Back-Tracking

I wanted to catch up on my school weeks here! Before Easter and after Micah's birthday, we had a great time studying India. I am determined to crank out Asia and Australia before we head to DISNEY (!!!!!!YEAH!!!!!) in May. Anyway, we spent a week and a half on India, and will do the same with China. Then I think we can fit Japan, Russia, and Australia into a week each. I love that MFW is actually flexible enough to allow this kind of scheduling to happen. I will say that we are doing A LOT of work each day, and this is teaching me to be way more diligent during the beginning of the year and not to take a month on a segment that was scheduled for 2 weeks! We finally finished our David Livingstone book, and I will be skipping the last two biographies...instead I picked a read aloud for China from the book list and am saving Mr. Popper's Penguins to end our school year with.

Nothing new for the basics...we are just cranking through math and language arts. Eli is enjoying the new Dick and Jane or Benny's Adventures book I place in his bucket each day. And he is just working on printing his letters with our memory verses. Abby will finish her Alpha math book with flying colors. I'm debating whether to do another year in Math U See for her or to switch her to Singapore next year like I did with Zeke. She doesn't seem to have the issues with Math U See like Zeke did...hmmm.... Speaking of Zeke...he's doing great, but we have had to have a lot of discussions about attitudes and Philippians 2:14-16a (we made it our memory verse for last week!). I will always butt heads with him since he and I are SO MUCH alike: rule followers, stubborn, perfectionists!!!! It is good to have the pep talks from my husband that remind me to focus on the important things... character issues are more important than completing a math page or a craft project! Issues are very inconvenient when they occurs during math time and take 45 minutes of discussion and training to solve, but I know it is the right work. :)

Here are our face paintings during our India study. The kids had fun performing a little skit for me after their paintings were done.



Here we are making volcanoes. The funny thing was getting a phone call during this project, answering it, exiting the room, leaving the children with vinegar and baking soda and having a LARGE mess to clean up! But it was OK. They had fun.

We ended our unit on mountains doing this activity suggested in the textbook. I'm pretty sure Zeke was the only one that understood why we were doing this activity.

And over the span of 2 weeks, we fit in a "green craft" activity from the Family Fun magazine. It fit in well with our science lessons on Reducing, Reusing, & Recycling. These fish are made from 2 L pop bottles. Fun!