MFW Adventures Week 6

Well, we completed week six of school.  I can't believe it has been six weeks already.  It has gone by so fast. These six weeks have given us enough time to see what is working and what is not.  Next year I will wait to assign the yearly school assignments and place everything into their folders until after the first two months of school has been completed.  Due to somethings not working out, I have to now adjust the whole rest of the year. Bummer!

Bible: We learned that Jesus is the Bread of Life. We read some great passages including Exodus 16. The story is about God providing manna for the Israelites in the wilderness.  Water and manna were all that was needed for then to live,  just like Jesus is our manna to live. The kids colored their picture of bread with the bible verse on it and placed it in our yearbooks.  We make bread from scratch on a regular basis, so this week we decided to make a treat for ourselves.  We made cinnamon raisin bread.

We also read from John 6, where Jesus feeds the 5,000. This story was extremely hard for the kids to really understand and grip .  It really made them think about those people that are really in need of food in our world today.  It was perfect timing that Jake's grandpa call to pick him up for the day.  He asked Jake to assist him in helping make bag lunches for the homeless with his church.  It helped Jake really understand the verse was discussed.

History: we continued learning about colonial life in America, focusing on the Dutch immigrants who left the city of Amsterdam in Holland and came to the New World to live in New Amsterdam.  We located New York on the map, as that is where New Amsterdam was.  We learned how the name was changed from New Amsterdam to New York, which was even a lesson for me. We learned that the Dutch Pioneers were the first people to bring over cows, pigs, sheep, and horses to the new world.

The cows were especially important for the Dutch because they used the milk to produce milk, butter, and cheese. We learned how the colonists made butter using a butter churn.  We had the pleasure of making our own butter this week as well. This was the kids favorite project this week.  I have to say that I even enjoyed it.  We will be making butter again soon.

Ashley was curious to see what the butter milk taste like, so I told her to taste it.  She loved it and said, "Mom you should have some of this in your coffee".  I have to say, it was great in my coffee the next morning.

The girls eached colored a page of our Life in Colonial American book.

Emily's

Ashley's

The Dutch Pilgrims built full log cabins with a fireplace located on one wall of the house.  This was different than the split wood cabins that the English built.  The Dutch also built windmills.  

We constructed a little Dutch village using our Interactive 3-D Maps: American History and Easy Make & Learn Projects : Colonial America.

Jake really enjoyed these projects.  The little log cabin come apart so that you can also see what the inside looks like.

It is so fun to see him use his imagination

  We also used our History Pocket to make a model of the inside of a Dutch log cabin.

Once again we used the Draw and Write Book Three.  Emily really does love this part of our week.  I'm so glad I decided to purchase them. This is Emily's Dutch Windmill drawing.

We started a new read-aloud, The Courage of Sarah Noble.  The girls are loving the story so far. It is a cute story about a girl from Massachusetts that travels to Milford, Connecticute to help her father while he builds a new home for the family.  I purchased the study guide for this book and talked over all the pages for the first four chapters. 

Science: We completed a really fun science project this week.  We learned how Carbon Dioxide is produced from yeast and sugar.  The sugar feeds the yeast, just as Jesus fed the 5000 people. Without the sugar, no carbon dioxide is produced. This really helped the kids pull all our lessons together this week.  We all made theories as to what would happen with our balloon.  Even Max helped out with this one.

Is the water warm enough???

feels great to me!

I'm adding the yeast

We added the mixure of yeast, water, and sugar to our bottle and toped it with a balloon

End result is we made carbon dioxide.

Math: I thought I would share a fun resource for those of us that have Kindergartners. My little Jake loves, and I mean loves dinosaurs.  I found this great dot to dot book from Rainbow Resources. It works on number 1-30. We read about the dinosaur that is created on each page and then color them when he is done. Jake calls this FUN math!

Jake and Emily both promoted to their orange belt in karate. I'm so proud of both of them.

Head over to  " Homeschool Highlights in MFW" to read more post of families using My Father's World curriculum.