Friday, February 24, 2017

End of the War, Crayon Art, Simple Machines and the Netherlands



We had a meeting with Lydia's Empowering Women group to start our week out.  She is working with a group to do a project on Jane Goodall.  So we met up with them.  Lydia got a chance to see some of her friends and they played chess at the coffee shop.


We had our final basketball practice this week.  The season went by quickly.  They also had their last game.  We will play briefly at our county's homecoming game in a few weeks.  So just a little more bball left.  Tennis starts soon!  3 of the 4 kids are excited for that.





Math

The older kids have made it through their first week of Division and had some review work before we started long division.  Caty chugged along with fractions.

Science
We covered pulleys, wheels and axles,






History

We concluded World War II this week.  The kids took a quiz over what we talked about.  All of them scored really well.  I gave minimal help, just reading vocabulary and sentences for them.  We watched a couple more movies, including The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Fighting Seabees and 24 Hours after Hiroshima (this was on National Geographic, but I found it on YouTube also.  The Youtube version has 3 parts).


Because the Timeless episode we watched this week had Charles Lindberg in it.  So we watched a documentary on him.


Geography

We visited the Netherlands this week.  We enjoyed Stamppot for dinner.  The kids really enjoyed our more Americanized version with peas and corn.  Surprisingly there were leftovers and Caty had them the next day.



I bought a pair of plain wood clogs on ebay and the girls enjoyed designing a shoe for themselves.  I was surprised how hard it is to find unfinished wooden clogs to decorate.  It was a bit frustrating.





Art

We have been given the opportunity to try out Creating A Masterpiece.com.  We did a project with oil pastel and ink.  Watch for our review.  We have been enjoying this.  CreatingAMasterpiece.com allows students to have video instruction while creating a beautiful piece of art.






The girls finished their online watercolor projects with their teacher from www.blossomingartists.com.



Reading

Joey-  Finished World War II Great Escapes and Shadow on the Mountain, Animorphs Book #3- The Encounter
Brayden- Star Wars Riptide
Lydia- She has three books going.... A Nancy Drew, Fifth Element, and Matilda
Caty- Totally True Adventures , The Race Around the World - Story of Nellie Bly

We finished our week off with our Me and My Guy Dance.  The girls look forward to this every year.  This year's theme was Disney.  This is my first year going as a volunteer.  So I dressed up too.  Caty was so proud of her Elena of Avalor costume that a friend of ours made for her.  I went as Elena's sidekick, Skylar.


Lydia chose Alice in Wonderland and Joe went as the Mad Hatter.





We are having such peculiar weather in Ohio.  It was so warm in February so far.  We have been in the upper 50s to 60s.  We took advantage one day and vacuumed and washed the van.


Another busy week down.  Things are going to be so hectic the next few weeks.  We have lots of events coming up.  The women's event that our GS Troop does annually, Living History event, programming class and 4H starts up next week too.  We are grateful for the warm weather though.

 Joe and I have been taking daily walks as we try to get our health back under control.  I am working on my diet also.  Eating low-carb...but found myself cheating a few times.  I'm sure this crazy weather doesn't help the way I'm feeling, but I'm enjoying the sunshine!

Hope everyone had a wonderful week!  See everyone next week!

Linking up with other moms at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap-Up


Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Home School in the Woods - HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece Review




Product Review:  HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece
Company:  Home School in the Woods

I love creating my own unit study programs for our family.  Looking up books that are tailored to each of our children takes a lot of work, but I think they appreciate it when we sit down to do the work each week.  But there are some weeks where I just am out of time and energy.  Learning must still go on, and that is when I am grateful for pre-made unit studies.  We recently had the opportunity to try out HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece ($33.95 download) from Home School in the Woods



HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece (Download $33.95 and CD $34.95) is a, 8 - 12 week unit study packed with hands-on project study on Ancient Greece.  It includes 25 passport stops as you and your students travel throughout this land and time period.  You will learn about religion, medicine, writing, education system, farming, Alexander the Great, and aspects everyday life.

Your students though are not just reading and filling out a lapbook.  HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece provides exciting writing opportunities disguised as creating a newspaper.  Each stop takes you on fun-filled adventures.  Included also are informational reading, instructions on how to create a folder to collect all your information in.  The pieces are included and easily printed out and assembled.   


We received the downloadable materials, but HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study: Ancient Greece is also available in a CD format.  The souvenir postcards have also been a huge hit.  Since we travel so much, we send out a lot of postcards.  The kids thought this was a great feature and looked forward to creating postcards to go along with our Story stops as we traveled through this time period.

This unit study is extremely easy to use.  I felt a little overwhelmed when I first started opening the files.  But I quickly discovered how to print the files that we needed for each lesson.  I was also able to quickly adjust activities to make them work for my kids who have trouble writing. 


Book lists and video suggestions are provided with each lesson.  These materials were easily gotten from the library, but I was also able to find other titles if our library didn't have the suggested titles.  These books though really were not necessary because each Passport Stop was packed full of information.  You could stretch this material out with a Passport Stop each week or do 2-3 stops a week, depending on in depth you want to study Ancient Greece with your family. 

