Weekly Wrap-Up ~ The Sun Came Out!

We are so happy to see the sun again here in North Carolina. It was a rough patch of rain that lasted days, but nothing like what hit South Carolina. We hold them in our prayers as they struggle to recover from a thousand year flood.

We had a good week and accomplished most everything we set out to do. The kids did lots of math, wrote two one-page papers, and completed their grammar worksheet pages. Oh, but there is so much more to homeschooling than the 3 R's.  Here are the highlights from this week.

Gandhi's Birthday ~ We celebrated Gandhi's life by reading Who Was Gandhi? and watching the more than three hours movie, Gandhi. We enjoyed both and they complimented each other. We also enjoyed a lovely caramel apple cake, because one needs hardly any reason at all to whip up a cake.

Roman Road ~ Our Roman road is complete. I am not sure why the grass only grew in some areas. Oh well, it was a good hands-on project anyway. The kids seem to benefit from hands-on projects sprinkled into their education.

Solar Rover ~ Dean made a solar rover this week. It came out great and needed just a little bit of tweaking to get it to run smoothly. He has since taken it apart and made a solar powered signal light and a solar powered spinning wheel. I love it when he expands the lessons and makes them his own.

Dictionary Skills ~ We reviewed dictionary skills. Yes, we usually just ask Google to define words, but I still think good old-fashioned dictionary skills are useful.

Who Really Discovered America ~ We completed the book, Who Really Discovered America? We really enjoyed the book and it is a good precursor to The World of Columbus and Sons that we will be starting next week. We didn't end up doing hardly any of the activities that went with the book; because they seemed too easy, we had done them before, or they required materials that I didn't have on hand. We did end up using their method to determine the age of several trees on our property. There was a neat math formula included in the book. Most of the trees we studied were between 50 to 60 years old, which fits with the age of our house.

Our New Photographer ~ Anne has really taken to photography lately. She has done several photo shoots of her dolls and posted them on her YouTube channel. This week she took over the camera on our nature walk at the arboretum. Below is a sampling of her photography. I think she is starting to get the concept of composition. My favorite is the large picture of water with foaming bubbles.

Robot Zoo ~ We visited an exhibit called the Robot Zoo this week. It was very interesting and tied in perfectly with our STEM lessons. Dean loved the fly robot and Anne liked the platypus robot. We did a scavenger hunt which enhanced the learning experience.

What would it be like to walk on a wall like a fly with sticky feet?

What a week! Lots of exciting stuff coming up in the next few days, including Anne's birthday.

Blessings, Dawn