Week 23

We continued to study ancient China this week as well as Japan. Some of the main topics included Yang Chien uniting the North and South of China, The Tang Dynasty, the Yamato Dynasty of Japan, and the Samurai.

We reviewed Haiku and the kids wrote their own lovely, nature poems:


I like to add a few lapbooking pages to our history notebooks.
These open up and have information about the terra cotta army and the Great Wall.



We have been using The Story of the World pretty consistently for our scheduled history readings lately, so I bought the corresponding test and answer key book. We really like it! I use it as a guide for oral narration when we're done reading. There are fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice and true/false questions. You can purchase it a Peace Hill Press.

This week's science focused on Mercury. I am thrilled with the kids' response to this new science curriculum, Exploring Creation with Astronomy by Jeannie Fulbright. They can't wait for science and honestly enjoy completing notebooking pages -- this is not the norm! Here is Grace's page.

We did some hands-on activities, too! Here we are making craters in flour to show how Mercury got its surface dents.


And here we have a salt dough model of Mercury.


I'm pretty sure the most memorable part of the science activities was what the girls found in our backyard while searching for pebbles to be our asteroids......a wild turkey!!!!


The poor thing was really lost! He stuck around our court all day and finally flew up to a high tree to roost for the night. Needless to say, we used this as an opportunity to learn all about wild turkeys!

Well, this, along with our Bible, math, language arts, catechism, spelling, reading, piano and cello practice, sums up our week!

Weeks 15-22!

We have been enjoying Rome to the Reformation SO much! Weeks 15-21 covered the Middle Ages. We studied the Frankish Empire, the Islamic Empire, castles, knights, monks, the Crusades, Saladin, Richard the Lionhearted, Magna Carta, Robin Hood, William Tell, and much, much more. Since there were so many interesting topics and a great list of book basket titles, we added two extra weeks to get it all in.

Our kindergartner has continued with her daily calendar, 100 chart, and phonics/reading and handwriting. She is also joining in with the history and science portion of RTR.


Our castle is almost done! This is a time-consuming project, but worth the effort.

We have begun Exploring Creation with Astronomy. The kids are quite enthusiastic about it!
Here is our model of the planets -- the project from the TM.

This week we studied the sun. The experiment we did actually worked! We don't always have such success.

This first jar contains only water -- the light shines through and is white on the paper, showing us that the sun would look white if there was no atmosphere around the Earth.



Next we added milk, one dropperful at a time, to represent the dust and other particles in the atmosphere. The light shining through the milky water onto the paper is rosy-orange. From this we learned that at sunset the light must travel further than it does at midday, hitting more dust and particles in the atmosphere. The blue light waves are scattered, but the red waves are able to get through creating the beautiful colors at sunset.




We began our study of Ancient China and learned about the first Emperor of China, the Old Silk Road, and the Han Dynasty.


Jacob enjoying Shrimp Fried Rice for lunch.