A Short Week

a weekly wrap-up...

It is definitely not Friday, but we are wrapping up the week a bit early to enjoy the unofficial end of summer.

A little of what has been happening in our homeschool this week:

1. A beautiful sunrise greeted me one morning as I was outside trying to capture the glow of dawn on our backyard flowers, before we started school for the day.

2a-c. The children are pretty familiar with Edgar Degas, the French Artist. From previous studies and the Art Memo game we love, they know some of his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. With it being a short week, I decided to do a short lesson on Degas. There was no formal picture study, though we did look at Dancers in Blue, and The Race Track; Amateur Jockeys near a Carriage.  We read through the portion on Degas in Art Treasury and tried our hands at the art project from pages 62-63. I altered the project slightly by using craypas. With their oil like quality, the colors were richer and easily blended for dynamic effects. Also, I didn't require dancers as the subject. I simply asked the children to draw a person in movement. Only one child drew a dancer. The others chose a football quarterback, a fire jumper, and a cowboy. Afterward, I read Degas and the Little Dancer: A Story about Edgar Degas, by Laurence Anholt, which is a fun little story.

3. This is our kindergartner's handwriting lesson one day.  He added the apples to the tree.  We are looking forward to apple picking again soon.

4. Part of our Travel the World studies, this is a North American Native American art activity from Geography Through Art.

5. My oldest daughter's geography lesson using Paddle to the Sea.  We will alternate between the geography and IEW writing course which uses the same books.

6. History - We are finally into The Story of the World, Volume 4. We only completed chapter one this week. It was about Great Britain and its vast empire during Queen Victoria's reign. Our children learned the phrase "The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire," and showed it on a map. There was also a section about an uprising of Hindus and Muslims in India against the British which we read. Our daughters completed the outlines and maps as well as participated in discussions after each reading. Our oldest son, who is in eighth grade, read and outlined pages 368-369 from The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, read and discussed Usborne History of Britain: Victorians, and learned about Hinduism from pages 12-23 in The Usborne Encyclopedia of World Religions.

7. A group photograph of the children from our field trip to the science museum to see the Dead Sea Scrolls.

8. My oldest reading about buffalo.  This week, the science co-op class I teach was on grasslands, and I had the extra books about the house which he took to reading.

9. Just outside our front door, a spider has been constructing a web almost every night.  In the morning, we go out and gaze on it.  This morning a bug was caught - nature observations in our own front yard!

10. The intense Stratego game we played - one of our favorites

11. A reading game we play with our youngest - a few sets of the alphabet with all the vowels on orange cards





We are off on a labor day weekend adventure!  Or, at least, a few days off from our regular school days, but as we all know, learning happens everywhere!