...---... 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 ;)