MFW Adventures Week 4

Our 4th week in Adventures is sadly over.  The focus of this week included Jesus as the Light of the World, Native Americans Indians, and the stars. It was another amazing week.

Bible: Our memory verse this week was John 8:12. We talked about how Jesus is the light of the world and that we would never be in darkness as long as we follow him. The kids each chose someone to pray for this week that doesn't follow the light of Jesus. Emily chose her great grandfather and Ashley chose her grandfather on my side of the family.  The girls didn't think twice on who they would pray for. They colored their stars and added them to our yearbook. We made candles to burn during our meals this week to remind us that Jesus is the Light of the World. The kids really enjoyed this project. We used a candle making kit that I picked up from amazon. This was their favorite project this week.

History: The North American Indians were our focus this week. We used the book North American Indians and a variety of picture books. We learned all about the Great Plains and Southwest Indians.  To represent tribes living on the East, we made paper wigwams. For the Plains tribes we made paper tepees.

Here were some of our reads this week.

We made two projects from Easy Make & Learn Projects : Colonial America. First we completed the Roanoke mini scroll book. Instead of stapling it together and making it into a little book, we pasted it into our yearbooks under projects. I felt this was an important topic to cover this week, as My Father's World (MFW) did not touch on it. Next we make the candle making slider. As you can see in the picture below, you can pull the slider up and down to watch the women dip the candles in the bowl of wax. We actually make candles this way last year.  I highly reccomend it if you have older kids.

We started using the Life in Colonial America Coloring book this week.  It looks like it will be a great resource this year.  We started out with coloring the page about Roanoke Island. I really like how the book explaines this time in history.

The girls enjoyed using the Draw and Write Book Three again. It is the perfect book for this weeks history topics. There were so many pages to pick from. Emily decided to draw an Anazazi village.  Ashley drew tepees and discussed what the paintings on them ment.

In an effort to get ready for next weeks history topic, we made another map from Interactive 3-D Maps: American History. The map explains about Henry Hudson and his travels to American. He then explored the Husdon rivers in Mass. The kids were not into coloring them this week, so here is the end result.

Science: This week we looked at the solar system and gravity. May kids love to watch school videos on our history and science topics. This week we watched videos about our solar system and the sun. We are planning to go to our local science and space museum. We focused a lot at the end of last year on the solar system and the planets within it. So this was just a little review for us.

I like to start school in phases, so this week we added some additional materials.  Here is what we added.

Reading: Now that our school week is in full force, we started our reading material. Ashley is reading stories from Days Go By, while Emily is reading More Days Go By. These are books from the Amish Pathway Readers (APR) series. These are perfect readers for my girls to read independently. We also use the workbooks that accompany the readers for vocabulary and Comprehension.

Grammer and LA: I had a hard time deciding what Language Arts program to use this year.  I went with Climbing to Good English from Pathway Publishers. I'm sad to report that it is not working for us at all.  I'm back to the drawing board. I would love any suggestions that you might have at a 2-3rd grade level.  We completed First Language Lessons level one last year. We really enjoyed it, as there was not much writing. I'm thinking of going to pick up level two.

Spelling: We picked back up with All About Spelling 1.  We started it at the end of the last school year.  We completed lesson 15 and 16 this week.  The girls seem to really enjoy this program.  With this program we use the tiles to spell the words. We do not have a written spelling test. For the dictation portion, I make sure we use some of the words in our other writings for the week. We might use the words in our draw and write pictures, or our topic summaries. We will start Rod and Staff Spelling grade 2 next week, which will allow for a weekly spelling test.

Additional Math: Since Emily can us all the extra practice possible to store information into her long term memory, we have started using Teaching Textbooks Level 3 along side her Saxon Math 3. This is a program that she can us independently on the computer. Emily likes that the program teaches her the lesson and if she gets an answer wrong, the programs shows her how to get the correct answer.  I am able to review her work each day. If she doesn't score 95% or higher, I can delete that lesson and she can do it over. She is doing this 3 times a week right now.

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