Last week in review

I just thought I'd recap what we did last week for those of you who like to follow along on our homeschooling journey. 

As a family:

We finished up our study of apples last week.  We read How do Apples Grow? and both children narrated this to me (and later to Daddy at the dinner table).  This was an amazing little book!  It went into great detail about the life cycle of an apple ~ from the visibly bare apple trees in winter who have tiny leaf buds and flower buds waiting to open to the apple blossoms in the spring to the apples growing bigger and bigger all summer long to the harvest in the fall.  

What I loved about the book was its in depth anatomy lesson!  It went into great detail about male parts and female parts within the flower and the fertilization process.  I was just waiting for "THE QUESTION" or the connection to come (asking Momma how the "male parts" of Daddy got to the "female parts" of Momma to make the babies) ... but, by the grace of God, it didn't.  

Whew.

Anyhoo.  The girls did a great job with this book.  They really understood the process and were able to retell it with ease.  

We all drew diagrams in our Nature Notebooks.

The Hippie's

The Princess's

Momma's

We also read a beautiful poem that told the story of Johnny Appleseed.   I loved how this poem presented John Chapman as a peaceful, God-loving man who simply wanted to plant apple seeds across America.  Lovely. 

The girls made entries into their Nature Notebooks on this one, too.  

The Princess

The Hippie's Drawing

The Hippie's Summary

In addition to the apple studies, the Hippie also read The Robins in Your Back yard to the Princess.  And, of course, they always have a basket overflowing with various non-fiction books from the library.  I re-stock this regularly with all sorts of topics.  They enjoy reading while they eat their breakfast. 

As for literature, we have finished both the Just So Stories that we were reading for our daytime Read Aloud and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle that we were reading for our bedtime Read Aloud. 

We will be starting James Herriot's Treasury for Children for our daytime Read Aloud and per the request of the Princess, we will be starting The Black Stallion for our bedtime Read Aloud.

In art, we continued our study of Monet.  We read Monet's Impressions and did a picture study on the print, Red Boats.  We now have both Evening Flower and Red Boats hanging up in our dining room.  We'll have to take these down and put them into page protectors in a notebook so that we can move on to the next painting.  The girls are really enjoying picture study and learning about Monet!  The Princess finally says "France" instead of "Kentucky" when you ask her where he lived (I have no idea where she got the Kentucky idea). 

As for handwork, the girls continued work on their soap-on-a-rope for Daddy.  We should finish this up today, actually.  They made the soap two weeks ago (from scratch ... melted glycerin & shea butter, added essential oils and such (honey, vanilla, almond oil, etc.) and let them solidify.  Last week they made their long finger-knit chains into ropes and added felt to their soaps.  This week we will finish them up and then Daddy will have handmade Father's Day gifts that he can actually use.  Awesome.

The Princess:

The Princess and I continued our reading lessons with letter tiles.  She really likes this.  I skipped it one day because I thought she was having "too much" and wanted to lighten her load a bit and she complained later in the day that "we forgot to do her letters".  She's been working with long vowels and the silent "e".  

On a side note, to show you how awesome it is to see connections being made, last night she came to me very excited with her wooden box of rice from her wooden kitchen.  She told me that she understood the "rice" now.  She said, "If this "e" wasn't here it would be 'rick' or 'riss', and that doesn't make sense.  But, since this "e" is here, it makes it RICE." .... big smile on face ... making connections to real life.  LOVE IT!

As usual, she also modeled the letter "A" out of dough and made "A" and "a" mosaics.  She also finished her "A" copywork and completed several pages in her phonics workbook.  

When I realized she didn't know what a vowel was, I had her make a vowel page in her Main Lesson Book.  I also told her a story and the little rhyme to remember ... "Lady, I owe you" ... "A E I O U" ...

The Hippie:

The Hippie had a busy week.  We finished our block on St. Francis.  That means she finished copying her poem by St. Francis.  She was very excited to be finished with that!  The girl does not like copywork!

We worked with the story of St. Francis and the Proud Crow last week.  Here is some of our work:

Momma's

The Hippie's

The Hippie's Summary

  
As I stated in a previous post, we also made bird feeders.  

The Hippie finished reading Pippi Longstocking (for her leisure reading) and started Pippi Goes on Board.  She's also been reading Cats to the Rescue:  True Tales of Heroic Felines.  She loves it!

We continued to play lots of games to try to solidify math facts.  We also began some Mental Math exercises.  We hit a point where I knew we could sort of speed through to catch up.  I also gave her some extra practice with some Math Mammoth samples I had and an old Right Start worksheet I had a copy of .  

I started to think I wanted to switch math programs, but eventually settled down and decided to just keep plugging away with Singapore on a daily basis and use the Waldorf methods during our Math Blocks.  Hopefully, between the two, she will really get a solid foundation.  And, we'll catch up eventually.  :=)

As usual, school seemed to beget school.  When we "do school" officially, they tend to "do more school" afterwards.  In their free time, they were caught painting, modeling, reading, doing Mad Libs (grammar practice), drawing, spelling and making things with Sculpy.  Love that!

I'll leave you with some pictures ...