November 2015

Science
We are still studying animals for science. About mid month, we switched from invertebrates (mostly insects), to birds. It seemed fitting as Thanksgiving was coming up. You know, turkeys and all. So we had a spider themed dinner and watched "Charlotte's Web" to commemorate the end of learning about creepy crawlies. As we learned about birds, we tried to incorporate a few fun things there as well. We had turkey cinnamon rolls for dinner one night and made some bird feeders. We tried a new method this year using gelatin and cookies cutters. So far the birds don't seem very interested. We also fit in a few other science moments. With some left-over candy corns, we did a little experiment where we put some in water, some in oil and some in vinegar. We made predictions and then watched what happened over the course of the next few hours.






Reading
Here's a few things I've tried to keep learning our sight words fun. We built them with velcro sticks, a wrote them on cards and hung them up. Every time they jumped to smack one, they had to say the word. That one was a huge hit.


Art
Miles and I were sick for a few days, so we tried to take it as easy as possible. We tried to keep ourselves resting, but still tried to fit in a few projects. It was fun painting the leaves I drew with crayons, with watercolor paints.


History/Geography
The kids and I finished learning about Africa this month. To celebrate, we had the Beckstroms over for an African dinner and watch Lion King. :) We also made salt-dough maps of Africa, which actually turned out really cool. I'll have to post a picture of that later.


Veteran's Day
I tried my best to stress the importance of Veteran's Day to the kids, but I still don't think they "got it". We invited Scotty (our neighbor) over to talk to the kids about his service to our country. He answered a few questions we wanted to ask and chatted a bit. Honestly, the kids got bored, but it was really interesting for Richie and I to learn more about our neighbor. :)

October 2015

Reading
Reading is going well. I am trying to get Gwen up to Miles's level, which she is not far from. However, I fear that while I slow Miles down a little bit in order to push Gwen faster, I'm doing him a disservice. I feel like if he were in public school, he would be a more fluent reader than he is now. Not that he is struggling, he is very bright, I'm just not pushing him as much as I possibly could. I'm hoping to have both kids reading on their own and fluently by the end of the year. It will make things SO much easier.

I tried to do a few more fun things to help them with sight words. One of which was simply writing the words on cups and then having them build towers with the cups. The catch is that every time they stack a cup, they have to say the word written on it.



Math
Math is math. We're plugging along and enjoying it. So far, it's nothing new, so the kids are doing just fine and think it's great. The only tough time we had with math this month is when Gwen had to trace some 5's. 5's are hard. :)

Science
We're still studying different invertebrates. We were lucky enough to find a praying mantis on our front porch early on in October. We gave it a nice little home in a mason jar and watched it intensely. We looked online, and found that praying mantis's only eat live bugs. I managed to catch a few flies and put them in the jar. The kids were equally amazed and terrified as they watched the praying mantis catch and devour the fly. Then we watched the same thing, but online this time with extreme close-ups. That was enough to even creep me out a little!
We also studied ants. I even bought an ant farm online. We were so excited when it got here, only to find out it didn't come with any ants. So I ordered some ants, we put them in the farm, started taking notes, and then all the ants died. Literally, every single ant died within a few days. I still need to see if I can get a refund or replacement. Boo.


Geography
Midway through September we started talking about Africa. We started learning the Singing' Smart song to learn all the countries in Africa, opened our Africa envelope with pictures of Africa and other fun tid-bits like African money. We've tried to read books from Africa, and hopefully we'll wrap it up in a few weeks.

History
We hosted homeschool group once this month, and that particular week we were studying ancient China. We learned about how silk is made, ate some "authentic" Chinese rice with chopsticks, made paper dragon puppets, listened to traditional Chinese music, and practiced painting pictograms.


We also had a super fun ancient Africa/Halloween Party day.


I counted Halloween as a homeschool project. :) The kids decided with an ancient Egyptian theme, which I was super excited about. Miles was a Mummy, Gwen was Hatshepsut, Lindy was an archaeologist (Lindiana Jones). :)


Joy School
This month for Gwen's joy school, we went to a pumpkin patch for our field trip! Sadly, my camera died right as we arrived. We also had a fun Halloween party in addition to the regular school days.