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!