School Days July 2020

Our school year is off to a great start.  I am still trying to figure out our subject schedule but overall the days are running smooth.

I can remember a day when I did weekly homeschool blog posts.  How in the world did I have time to do that?  This school year I am going to attempt to do a school post once a month that will highlight some of the things we have been learning and doing. This post is a look at our first two weeks of school. 

Our school day begins at 8:00.  I have always been very consistent with that because it sets a good tone for our day.  They rarely ever complain about starting because they just know it is what we do.  They have to have their personal devotion done before we start.  We then begin by saying the pledge, singing a patriotic song and a Bible song, reading the Bible, studying a country or people group, and then prayer. 

Cruz doing his devotion.

 David helping Ben do his devotion.

So far we have studied and prayed for the countries of Afghanistan and Bangladesh.   This becomes a geography, history, and cultural learning experience all in one.  During our study of Bangladesh we learned about the Bengal tiger.  I used it as an opportunity to go deeper in study because they love tigers.  We watched several YouTube videos on them and then I had them write some interesting facts they learned.  We watched another YouTube step by step art video to learn how to draw one.  Here is Ben's work.

Ben studied Washington State.  At the end of the week this was his "report".   He will do one of these every week with a different state.

He read the book Freckle Juice and as a project he made some using the recipe the book gave.  

It smelled so bad!  He would not taste it and neither would I but he sure had fun making it.

These are two more books he has completed.  They follow a journey of a family who left Sweden in the 1800's in search of a better life in the United States.  I had him map their journey.

Each color dot represents a stop they made on the journey.

This was his other reader.

Cruz is working his way through Farmer Boy one chapter a day.  He is doing a book study on it as he goes.

History has been fun so far.  I am trying to incorporate as many hands on things to it as I can.  We began by learning about landforms of the United States.   They each had to pick one to illustrate.  Ben chose volcanoes and Cruz chose mountains.  They used watercolor pencils to make their art.

During our study of the Florida Everglades they had to each choose an animal that lives there to learn and write about.  Ben chose the American alligator and Cruz chose the manatee.  

We studied dams and levees.  For this project they had to use Lego and build one.  I found the idea here. 

 

Ben said his was Tikal.

Testing them with water.

Anytime they can build and it counts for school they love it!

This week we will begin learning about Native Americans.  I had some clay left over from an art supply kit so I had them make some "pottery".  It takes a while to dry so we made it early.  During our lesson I will have the boys paint them.  They really loved this messy activity!!

I will share an update on how these turned out in my next school post.   

Lastly, here are the boys in school one day dressed in their bath robes.  I do not allow this very often but every now and then I let it slide.  As you can see they were quiet, busy, and working hard.  As long as they keep that up I guess I won't mind.

When you add in some multiplication facts,  fractions, spelling, and language it makes for busy days. I look forward to more fun learning this month.