Pardon me for being all mushy-gushy, but I we are loving our time with Heart of Dakota {Beyond}! I don't want to sound like a broken record, as I am sure I've mentioned it before, but I just love how easy this is to implement--it's such a relief knowing we are learning without more planning on my part. And, my son is enjoying most of it (I'll get to that later), but hands-down his favorite activities have been listening to our weekly song that corresponds with our Bible verse and getting to act silly while trying to memorize his verse for the week!
I've forgotten to mention our weekly Bible verse and song in the past two posts, so I'll fill you in this week! For Unit 3, our memory verse was 1 John 4:15-16a, and our song was appropriately titled, God is Love. We LOVE our Hide Em' in Your Heart (Vols. 2) CD!! T typically turns on the music first thing when we come down to our School Room. Yep, we jam in our jammies to start our school day! Even baby Z loves bee-boppin' to the music. So precious!
The focus of Unit 3, was Trouble with King James in England. As we read through our History book, Stories of the Pilgrims, we met the Brewster Family, who owned an inn in Scrooby, England. In our readings, King James had found out that The Brewster Family and others in and around Scrooby, England were meeting and worshipping in secret. King James did not approve and sent men to keep a watchful eye over the town and the people's whereabouts. King James persecuted those who did not believe as he did and the people of Scrooby could take no more. As the week finished, we read that the people of Scrooby began packing their belongings to head to Holland.
Art: After being introduced to the Brewster Family, we gathered some art supplies to make a picture of the Brewster's house. They owned/ operated and lived in an inn that once was a castle. It now had beautiful rose bushes growing up the walls. Here is my son's interpretation of their house. Beautiful!
Our science lesson was about pollination. Since the inn was surrounded by beautiful gardens and rosebushes, we learned that flowers need bees to pollinate them so that they can make seeds. We also watched The Magic School Bus Goes to Seed, which also explained pollination. For this activity, I drew out some flowers on a piece of paper and quickly grated some yellow chalk. We pretended our fingers were little bees and stopped on one flower, then flew off while shaking the pollen off on other flowers we landed on.
Afterwards, we completed a notebooking page. His illustrations crack me up!
We also explored light this week in science. By shining a flashlight on a white piece of paper and a black piece of paper, we were able to see how white reflects light and black absorbs light.
T did great with his Spelling list this week. He had trouble with little, but by the end of the week he got it! We also found a sheet of letter stencils from my scrapbooking days, and he enjoyed using it several times during the week to spell out his words.
Still working on sentences in Language Arts this week; we have learned that sentences have two parts, begin with a capital letter, and end with a punctuation mark. This week we learned some technical names for the two parts of a sentence, the subject(s) and the predicate. I can already tell you we'll be reviewing these words in the future ; )
The math in HOD is Singapore, but we are doing something different. We are using the Light Units from Christian Light Education. I'm not sure how I feel about it all just yet. I thought all of T's complaining last year were from the curriculum we were using, but he still does it. Sigh! No curriculum is perfect! We started off in Unit 104, but already I see some big gaps in what he can/ cannot do. Some of it is expected, but some he just plain forgot because he wasn't using it, which is why we have gone with a Spiral approach with him. Time will tell! Although, some of it is (I think) a lack of confidence as just before I took this shot, he proclaimed a big, Yay! I got it! and the rest of our time was smooth sailing.
To end our week we played a super simple and FUN game laid out in the manual for History. I'll just say that Baby Z and I ended up in jail pretty much every game we played, while T made it to the King's court!