My Father's World Adventures Week 1

Here they are on their very first day of school!

We had a wonderful first week of school! Surprisingly, we were able to stick to our "schedule" pretty closely.

Bible - This year will take us through the names of Christ. We looked up the meaning of the our names and Jesus too. I wrote each of the kids a personal letter on how their dad came up with their names. Yes, in our family daddy always picks the name. Boy did they love those letters. They enjoyed learning why dad chose the name that he did for them.

History - We discussed the meaning of each word in the Pledge of Allegiance. This was an over view for us, as we learned them last year in our sign language class. To go along with that, we walked through an overview of the 50 states and 7 continents. We discussed a “rose compass” and general map reading. We even enjoyed a nice red, white, and blue snack for the day. We had yogurt with berries. We read about Leif Ericsson and the Vikings. We created our timelines and added the first 3 pictures, including Leif. We read and looked through lots of books on the vikings.

I picked up a great resource that was reccomended by a friend called Interactive 3-D Maps: American History . We created the Viking map from it that showed the route Erik the Red took from Iceland to Greenland and the route Leif Ericsson took from Greenland to Newfoundland. The girls had loads of fun making it, but Jake couldn't stop playing with the little ships since we finished it. This book was a great hit and there are lots of other maps that we will use from it this year.

At the end of our week Jake and Max watched the movie of "Lyle the Kindly Viking". They always love Veggie Tale movies, so it was a big hit.

On the other hand, the girls watched, "vikings Journey to New Worlds". This was a great video for older children. I really enjoyed it as well.

Science - we conducted a simple experiment to go through the scientific process of come up with theories, conduct experiments, and observe their results. Our experiment was to see if adding salt to water would help an egg to float in it.

I have to say, we had a great first week of school.