Friday, March 2, 2012

Weekly School Summaries - India (Feb. 20-March 2)

I respectfully ask that you not pin pictures of my children to Pinterest. Thank you! 
We're in that time of year when the end is so close and yet so far away. Everyday assignments feel tedious and it's getting hard to keep things fresh. We were just gifted a trip to Florida, so in a few weeks we'll be having our very own spring break. I can't wait! Oh, the kids are pretty excited too. Here's what we did the past 2 weeks:

Math: Same as usual. They each had 4 days of lessons and 1 day of math games on the computer.

Reading and Language Arts: Soprano spent two weeks on two poems' from 'Across the Centuries'. She read 'The Dragon-Fly' and 'The Birthday Child'. Her favorite activity was a dragon-fly sun catcher. 
She's almost done with her second Phonics book and is still doing well. She's excited to not have phonics work next year though. In English, she's learning about past and present tense verbs. Spelling and handwriting are continuing well. She finished Zz sentences so we're moving on to different exercises like months of the year, numbers, etc.

Tenor continued with his 'A Reason for Handwriting C' and continued with his new writing workbook. He's written some friendly letters, a short book report, and thank you notes.
He's working through 'Misty' from 'Across the Centuries C Level 1'. He's read chapters 6-13 and finished some vocabulary work, a mural drawing activity, and 2 evaluations.
English (singular and plural possessive) and Spelling (Rod and Staff Level 4) are moving right along. 

Electives:
Typer Island for their typing instruction and continuing with SOS Elementary Spanish. 

They did two health worksheets: one on bike safety and one on how cleaner/medicine bottles sometimes look like food or drink and how to tell the difference. We also talked about the PA state flower and coal miners and how school bus drivers are community helpers.

Phys Ed.: They had Tae Kwon Do again and are working toward their white stripe belt. We're walking at home and of course, they love gym at homeschool co-op.

Bible: The past two weeks included:
Reading about India, Hinduism, and the Gonds
Reading Matthew 18:15-20:28
Finishing memorizing The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9b-13) and Matthew 7:12

Geography:
Things we did included:
Filling out our passports to travel to India
Coloring the Indian flag and writing down interesting facts about it. Reading about the People and Places, and Nature, Farming, and Industry of South Asia and reading about the Hindi language. 

Tenor decided that he wanted to do an India lapbook so I used resources from Homeschool Helper and Homeschool Share.


We also spent time at http://mypassporttoindia.org. It was a really good resource that was recommended by another MFW user. It's a great video series with lots of pictures and information that was right at the kids' level.
  
Illustrating notecards for mountain, mountain pass, mountain range, and highland.
Playing the geography game with just Asian countries and the world traveler version.
Tenor's Asia pages from World Geography were Bodies of Water and Islands. He's only doing 1 page per week during our Asia studies.
Soprano finished a few more of the Asian Animals pages from The Complete Book of Animals. She's doing 3 sheets or mini storybook per week for the 10 weeks we're studying Asia.

Science: We finished up the acid rain experiment from last week. Amazing how much difference between the vinegar water plant and the regular water plant. I think we killed it. I'd love to show you but I can't find pictures anywhere.
We also talked about conservation (the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle) and then started studies on mountain ecosystems. I printed a mountain outline with some dividing lines for the kids to paste where different animals live or plants grow in a mountain ecosystem.
The kids loved the volcano experiment.
 
Other MFW: 
Wee sing: not our favorites thus far: "Attal, Mattal", "Anilae, Anilae", and "Kai Veechamma"
Art: We did some Kathakali face painting. I found a very, um, vivid picture online to use as a reference.
To supplement, we read other books about other southern Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), and Sri Lanka) and animals like elephants and tigers, and the Taj Mahal and borrowed DVDs from the library.
Linking up at www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com and
at http://discovertheirgifts.blogspot.com/.


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