Taking Off with Homeschool!: Preparing & Res to Ref

Preparing Hearts for His Glory

This week we started reading from Life in the Great Ice Age.

We learned that Noah's decedents were very intelligent. The world changed after the flood and it took time to adjust to the climate in the new land.

After our reading, I asked the kids to write their narration. Some struggled with the written narration and honestly it was PAiNFUL.... but, overall I think as with anything, the more we do it the easier it will be for them. *Fingers Crossed*

This has been their first experience with writing their thoughts in a written narration instead of oral. So, writing these guidelines on our dry erase board to get their brains churning was helpful. We took time to go back and correct spelling errors and punctuation after their thoughts were on the paper.

We continued reading The True Story of Noah's Ark. The kids had heard the story many times before but have been fascinated with all the details that they didn't know. We learned that the flood story has been passed through the generations in most cultures. We know that God promised not to flood the world again when he placed a rainbow in the sky.

This week the history projects involved learning about warm and cool colors. We skipped the magazine cut out on Day 1 because my 3 already know about warm and cool colors. However, the kids enjoyed painting a cool water color background using green, blue, and purple.

Then, they added a beautiful rainbow to their picture with tempra paints by only using the 3 primary colors. The kids enjoyed this project and their rainbows all turned out beautiful!

The kids drew and colored Noah's ark and a giraffe this week with 'Draw & Write through History'. They seem to all enjoy the draw & write lessons.

Love the new cursive tracing copy work that we found on the files section of the Preparing Facebook page. This has helped tremendously for my 3rd grader. She is working on cursive and this will help solidify the style. My 5th graders can easily copy in cursive and it looks great!

In Poetry, we read 'Bed in Summer' by Robert Louis Stevenson. The kids could relate to going to bed in summer while it's still daylight outside.

They wrote down a few ideas and then creatively added them to their poems.

They enjoyed the silliness of the creative writing changing a few lines of the poem into their own. I am really loving this creativity in writing part of Preparing Hearts this year!

In Science, this week the kids learned that God gave animals layers of fur and birds inner and outer feathers to help them survive the cold weather in the Arctic tundra.

We learned that fox and the ermine are predators and hunt for prey in the snow.

Our Science experiment was to explore what causes ice to melt. We learned that heat helps ice melt quicker. When we used a hairdryer, the ice melted faster.

We learned that in the Arctic, the heat from the summer sun slowly melts the ice through radiation. As the ice and snow melts animals return to the area to have their young.

Our vocabulary words were taken from our story reading. This week we learned the meanings of barge, sulfur, and generations.

The kids continued to diagram sentences this week and specifically worked on Asking, Telling, Commanding, and Exclamatory sentences.

Recess this week was filled with a lot of locust shells. It's definitely the end to our summer soon. We love and our ready for fall weather season!

Resurrection to Reformation

This week, the big one created a beautiful stained glass window art. He made a cross in the center and outlined his black paper in glue. After a day of drying, he colored the spaces with brightly colored chalk. We sprayed it with hairspray to set the chalk and added a brightly colored frame. I love the way this turned out.

I've really noticed the big one really enjoys the art projects in HOD. He said he hadn't done much for several years in public school and didn't realize he missed it.

In poetry, this week we read another poem by Emily Dickinson. Love these poetry worksheets to deepen their thoughts on the poem.

This week he started one of his extension reading books. So far, the response has been pretty good. The extension reading is beyond DITHOR and my plan is for him to design a book report and review following the conclusion of the book.