Week 10- American Revolution

Mashing our berries for berry ink!

 We have completed 10 weeks and now are on break for 2 weeks. We leave in a few days for our kids first trip to Disney World, the anticipation of which has made this week a bit more of a struggle. This week, we spent time on Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, and the American Revolution. This was a lot for one week. I really think this part of the curriculum could be revised. We spent an entire week reading 4 pages about French pioneers, but gave an equal time to the American Revolution? Oh well... so goes life. We'll have to come back to it and spend some more time on the concepts of revolution. Here's how our week went:

Bible:
 Memorized John 7:37. Discussed "Living Water". Continued God & Me 3. Watched "What's in the Bible? vol 12."

History:
Covered the assigned reading and added the Magic Treehouse Fact Tracker: American Revolution. The girls read the  Fact Tracker aloud to me.  They gave two oral reports this week on what they learned: one to Nana, and one to me after we completed the book. We also completed a cute little book on the Declaration of Independence. Check it out http://www.teachervision.fen.com/fourth-of-july/printable/45983.htm

By far the girls favorite activity this week was making the berry ink and writing with quills. They played with this for hours. We also made hasty pudding, and the girls didn't see anything special about it. As far as they were concerned, we had just made grits...lol

We also started watching Liberty's Kids via YouTube. The entire series is available free of charge from the production company on the site. Through a bit of "Daddy magic," my husband made it so YouTube  can play through our Roku, so we can watch on the TV. I think this will come in handy for a lot of videos.

Language Arts:
 Instead of trying to summarize this weeks lesson for notebooking ,we went of course and tried our hand at fiction writing using historical figures. It was very funny to see how this morphed into different things in my two girls hands. Ying struggled.Her anxiety provided a real block until I got a prompt she could understand. Then her story very much followed the "Magic Treehouse" formula. But it was amazing how much she got down on paper once the stress of creating form was taken away. Yang on the other hand wrote me a 2 page story about Molly Pitcher, Sam Adams, and a Superhero on a speeding train. This was her zone.

Handwriting:
The girls are pretty much done with Handwriting Without Tears, so we have moved on the copy work to practice our cursive. This week the girls chose poems from Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein to copy.

Math & Spelling:
Our methods ain't broke, so we ain't fix'n 'em. lol...

Science:
Talked about absorption.

Physical Ed:
 The girls running club started up this week. They are training for a 5k run in December. Thursday they had their pacer run. Ying finished middle of the pack for her age group. Yang finished last but with a smile on her face. They are excited to keep training.