State Reports

One of the things that I love about our co-op is that the kids get experiences that they don't get at home. In their writing class they were assigned a state, and they had to do a brochure and a float including all kinds of information about their state. One thing that made me happy was that they really took ownership in the project and worked on it at home and asked me to help them, rather than me nagging them to get it done. Some of the skills that I was thrilled to see them develop was making sure they had all the information that the teacher asked for (she had given them a list of things to include). They also set weekly goals with their teacher (who is amazing) and it was so cute to hear them talking about making sure they met their goal. These are all skills that I value and it is nice to have them reinforced by someone else. They finished both the brochure and the floats this week. They came out very cute. I'd like to post the brochure too if I can figure out how to do that. They were the first to finish in their class. In a couple weeks they will be presenting them to all the parents.

Annsley got the state of Florida and included things about the beach, the floral gardens, Disney World. They also had to have the state motto, bird, flag, map, and a few other things.

Seth got the state of Wisconsin. Some of the things he wrote about were football (of course), cheese, and all the lakes. We included these things on the float.

Week 24 TOG update

This week we studied about the Persian Wars and reviewed some information about the ancient Greeks.

History:

Literature:

Seth read this book. He read the whole thing this week even though it was supposed to take two weeks.

Annsley is on week 2 of this book and really enjoying it.

Geography: We looked at the map of Greece and the Persian Empire. We labled the places where some of the major battles in the Persian War happened.

Writing: Confession time. This week, due to a variety of reasons, I could not seem to get around to the writing assignment. I needed to teach the how to write the outline for the new unit, and I just never could find the time. I think that tomorrow (working on a Saturday) I will show them how to take notes for the Unit IV (Writing from one source) unit. Then, next week we'll go through the whole process.

Dictation: This week we used a selection from the Athenian oath as our dictation.

Notebooking pages: This week we drew pictures of the Greek ships and weapons. We also made a little booklet about life in Ancient Greece. I can not seem to get my pictures off my camera right now, so I'll have to post pictures later.

This is Seth's ship and weapons.

This is Annsley's ship and weapons.

Fine Arts: This week we began our Greek play on the story of Job that the kids will perform at the unit celebration. Annsley will be playing the role of God and Seth has the distinguished role of the devil! (Hmmmmm, type casting?!?)

(Can you tell it was St Patrick's Day this day? We took our history books to McDonalds and had a Shamrock shake.)

Week 23-TOG

The focus for this week is the Persian Empire and the time where the Israelites were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. We also spent time on Esther and studied a little about the Feast of Purim

History Reading:

Most of the reading this week was Bible reading. The kids read Esther and Nehemiah in Spanish with Daddy. This has been such a great addition to the history studies and really pulls Danny in to what we are learning about.

We read the chapter in SOTW that talks about Persia and King Cyrus. We also read a little bit from the Usborne book

Literature: Annsley started Victory on the Wall

Writing: This week we did another Unit 3-writing a narrative story on the story of Esther. Seth struggles with this because he really has a hard time choosing the details to include. The choices seems to paralyze him a bit. He can add all the dress-ups, etc, but the Unit 2 were much easier for him. I may be choosing stories that are too big, and perhaps I need to narrow down the story a little bit for him.

Dictation: For dictation this week we did a poem I found about the Feast of Purim

Geography:We mapped the Persian empire this week.

Fine Arts: Next Monday we will have a feast of Purim celebration for the project for the week.

Week 22-TOG update

History: The themes this week had to do with the neo-Babylonian civilization. We spent a lot of time talking about the captivity of Judah. We read the book of Daniel and parts of II Kings. We also read about the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. The kids even read the book of Daniel in Spanish with Dad.

Writing: We began Unit 3 writing in IEW. This is a unit of Summarizing Narrative Stories. We worked on our favorite story from the book of Daniel. We also added the final two sentence openers. (Very short sentence and clausal opener).

Dictation: This week our dictation was selected Babylonian proverbs.

Fine Arts: This week we drew the famous Gate of Ishtar. We also made a little book of Daniel and the Lion's Den.

Geography: We mapped the Babylonian Empire.

Project from week 21:

We looked at the Assyrian Relief carvings, and decided that people might be too difficult for us to tackle. So, we carved simpler images. It gave us all a new appreciation for what carvers have to do out of stone. Ours was just a bar of soap!