Saturday, November 13, 2010

Week of November 5th....Guten Tag

Well it's been a long week.  I caught a little bit of the kid's runny noses and that turned into an ear ache and sore throat for myself.  Very hard to homeschool when your head is throbbing, but we made it gradually through.  But needless to say I didn't post daily what was going on!

Here's the highlights of the week:

Monday:

The boys had OT Therapy and the girls had their last Musical Jamboree class.  We came home to do schoolwork.  Then it was sooo nice outside that we got out bikes and the kids played outside.  Our weather this week has been very warm -- in the mid 60s all week!!!  It's November and the boys wore shorts to basketball practice!!

On Tuesday Lydia and I planted lettuce seeds hoping to grow some fresh salad for the winter months. 


The seeds were very small!


We also entered our study of Germany this week.  We learned about the colors of the flag, where the country is located, that our names are said the same in English as in German, how to say Grandpa and Grandma in German, what kind of inventions were created by German inventors (we learned about the bicycle--dandy horse, and the first electric passenger train).

Caty enjoyed our snack of nutella and peanut butter...she thought it was sooo fun to create her own crackers.  She also loves Nutella.


We made German Butter Cookies.  They were a gluten free version.



We made frickadellen patties.   http://www.germandeli.com/gd45.html  These very popular German burgers were a huge hit in our house.  I adjusted the recipe to make it gluten free.  We also used ground sirloin.  I left out the onions, because of food allergies, and added shredded cheese to the mix.  Then I rolled the patties in gluten free flour and fried them up in a little oil. 


We had plenty of leftovers, and Joey loved them!!!  He has asked to have them added to our monthly meal rotation.  They were not real pretty, but very...very...tasty.


Lydia and I read more of Grimm's Fairy tales this week.  We read Little Red Riding Hood.  We also watched it (I'm using YouTube alot more and Netflix too!) and then I turned it into a Stranger Danger lesson.


For their World Traveler's Club projects Lydia talked about what she learned from Little Red Riding Hood, Joey spoke about the dandy horse, and Brayden talked about First Passenger Electric Train.

Our grass that we planted last week has begun to sprout!!!  We saw little sprouts starting to shoot up yesterday.  So excited!!!




We did get a little behind the week, but very simple to catch up.  I am working hard at getting together some new workboxes for our schooling to help the kids.  That is a wonderful benefit of workboxes.  They give the kids a timeline as to how much work they will be doing that day.  We will probably start with just two and work our way up to 4 boxes.  Brayden really needs a definite reminder of start and stop times and he wants to know how long things will last!  These work!! 

I am working on some adjustments to our teaching styles to help the kids.  The boys hate the their handwriting, but it's also part of their OT Therapy.  I purchased Handwriting without Tears and they balk their way through it.  It's boring to them.  I have decided to try copywork to help with this.  I have found some I am going through from http://www.currclick.com/.  But I stumbled upon a site that I can create copywork sheets out of things they are interested in such as Pokemon and Bakugan.  So I have started making sheets up for them.  They will love it!!!  It will give them a small amount of time to freely express their "knowledge" on the subject while writing it.  It may even help with some control issues.

Next week we will be studying South Korea, more on Joseph, working on how to read if a person is interested in talking with us and when to start a conversation with a person.  We will also be getting our post cards ready for our post card swap.  Since we lived in Indiana for many years, we are covering the state of Indiana, even though we don't live there anymore.  We also will be doing research on birds of the rainforest for our zoo class and starting a study of the human body in science. 


No comments:

Post a Comment