Creation to Christ
Riley is learning the geography of the Holy Land and really enjoyed his history project of making a map of the tribes in Israel and Judah. He worked hard to use playdough to shape each tribe's land shapes and make flags for labels for each of them. The last day of his history project, he studied hard and could remove all the flags and put them back in the right places without the aid of a map. This was all part of the HOD plans - love how spreading the history project out over 3 days helps it really resonate...
Riley's histroy notebook is coming together so nicely. HOD make the most beautiful notebooks. Here is another history project he finished at the start of this week. It shows the dividing of the 12 tribes between Rehoboam and Jeroboam. He forgot to write his written narration in his history notebook, and accidentally wrote it on notebook paper, so we just cut it out and glued it in...
I love how my dc are often dressed up in this or that from their playtimes and come back to doing school still wearing dress-up stuff while they settle in to read a good book. Just fun, isn't it? Neat to see them learning in such an informal setting with such delight!
The prewriting we do in "Write with the Best" is almost more important than the actual writing, I have found. If we do a good job in the prewriting stages of plans, the actual writing of the piece is a snap. It is well worth the time up front! Here is our prewriting for Riley's description of a person, the parts we hi-lighted to include in his description, and then his first draft paragraph he wrote today. HIs character is named "Skittle" and owns a Sugar Shack, but his dad is a dentist, so he flosses regularly. I thought this was a pretty funny, creative description that shows off Riley's sense of humor (and love of Skittles)!
Riley is in Singapore Math 4A right now, and he is learning about larger number multiplication and division. I like to use markerboards for this, with me writing a problem, him working it while I write the next problem on a second markerboard, and then us switching. We do this for the Textbook portion together, as this is my teaching part. Then, for his independent workbook part, he uses the markerboard himself. Singapore does a super job of modeling several different methods to solve problems. I've seen our different dc often choose different methods, but they still arrive at the same answer. Here is a picture of Riley with the markerboards, and another picture of the 3 methods taught that day...
Don't you just love it when learning naturally connects across the subjects without it being 'planned' per say?
In history "The Story of the Ancient World", Riley read about Elijah, and in R & S English, he read about Elijah from the Bible (a different story, but still a neat connection).
In WWTB, Riley learned how to write an organized paragraph describing a character, and in R & S English Riley had to write an organized paragraph with sentences of varied lengths describing Elijah's story from the Bible. The other week, Riley read a poem by Robert Frost in R & S English, and he is studying Robert Frost's poetry in CTC. There are so many connections like this every week with HOD - it is an awesome way to learn that helps my dc connect and retain so much more!
What a super week - hope you had one too!
In Christ,
Julie