Homeschool Discoveries

This week was definitely a little more on the out-of-the ordinary side.  Tony was gone from Sunday through Wednesday morning for a work trip.  Then Sunday night baby J started running a fever, causing a few changes to our plans.  Between the fever and teething, J did not sleep well those nights Tony was gone.  I was pretty tired, but luckily coffee was my friend and I made it through.

Here are a few highlights from our week:

Art Museum Trip (Top Row):  On Sunday afternoon we went to Family Day at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The MIA’s monthly family days feature hands-on activities revolving around a specific theme.  This month’s theme was “Sky”.  The kids made sun catchers and kites and watched a short planetarium show in a mobile planetarium brought to the MIA from the Bell Museum of Natural History.   One highlight for the boys was a display of guns we spotted while on the way to one of the activities.  They were excited to see some muskets that are probably a little bit like some of the guns we’ve been reading about in our American History studies!

Lots of Math (Middle Row & Bottom Left): We had a very “mathy” week here.   Most of the lessons on the schedule for Miss M (3rd grade)  in Right Start C were involving fractions, so I declared a “Fraction Fun Day” on Wednesday.  You can read more about that in this post.   Mr. E  (Kindergarten) loves fractions too.  I was amazed on Monday when he started answering the questions I was asking Miss M as a part of her math lesson!  So, instead of his regularly-scheduled math lessons, I went over a lot of the same material on fractions as I was covering with Miss M, but in a bit less depth.  He was so proud of himself for assembling the whole fraction chart on his own!  He also did lesson 36 in R.S. level B (the main highlight of that lesson was playing addition war).

Lots of math card games were played at our house this week.  Besides the Addition War that I played with Mr. E, I played the fraction games “One” and “Fraction War” with both of the older kids.  Mr. E and Mr. K (Pre-K, age 3.5) even played regular War with number cards together!  Miss M was grasping concepts quickly this week, and somehow we flew through the content of seven lessons (137-144) this week!  We didn’t do all the multiplication practice associated with these lessons, but that will come.   I told Miss M I wanted her to do 15 minutes of multiplication practice each day. She’s not super fast at it yet, but that amount of time is just right to help her not get too stressed out about finishing a certain # of problems.

Spelling (Bottom Right): Miss M finished lesson 13 in Logic of English, while Mr. E started lesson 3 (though we only got through the first section of the lesson – we didn’t do any spelling dictation this week).   We played a phonogram game all together on Thursday — a modified version of the LOE game “Rotten Egg” — everyone had their own bag of phonograms.   🙂

Other stuff I didn’t take pictures of:

• History: We finished up a couple read-alouds from the Colonial/French and Indian Wars period (Sign of the Beaver and The Matchlock Gun), and started reading the next book in the American Story series by the Maestros covering the Revolutionary War (Liberty or Death).  Miss M read a number of books about this next topic from our “book basket”, and we also started watching the animated series “Liberty’s Kids” that takes place during the Revolutionary War.  Episodes are available on youtube, and we watched the first four of them.
• Science: We didn’t do a lot of science this week other than Miss M completing one more chapter of Sasafrass Science Zoology, and the boys enjoying a few more library books about space.
• Mr E  started reading set 4 of BOB books as well as a few other readers.  Check out my post from earlier this week about books for new readers if you are looking for easy reader book ideas.

On Thursday afternoon/evening we had another fun adventure:

After checking out one of my favorite regular book sales (a semi-annual library sale in a suburb 20 minute from home), we went to the Minnesota Children’s museum to see two new exhibits (The Amazing Castle and Ball-O-Rama), and a special demonstration by The Kinetic King — a guy you may have seen on America’s Got Talent if you were watching in the summer of 2011.  He does “Kinetic Sculptures” that “explode” in a matter of seconds.  It’s pretty amazing to watch thousands of craft sticks flipping up in the air in sequence!  After our museum exploration we had a late dinner next door at Mickey’s Diner — a well-known local establishment.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap Up!