The benefit to you is an early Weekly Wrap-Up, which I've been toying with moving "officially" to Saturday, anyway. I usually post it late Friday afternoon when we're finished with school for the day, since we often do things on Friday that I want to include, and leave the linky up until Monday evening. What do you think? Do you like Saturdays? Late Friday ('cause, you know, early Friday just ain't gonna happen)? Don't care? I like to be democratic and all.
So, let's see...our week? Well, Monday was the day when I thought about pulling out a large majority of my hair and banging my head against the wall during reading time. I don't know why, some days, Josh and Megan seem to totally lose their minds -- or, at least, the brain cells that control the ability to read and/or sound out words -- when it's time for their one-one-one reading time. Since the rest of the week's one-on-one time went well and they are reading well when they're doing grammar and math, I'm thinking that perhaps it's just a conspiracy to drive me over the edge so that they can go play while I sit, huddled in a corner, with chunks of hair in my hands.
But, maybe I exaggerate.
We wrapped up our solar system unit this week, never having done the hands-on model. So, there you go. Everyone who ever reads my blog and things, "Wow! How do you do it all?" -- there's your proof. Sometimes I don't. I figure that astronomy is a very high interest subject and we'll come back to it before the kids are grown and gone.
We did make nifty little flash cards. I printed out forms for each planet from our Christian Kids Explore Earth and Space book. We included poor Pluto, which gave us three planets for each kid. They pasted the forms on the lined side of index cards and filled out the information: planet name, ordinal number from sun, number of moons, etc. Then, they drew a picture of the planet on the blank side. It was fun and it really helped them remember, at least, the names of "their" planets.
We had an awesome time on our nature walk this week. We saw a huge variety of mushrooms and a really large rabbit. We hiked, we sketched, but I'll post in detail about that next week.
The next biggest highlight seemed to be our art lesson. I'm telling you, I've always been impressed by Ken Robinson's take on creativity and education and I'm starting to think that he may be right on the money when he talks about redefining the "basics" (as in, "We got the basics done today" and you mean reading, math, science, etc.).
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that what is typically referred to as the "core subjects" need to take a back seat to things like art, music, drama, nature study and other more creative studies, but I'm also really starting to see that maybe things don't need to be so skewed in the traditional direction either. If you've never seen it, you really should watch this video of Sir Ken Robinson's speech at the TED conference (it doesn't hurt that he's funny).
Anyway, we really enjoyed another art lesson from God and the History of Art. This week, we tried our hand at the color mixing we practiced last week with the piece "Stag Beetle" by Albrecht Duer. I thought they turned out really nice.
The original (Okay, not the original, but you know what I mean.):
Our paintings:
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