Week 3 ~ In Our Groove!

We had a great week. I even heard each child say that they loved learning and that learning was fun! We really are hitting our stride. I love it when everything falls into place before out of the home classes start. Our learning definitely feels better than it has in more than a year. Everyone is more eager, everything is getting done and then some, and there is general calmness when there should be. What a blessing!

Goldilocks ~ She still did school work in her room most days. Her favorite subject this week was literature. She loved listening to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and is working on a decent book report. I had a book filled with workbook pages to fill out for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but she found them too difficult. They were geared for 3rd through 5th grade. I shelved it for her siblings. She also enjoyed identifying emotions in different characters in a few Cosby Shows. This is good practice for her since she often has trouble reading facial expressions and social cues. Otherwise, she did lots of math and writing this week. She went on our family field trip this week and joined us for our poetry tea.

The other children had a busy week. One of their favorite activities this week was checking on the ducks and geese at the local lake. They did drawings, counted the ducks and geese, fed them a loaf of bread, and even managed to pet a few of them. One of them even crawled into my lap to get a piece of bread. We also saw a Great Blue Heron this time.

American Girl Doll Club ~ We had the first meeting of our American Girl Doll Club this week. It was fantastic. We are doing Rebecca 1914 this quarter. The girls made pot holders and decoupaged boxes to fill for the Meals On Wheels Christmas drive in a few months. The boxes are so nice. The other mother read aloud most of the first book while the girls worked on their projects. We will be meeting another time to make a Jewish/Russian feast with the girls. It should be fun!

History and Literature ~ We finished The Wright Brothers. Tom Sawyer and Little Red Riding Hood loved this book. We then moved on to the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. We watched this youtube documentary. It was excellent. We then made molasses sugar cookies. Of course, we then had to recreate the great molasses flood (see photo below). The kids also watched a Netflix DVD, Unsolved History Mysteries ~ 1906 San Fransico Earthquake. This was a neat DVD because it looked at the earthquake from an engineering and structural building point of view. We finished off by adding the new info to our scrapbook timeline. Lastly, we read Sky Boys How They Built the Empire State Building.

Poetry Tea ~ Our poet this month is Carl Sandburg. The kids were really excited about this poet because he lived just a few towns from us. So this week, we visited his goat farm and fell in love with the goats. I think we may need a goat or two to maintain our yard. It is so overgrown that using goats to eat the grass and weeds indeed would be perfect. My husband thinks I'm nuts, but that's nothing new. We started the morning off with a poetry tea. I read them a few poems and then we watched this YouTube poem ~ Skyscrapers. This was excellent and a perfect connection to our architecture study. The kids then took turns filling in pages of a Carl Sandburg activity book. Then we were off to Connemara. We did not go into his house this time, since the kids were enjoying the goats too much to force them into a house tour. They worked on their Junior Ranger badges and looked through a scrapbook of the house. That was almost as good as if we had taken the tour.

Blessings, Dawn