Well, spending the week on the couch feeling immobile and unproductive wasn't my plan!! But I managed to ignore a sore back long enough it became a bigger issue! The boys and I spent the week at home, getting more homeschool done than we have been able to do in a while and watching movies while I rested.
Monday they still attended Eden Acre's while I went to see my chiropractor. The email about how their day went explained that they explored the hiking trail on the property further, hunted for and tried to identify mushrooms, and worked on physics through building forts with natural materials.
Tuesday we started All About Reading Level 1 for Avery! He was quick at getting the sounds and felt very proud he could sound out the short words in lesson one. We did our next lesson in Beast Academy and worked on work sheets. We are comparing numbers right now and on track to complete at least 3 levels, possibly 4 by the end of the school year!
Wednesday we read our chapter in Story of the World. It focused on Japan during the 1500's. Half the chapter was on Sumo wrestling and how the current ruler of the country created Sumo wrestling to give the wandering samurai a way to demonstrate their power while being united for the country, rather than wandering mercenaries that may be used against the emperor. The boys have been fascinated with Sumo's for a few years so I did a unit this week about them. We had a few books from the library, two of which spoke about a special soup Sumo's eat to help them gain weight so we looked it up and created it the best we could with the ingredients we had! We also brewed some Oolong tea (technically from China tho...) and drank it in our Japanese cups. Now, these cups, I found them at a garage sale this summer for $1.50 for 5 saucers and 4 cups. I thought they were super cute and one shelf of my china cabinet is Asian style tea sets, so I bought it to go with them. When we poured our Oolong into the cups, one boy pointed out there were stickers on the bottom on the saucers. The stickers read "Post WWII, 120's Japnese Handpainted cups"!!! I said, okay boys, be gentle to these cups, and they were amazed to count up the years a realize the cups were 100 years old!! Pretty niffty! We also created a ring and had a Sumo match with pillows!! The boys had so much fun! We also learned how Sumo's are sponsored by big businesses, and flags to advertise those businesses are paraded through the arena before a match, so we painted our own banners.
Our language learning of the week had us talking about colors! We learned to sign and say colors in Spanish and Sign language and watched the Signing Time video on colors. We also played Scrable Slam! for the older two for English this week.
Last weekend we camped with friends from our homeschool co-op and one friend was using a knitting loom to make a scarf. We happened to already have a few loom devices and lo and behold the boys were finally motivated to attempt it!! (Remember how last year our art study was on fiber arts and the boys could have cared less...guess we should have found a friend to demonstrate and encourage them!!). Michael created a whole hat in one day!!
We went for a nature walk one day to collect fall leaves....only to find our fall leaves are not quite ready yet!! The boys and I wanted to try dipping leaves in wax and hanging them as our decorations in our art area. Instead they melted wax and made some candles instead while we wait for the leaves to finish changing color and falling. Remember our appointment week? Here are our new glasses!
Michael has been huge into audio books lately. He is on book 11 of the Tui S. Sutherland Dragon Prophecy series as well as the third book in Brian Jaques Redwall series. He also has completed his first reading challenge of 480 minutes!! Time to start a new reading chart!
On Friday we did our science lesson for the week, comparing the diffusion rates of food coloring molecules into water molecules based on the temperature of the water. We concluded it diffuses faster in warm water and slower in cold water. The boys really liked this experiment and dad added to the lesson by explaining we also are seeing the diffusion of hot and cold because we took temperatures of room temp, ice water, and almost boiling water at different times seeing the temperature change.
Whew. That was a fun week and makes me wonder if we should cancel all the things and just stay home and do all the things instead! Hahah. My extrovert child would be sad. Hope you had a great week,
Cheers.
The Dillmans
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