We have used Home School in the Woods Project Passports in the past, and I absolutely love them and so do the children.  All the projects included are amazing.  That is what sets Home School in the Woods apart from other unit studies.  It's not just a lapbook or a few pages to read.  You can fully immerse your whole family in a historic time period.   So it's great for multi-level teaching. Homeschool in the Woods provides the materials....and you just need to provide the costumes if you really want to make it come alive....lol.


Several members of  the Schoolhouse Review were given the opportunity to try out various products from Home School in the Woods.  Take a few moments to see how they used them in their homes and if they enjoyed the Passport stops as much as we did.  Visit the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog below.




HISTORY Through the Ages Project Passport World History Study Reviews
Crew Disclaimer


Friday, February 17, 2017

The Holocaust, Simple Machines, Reading and Basketball



It was a busy and lazy week all at the same time.  There was so much to get done.  I had a ton of office work, but I just had clarity issues all week.  It was tough to get things done and not be overwhelmed.  So I was working very hard to stay on track and stay calm.  I didn't over-schedule and I didn't over-plan, but it felt overwhelming no matter what I did.  It was all me.  So I started to plan a full diet overhaul for next week.  I'm hoping the cutting out sugar will help the path my brain and body has been heading down.  It can't hurt to try it...lol.

Watching CNN10 Student news.  We do this almost every morning.  You can watch it on You Tube.


Work on their work quietly...this rarely happens.  I had to get it on film.


Geography

This week we visited Switzerland.  We watched a video on Amazon to let us visit and put our suitcases together.  Our international meal was a fried potatoes with ham dish, called Rosti.  The kids loved it and there were zero leftovers.


Science

We started tackling simple machines.  This is such a fun, hands-on subject.  But I will admit, not a favorite of mine to teach.  I constantly mix up the different simple machine style names.  We used various videos from Youtube to explain the different machines.  I printed a couple worksheets from Superteacherworksheets.com about various machines.  While cleaning shelves, I found our Simple Machine Levers and Pulleys Kit..  So we started going through the included books and building each machine and talked about them.







I splurged and ordered the other two kits for us to go through the next couple weeks.

We also watched these videos:





Math

Caty started working on fractions at her grade level.  The older kids worked on simple division.  I even pulled out our Math Tri-Facta Multiplication & Division Game game to help them work on their facts.  These are Rainbow Fraction Tiles and her workbook is one I have had for a few years.  


Caty and I played this several times this week!  She loved it.  We have had this since Joey was in 1st grade, so we have the old box.  But they still make it and you can buy it from Amazon.    It's actually cheaper on Amazon than what I originally paid, since I got it from an education store.


And since a friend pointed out it was National Pizza Day, we had pizza for lunch that day.  Costco has these great Organic pizza kits.  The whole family likes the crusts and there are 4 kids for $8.00.  I keep extra on our shelves just for this reason.  We were running behind and I was able to quickly throw in pizzas for them.




History 

It was a difficult topic week for history.  We spent the week reading and learning about the Holocaust and Concentration Camp.  I learned quite a bit myself about this historical time period.  I found this book when we visited the Holocaust Museum in DC a couple years ago.  It was very informative.

We continued to watch the Apocalypse: World War II on Netflix.  But I was having a hard time walking that line with our multi-age group.  It wasn't just age, but mentality.  Considering our religious group was one that was persecuted and sent to concentration camps, it was really tough for the kids to understand the mentality of the Nazi.  We learned about why the Nazi's attacked religions, including that they did not believe in a God because that meant that a God was above their Fuhrer.  There was to be no one above that man, he was the ultimate leader.  We watched some videos specifically about the suffering of Jehovah's Witnesses and why they were also signaled out.



We watched this video about the after effects


We also watched this movie on a person who worked to hide Jews and her struggles.  It was good.  It was called Hidden Silence and you can watch it on Amazon Prime also.



This is the book that we used to learn about the Holocaust.  It was very thorough.  I picked it up at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.  I did find it on Amazon.



Reading

These are the books that were finished this week...

Joey - Under the Blood Red Sun, Great Escapes of WWII, Animorphs Book 2 - The Visitor
Brayden - Lego Batman Novelization
Lydia - Number the Stars
Caty - Enchanted Pony Academy #2 - Wings That Shine, Everybody Loves Bacon, Enchanted Pony Academy #3 - Let It Go
Me - NYPD Red #1, Number the Stars

Lydia spent a lot of time working on her spelling bee on Monday and Tuesday.  Our spelling bee was Tuesday night.  She spelled out when she spelled singular instead of plural.  She forgot the S at the end.  I was very proud of all her hard work.



The kids had a basketball game this week also.  It was a very tough team, but Caty even score this game.




Caty got fitted for her Daddy/Daughter dress.  She's going as Elena of Avalor.


We went to a new to us theater in Findlay and saw their Percy Jackson play.  Turns out it was a musical.  The kids really enjoyed it.  It was good work considering that is a long book to put into an hour performance.



I'm exhausted just looking back at our week.  I beat myself up on a regular basis thinking that I am not doing enough.  Once a week when we finish, I see how much we accomplish when I am putting together these posts.  We are making it through each day with all the hurdles that are before us.

Hope everyone had a wonderful week!!

Linking up with other moms at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.