No field trips this week, but it was still a fun, busy time!
We’ve now started all of our subjects but Latin. I really did have good intentions about getting Turkey and Bunny going with First Form Latin, but between their complaining and teacher fatigue, I gave up after two days. Good thing there’s always next week!
We started on our history timeline this week. I’m very excited about trying this again. We had the Sonlight Book of Time the first time we studied ancient history, but I found it to be very difficult to work with. I was very excited to find this hardcover timeline book, for which there are four sets of timeline figures, from the ancients through the present day, as well as a placement guide, which takes all of the guesswork out of figuring out the spacing for 100s of events! I’m still toying with how we’re going to use it. I think instead of adding the figures for each daily history reading assignment, we’ll add all of the events we learned about for the week on Friday, and use it as a review. We’ll see how it progresses as we go through the year…I may change my mind!
Science continues to be a highlight of our school days. As we continued our overview of the solar system, we made a balloon solar system to hang from the ceiling of the school room. They are not to scale, in size or distance, at all, and we did have a problem with the Earth balloon deflating, although I was able to patch it up. It’s a fun visual reminder though, and Chickadee loves pointing at the balloons whenever she visits us in school!
We also began our study of the Jewish year in preparation for Rosh Hashanah next week. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and since we’re going to be learning a lot about the Israelites as we study history this year, the timing is perfect. I’ll even be able to get out the dreidels I bought at Target several Christmases ago! We learned about Shabbat this week, and looked a bit at what Hebrew looks like (the children were very surprised!). I may try making a turban challah next week, although, since I’ve never had it before, I won’t know if I’ve done it right. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing!
The rest of the week was pretty standard. Ladybug had her first math test (perfect score), and her first spelling test (only missed one), which was very exciting to her. Turkey and Bunny were a little less enthused about their math and spelling tests, but they are looking forward to their first Greek myths test next week…go figure! I haven’t decided if we’re going to have school on Labor Day or not…maybe we’ll just do something fun like go apple picking instead!