Classification

So, we rounded out last week talking about sheep! We looked at pictures of wild sheep and domesticated sheep and talked about the difference between sheep & goats. Then we took a look at how sheep are classified (yes, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species...remember?). Mane thought that was so fascinating that we made another page in her school notebook for classifying people. I think this is something we'll continue to do as we encounter animals in Five in a Row and Story of the World.

We finished the chapter on ancient Africa in Story of the World, and it looks like we'll be moving into more chapters on Egypt. My plan is to spend less time on these since we spent SO MUCH time on Egypt last year. Depending on how it goes, I might try to get us to ancient Greece by the time the 2010 Olympics begin.

Well Socialized

No worries about an unsocialized homeschooler here in the last week...

Swim lesson last Thursday,
Playdate on Friday,
Played with friends at Vespera's soccer games Saturday & Sunday,
Homeschool group on Tuesday,
Bible Study on Wednesday,
Playdate today...

Onion Skin Dye

Weaving

We found a lovely book about weaving at the library called Kids Weaving by Sarah Swett. Mane completed her first weaving project - weaving a card for Mango - after we read the first portion of the book. The book includes some history of weaving and weaving terminology - a perfect guide for kids AND adults!!



Mane has been writing common nouns, proper nouns, and verbs from A New Coat For Anna, as we have continued to row this book. I reviewed the book with her using the comprehension questions from the Five in a Row book and was AMAZED that she could remember what Anna's mother traded for each step in the process of making the coat after only reading the book twice. (I didn't ask her the questions after the first reading...hmmm, makes you wonder!)

Here's Mane's intro to the section in her notebook on A New Coat For Anna:

Today Mane is writing her own story with the steps for making applesauce...in the same manner as the steps to Anna's new coat.

We've been spending a lot of time with the Making Words book lately - practicing spelling and organizing words according to rhyming. Lately we've been using words that look more alike, and Mane has needed to really attend to letter order. She has a tendency to guess what word she's reading based on the first few letters. Today we did a much longer lesson because she just wanted to keep going. She took out her magnet letters & her little magnet board and used those rather than the letter cards. It's a nice, colorful change from the letter cards, and the magnets are more three dimensional.

We're on to lesson 17 in Math U See...rounding to the nearest thousand and ten thousand. We spent a long time with the math blocks this morning clarifying the concept of rounding and estimating. For some reason, the leap into ten thousands and hundred thousands is more difficult...perhaps because we've moved more into the realm of the abstract. I can't "show" her a hundred thousand math blocks. ;)

A Podcast about A New Coat for Anna

Warmth, Waiting & Woolly Friends: A New Coat for Anna

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A New Coat for Anna

After a Christmas wedding, a car accident, and some medical crisis, we're back to some more academic type schooling this week. Mane is working through lesson 16 of MUS, and she's nearly halfway through the 2nd grade Hooked on Phonics. She's been painting most days with a daily watercolor calendar we bought at Barnes and Noble after Christmas. The calendar features famous watercolors and some helpful tips for trying your own similar painting.

Today we read A New Coat for Anna by Harriet Ziefert. We'll be rowing this book for the next few weeks. It's about a little girl who needs a new coat after World War II. Her family has no money. So, her mother barters for wool, then for the spinning, then for the weaving, and, finally, for the tailor to make the coat. It takes a year for Anna to get a new coat, but, in the end, she has a new coat and several new friends. Today Mane drew a picture in her school notebook to begin our pages on A New Coat for Anna.

Today we also continued our studies of early and ancient China. We read about the Great Wall of China in You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Great Wall of China! by Jacqueline Morley, and we looked at pictures of the terracotta army in The Emporer's Silent Army by Jane O'Conner. We talked about how being so terribly afraid of everything is what made the emporer Qin so cruel and ruthless and how we don't need to live our own lives in fear. Both books mentions some of the advantages of having an organized empire (standardized weights & measures, standardized money, better roads, better protection from invaders). We talked about how those things are good, but they would be better if the emporer had cared more about the people who were doing all the work to make those things happen. We did some comparing to the early rulers of Mesopotamia, as opposed to Hammurabi.

Plans I just need to write down for next week before I forget:
- Demonstrate how non-standardized measurements are a problem
- Talk more about acting out of fear vs. acting out of care and concern for people
- Learn more about weaving - maybe make our own weaving loom
- learn about making dyes (Anna's mother dyes the wool red with lingonberries in the book)