Krazy Kuehner Days: The Great War, Public Speaking, and Family Funtime

We started our week out with a friendly, yet unwanted visitor. We have empty fields across from our house, and with the temps... a field mouse thought he could make his way and share our living room. YUCK!! He was gone. Then we had a second visitor, so I discreetly hid traps where the dogs wouldn't find them. No more furry creatures in our house!

Extra projects

Lydia finished up her bullying project. We finished her study of bullying by watching American Girl - Chrissa. She presented her report at the scout meeting. Check one more requirement off on her safety award.

These are the zipper pulls she made.

Caty also presented what she learned on bicycle safety. I didn't get a picture of her making her presentation.

They both each earned two more patches a piece. I was behind on updating their badge tracker information. Lydia earned her Public Speaking and Special Agent badge. Caty earned her Detective and Artist badge now.

Bible Studies

This week we studied ways to help strangers feel welcome in new areas. We also examined what true faith is and how we can show true faith.

Since we have been concentrating on the Civil War through World War 1 now for the past couple months, we also took time this week to learn more about the start of Jehovah's Witnesses. We watched the video Jehovah's Witnesses - Faith in Action Part 1 & 2.

History

We started our study of World War 1 this week. We'll spend the next couple weeks on this topic. This one is a little more difficult since we have a wide age range. But we'll make it through.

We covered the start of the war, weapons introduced, trench warfare and also major battles. We colored maps to keep on their clipboards to visually see what countries were on each side.

Our big project this week was building a trench out of Model Magic. Joey did this project a few years ago, so the girls did it also.

Science

We received our first Little Passports Science box. It's on Forensic Science this month. I opted to try these out for a few months. We have finished so much science the last few months. We went through all of our Sassafrass science books. I am making our new plan for the rest of our "school" year, but thought these might be a nice break. I'm still on the fence though about our next curriculum.

This first month was cute. The kids got a comic book, and experiment card. Almost all the supplies were provided. The girls had a lot of fun with it.

Learned about Splatter Patterns:

Working on fingerprinting.

Extracting DNA from grape tomatoes

Waiting on our mixture to separate.

You can see the white wisps...that's the tomatoes DNA

Splatter patterns

Geography

We visited Greenland this week. The kids and I watched a Globe Trekker on Iceland/Greenland. It really gave us quite a bit of views of both countries.

For our international meal we had Cod with mustard sauce and warm potato salad. I also made the Chef's Dream cake.

Language Arts

This week we are still trudging through our Language Smarts - Book E. We worked on words that have unique spellings.

Math

I found some great puzzle sheets to practice their addition and subtraction to the thousands practice. Caty really liked these, and so did Lydia.

Lego Robotics

The group has basically finished their expo project. They worked really hard and have their board put together.

The girls also started Mod lessons from Learn to Mod. Lydia is getting into early programming, so we thought we would encourage it a bit more. She finished writing her first mod. Caty is a little slower though. But she earned several badges also.

In Other Happenings....

Our copier took a dive this week. Deciding whether or not I want to replace the printhead or what we might do. We have our main laser printer, which I have a love/hate relationship with. On the days my computer decides to communicate with it, I love it. On the days it decides to ignore my printing requests, I obviously do not like it. It's all in the programming between it and my Mac. Just frustrating some days. I have copies to make, so Joe showed me how to take photos of the pages with my phone. Send it to my laptop and then I can print them. It's actually super easy to do. So right now I am leaning toward not replacing the old copier/printer we have been using for copies. The app I am using is called Genius Scan. Worked out really well for me!!

Caty and I finally started our first avocado seed. We're hoping to plant an avocado tree! I always forget to start the tree. We have been doing really well with keeping our plants alive that we brought inside. Our orange tree and palm tree are also doing well. So maybe an avocado tree may have a chance of survival!!

The chore chart is making progress. Some days are better than others. I have literally taken money away from the kids when I find they haven't completed what they told me they did. Then we have discussion about lying. I am made slight adjustments each week now to work with the kids strengths (and even weaknesses).

On Friday we took the kids to a new place I heard of that has vintage video games. We thought we would surprise them. They had a blast. The pizza was good and the games, even though a few were not working the best, were great.