

Math- Money unit on Time 4 Learning.

Spelling- Lesson 22.

Coop this week- 1st week and the girls loved it! They are taking Hands on Human Body study, Lego Early Simple Machines, & Classroom Play production. They also have a 1/2 lunch period which they are very excited about. The uniform is strict which was a bit of a challenge for them ( ahhhh real pants!) but they got over it. Told Ying it could be worse... She could have to wear a skirt!


Choir- The girl auditioned for our church's next production "Back to B.C." where the kids take a time machine ala Bill and Ted to different Old testament events to help lead a doubting friend to Christ. Yang is trying out the be the "mad inventor" of the time machine, Ying hopes to be David in the David in Goliath. scene.