Homeschool Highlights Weeks 7,8 and 9 (2018-2019)

Here is a look at some of our homeschool activities from the past few weeks.

Our Bible lessons have focused on God's creation, how sin spoiled the world, and God's law.  Our memory verses have been John 3:16, Jeremiah 29:11, and Deuteronomy 6:4.  We will be adding verses 5-6 of Deuteronomy chapter 6 over the next two weeks.

We have learned about three languages/ people groups and prayed for them daily.  These languages included Bwisi in Uganda, Catalan Sign Language in Spain, and Daakaka in Vanuatu.  We understand the importance of having a Bible in your heart language and we are enjoying the opportunity to pray for language translators around the world.  That is a hard, tedious job but a very important one.

Cruz reading about sharks.  A topic he loves.

His current reader is this book.  He has several in this series to read this school year.

Ben doing a reading lesson.

 phonics review

seatwork

spelling

We just finished our first nine weeks and Ben took his first language assessment test.  Both boys had unit tests in math.  They are doing well and on target. 

Below are a few items we love using for review.  The boys think of them as games more than schoolwork.  I try to add these in throughout the week.

Hot Dots for reviewing blends and digraphs.  They love the talking pen.

I love these Smart Tray sets.  We use them often. 

We have continued our study of Egypt in History.  In one lesson we learned that Egyptian pharaohs built pyramids and decorated the interior walls with pictures that represented all activities of Egyptian life.  As a project we made our own wall mural and drew scenes from Egyptian life.  They thought this was a lot of fun.

They used our textbooks to get ideas.

One of our art lessons was about European cave drawings.  We made our own cave art by crumbling brown wrapping paper and using soft pastels for drawing. Here is Ben crumbling his paper.  I think that was their favorite part.

I pulled up examples on the internet and let them pick what they wanted to draw.

They both love art! 

Cruz's drawing

They glued their drawings to a piece of black construction paper and then decorated the edges.

Ben's drawing

We are continuing our study on animals around the world in Science.  We have learned about the continent of Africa and animals from the Namib Desert region, Congo jungle, Serengeti plains, the Okavango Delta, and Madagascar.  We also learned about animals in Europe.  This study focused on animals in the Pyrenees Mountains, Coto Doñana, and the Western Isles.  All throughout the day we are constantly going to our maps and finding the places that we are learning about in each subject.  They are getting a good Geography lesson as well.

Our Science experiment topics have been on vanishing water and mixing.  One of our experiments had us learning about evaporation.  We filled three saucers with the same amount of water.  We put one in direct sunlight, one in a drafty area, and the other in the shade. We made observations about which one we thought would dry up the fastest.  We left them there overnight and the next day we compared them.

We added food coloring to the water so we could better see if it evaporated.

The saucer in the direct sun dried up before the end of the day (it is hot here!).  The one in the draft almost dried up.  Lastly, although the one in the shade did evaporate some, it had the most water on the plate left.

For our lesson on mixing we mixed water and salt in a bowl.  We poured some of the salty water on a plate and set it out in the sun.  When the sun evaporated all of the water we could see the salt left behind. They thought this experiment was very cool. 

We have finished one and a half books in our read aloud time.  The first one, Catching Their Talk in a Box, was the life story of Joy Riddorhof.  She was a missionary who's life work was to record the gospel in the heart language of people all around the world.  Her passion, faith, and commitment to prayer was an inspiration.  I love missionary stories and getting to study them with my boys.

The book we are currently reading through is Henry Huggins.  We are just a few chapters in and Cruz is already saying it is one of his favorites.

We do our read aloud time at night before bed.  It has been a part of our bedtime routine for many years now.  It is a great way to end the day and get them settled down for sleep.

As I already mentioned we finished up week 9 this week.  Hooray!  We will be taking a short fall break a few days next week to attend a prayer retreat with some of our mission family.  We are looking forward to some fun and fellowship while there and a few days off from the routine of school.