Friday, March 16, 2012

Weekly School Summaries - China (March 5-16)

I respectfully ask that you not pin pictures of my children to Pinterest. Thank you!
 Ni Hao! We're so looking forward to our spring break next week! It made the past 2 weeks a little hard to get through but I kept using our time off as motivation. The kids spent a couple days with my folks because I spent a day judging contemporary vocal solos for ACSI's Fine Arts Festival. I had fun although it was definitely a brain drain. The younglings enjoyed their time with their substitute teachers (Gram and Pop-Pop) too. I gave them a slightly lighter schedule since my mom was overseeing the schoolwork for 2 days. Here's what we did the past 2 weeks:

Math: Same as usual for Tenor. He had 4 days of lessons and 1 day of math games on the computer each week. Soprano had one week of regular lessons (4 and 1 day on computer) but the 2nd week when they were away, she did 3 days of flashcard practice and 2 regular lessons. She's up to multiplying 5s. 

Reading and Language Arts: Soprano finished up "The Birthday Child" poem from 'Across the Centuries'. She made a party hat and did a vocabulary activity. Then she started her next book, "The Runaway Bunny."
She finished her second Phonics book and jumped right into the third one. We're working on consonant sounds (beginning, medial, and end) and soft/hard 'C's and 'G's. In English, she's being introduced to paragraphs. Spelling and handwriting are continuing well. 
Loved this error in her phonics....
"The giant unliked the troll." I really, really hated to mark it wrong considering how Facebook has made 'unliking' a verb but technically it wasn't right so out came the red pen.
Tenor continued with his 'A Reason for Handwriting C' and continued with his new writing workbook.
He finished 'Misty' from 'Across the Centuries C Level 1'. The last activities were a worksheet about saying goodbye to someone you loved and a couple of evaluations. After our break, he'll begin "Helen Keller" from the Level 2 book.
English (adverbs) and Spelling (Rod and Staff Level 4) are moving right along. 

Electives:
Typer Island for their typing instruction and continuing with SOS Elementary Spanish on a modified schedule because of their visit to my mom's. 

They did two health worksheets: a safety review and one on exercises that mimic animal movements. They each had to come up with their own exercise. They both made up exercises like snakes. I think I see Tenor's influence there. We also talked about Gettysburg and Independence Hall (PA history) and how sanitation workers (aka garbage men) are community helpers.

Phys Ed.: We've had 2 very busy weeks so they didn't make it to Tae Kwon Do the past 2 weeks. It's a pretty flexible program so they'll be able to catch up easily. We're walking at home and of course, they love gym at homeschool co-op.

This is the country we've been most excited about all year because we have dear friends who live in China. We talk about them all the time so we were all looking forward to studying about where they're living. Unfortunately, the past 2 weeks have been so incredibly crazy schedule-wise. We got all the work done but didn't have time to do any extras. We might "revisit" China at the end of the year when MFW allows for a few weeks of picking your own country. They've sent us some beautiful things from China.
Like this Hulusi:
This Xin:

And some neat ornaments made by Tibetan people out of yak wool:
 

Bible: The past two weeks included:
Reading about China, Tibetans, and Buddhism
Reading Matthew 20:29-22:14
Memorizing Matthew 20:26-28

Geography:
Things we did included:
Filling out our passports to travel to China (The younglings still love doing this!)
Coloring the Chinese flag and writing down interesting facts about it. Reading about China, the Chinese language and the Nature, Farming, and Industry of China.  Playing Chinese Checkers. Creating cool tangram designs using our Saxon Math manipulatives and print outs from this site:
I printed the animals and the people for the kids to create.

Illustrating notecards for hill, valley, volcano, and waterfall.
Playing the geography game doing the world traveler version.
Tenor's Asia pages from World Geography were Climate and Animals. He's only doing 1 page per week during our Asia studies.
Soprano finished the Asian Animals pages from The Complete Book of Animals and started Sea/Ocean Animals. She's doing 3 sheets or mini storybook per week for the 10 weeks we're studying Asia.

Science: We had lots of pages from the Living World Encyclopedia. They read about parasites, the seas and oceans, and the ocean surface. They also labeled the oceans and wrote about their identifying characteristics.

We also did the ocean current experiment.

And tasted salt water:
mixing up the salt water

Not fans of sipping salt water

Other MFW: 
Wee sing: Fong Swei and Arirang
Art: We were so pressed for time these two weeks, we skipped Global Art. But we did make our own paper lanterns and Lai See envelopes from a Panda Express Chinese New Year kit. Panda Express offered free kits back in January with a Word Search, a Lai See envelope activity, a lantern activity, and a DVD about Chinese New Year and an accompanying quiz. It was a fun kit that gave a brief look at the history of Chinese New Year and how they celebrate it.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!
To supplement, we read other books about other Asian countries (Mongolia, Nepal, Tibet, and Taiwan), pandas, and seas and oceans and borrowed DVDs from the library. Our favorite was the Torchlighter's DVD about Gladys Aylward. Very true to the book and well done for our early-mid elementary level. I thought it was very interesting.
We also had dinner out at a Chinese restaurant. Figuring out how to use chopsticks was the best part!

Oops---dropped something!
When they don't work with one hand, go for the stab method.
 
Next week-----Spring Break! Zai Jian!

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at http://discovertheirgifts.blogspot.com/.

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