Taking Off with Homeschool!: Bigger Hearts for His Glory

Our verse this week was Proverbs 18:10

'The name of The Lord is a strong tower.

The righteous run into it and they are saved.'

We listened to 'Blessed be the name of The Lord' this week on YouTube. You can listen here too: Proverbs 18:10 Song It helped the kids learn their memory verse easily.

Our poetry this week was 'Each in His Own Tongue' by William Herbert Carruth. I've decided to change up the Copywork sheets. We were using the pages from the Facebook files. I love the form but, it just wasn't working with my 7yo who still needs the guidelines with her writing.

7yo Print Poetry Copywork

We switched this week back to the guided paper we used in Beyond and her writing is beautiful again. It's a bit more effort but, worth it in results. If you haven't heard of this site yet.... It is awesome! You can type up anything and it lets you print out the guidelines and writing styles that you want your children to follow. It has been a handwriting lifesaver for my little ones and the copy work that they do. Click here: http://www.worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting.html and you can customize to your child's needs too. It was quick and easy to type up and print this out for her. Highly recommended if handwriting needs a bit more space or the guidelines.

9yo Cursive Poetry Copywork

It was also helpful for my cursive writer. We will be making these each week to help with their writing since they both did so much better with the penmanship guidelines.

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Our character trait this week was responsibility. We talked about Don Juan de Onate` and how he was responsible for many people when his expedition headed to New Mexico to build a settlement for Spain.

We learned that the Indians in the southwest made beautiful sand paintings. They thought the paintings brought healing to the sick. We know healing comes from God.

In art we made a 'sand painting' with colored salt. First, we added a couple drops of food coloring to our salt and shook the bags to make colored 'sand'.

We made a watered down glue mixture and painted it on our paper plate circles. One color at a time the kids sprinkled the colored salt onto their design.

Sand Paintings

We had a sun, rainbow, and a sword. The kids enjoyed this and loved that we journeyed outside for the project because of the messiness. It was much better than using glitter though!

Oh wait... Did I say glitter? Surprise!

We learned that many of the pilgrims passed away with a pestilence because of the germs that spread quickly at that time without the common practice of washing their hands with soap and water. We sprinkled glitter germs over the kids hands. They used a dry paper towel to try and clean their hands. It helped a small amount. Then they used water to rinse off the glitter germs which helped a bit more but, glitter still remained. Then they used warm water and soap and the glitter came off of their little hands easily. Our experiment showed that it is important to wash our hands with soap and warm water so that we get all the germs off and don't spread them to other people.

We learned about Myles Standish who journeyed to America on the Mayflower. Although, he was small, he was a bold soldier and helped the pilgrims reach North America. We learned about Squanto and how he taught the pilgrims how to hunt, fish, and plant corn.

We talked about the differences between needs and wants. The kids cut out examples of needs and wants from magazines.

Hemispheres

In geography, we learned about the 4 hemispheres. I printed this quick map and had the kids color the regions.

Dipper and North Star

We learned that astronomy and the stars were often used to navigate as the pilgrims traveled. We learned about the Dipper and how to locate the North Star. We learned that the North Star doesn't seem to move because it is directly above the Earth's axis.

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4th grade CLE Math

4th grade math is going well despite our troubles with borrowing to subtract. I'm a real person and not afraid to show our difficulties on the blog too. This was one of "those" days for us and my son did go back and correct his work.... sometimes more than once... so that I'd know he understood the concept.

Thankfully, the rest of the week went smoother moving into metric measures. He's overall doing very well with Christian Light Education and we will press on.

Our song is O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing. We listened and sang along all week. The kids enjoy the music. We learned about Charles Wesley's poem and that he learned to read from his mother using the Bible. He wanted to write the words of the Bible into songs so people could memorize the words of the Bible easily.

We started a new fiction book this week; The Princess and the Goblin. The children are captivated after the first several chapters and begging for me to read more. So far, this book is a sure hit!