Weekly Wrap Up, Week 3 – Pirates, Dinosaurs and Fall!

Did I REALLY say that I was going to make this week’s wrap up more.. brief?? Because I’m not really sure I can! We did so many fun things this week, learned so much, and there’s quite a bit to talk about!

Week 3 really did not start off well. At all. I was quite worried  the whole week would go that way, but by mid-week things picked up and we actually ended on a pretty good note. (Thank you, God, for that sweet blessing!) We didn’t get everything on my lesson plan done, but that’s mostly because I’m trying to help Princess double up on math and finish sooner. And also because Drama Queen hit a wall a couple of times and ended up breaking one lesson across 2 days. I may need to adjust a little, it’s no big deal. The girls and I did decide to make a change from last week and do history 3 days a week instead of 2, and spend two weeks on a science chapter instead of 1. We decided that part of the point of doing school the way we’re doing it this year is to enjoy it more and do more fun stuff, to learn it and remember it better. So that’s what we’re doing.

Monday:

Monday was bad, bad, bad. Icky poo. I had a headache, I didn’t feel well, we got a late start. Just all around bad. At one point mid-afternoon I “abandoned ship” and told the kids that we were going to celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day (I know, it was the day before, but we don’t do school on Sunday’s, right?!) The kids dressed up like pirates and we put on a Scooby Doo pirate movie. The rest of the day was amazingly better. HUH. Imagine that. (Thank you, Netflix.)

Monday was supposed to be History but I was so out of it, we did Science. Since we decided to slow science down a bit we spent the day catching up on our notebooking for Chapter 2 (the Sun.)

Tuesday:

I was really hoping Tuesday would go more smoothly. It kinda did.. and then it really didn’t. We did, however, print some pictures and make a Fruits of the Spirit wall (Galatians 5:22-23 is our weekly memory verse.) I browsed online for some free printable things, and ended up just printing some pictures and making our own.

You may be wondering about Mr. Obedient Orange out there to the side. He’s Self-Controlled Strawberry’s friend. They work together. ;0)

Since we did Science on Monday, we did History on Tuesday. And since we didn’t finish the last lesson from the previous week, and since we were behind on our day, we read Lesson 6, Dinosaurs, together on my bed after supper. That was actually kind of fun. One of the projects in the book suggested googling modern day dinosaur sightings just to see what we could find. We had so much fun watching videos and looking at pictures of the Loch Ness Monster that I let the kids stay up entirely too late!

Wednesday

For some reason, on Wednesday I woke up reeeeally early. It was quite nice, though, having some time before the kids woke up to sit in the half dark and listen to worship music. Because of that we got a fairly decent start on our school day. We had double celebrations on Wednesday – See You At The Pole and The First Day of Autumn (well, unless your calendar said it was Thursday, I hear there was a great calendar confusion.) ;0) We started our day with our usual prayer and we prayed for the leaders of our nation, state and local government. We followed that with the Pledge of Allegiance and a short discussion about being more involved in our local government and elections coming up.

To celebrate the onset of fall, we cut out and colored leaves to decorate the wall around our calendar. Next week we’ll add a few more things to complete our school room fall decorating.

Wednesday was history and we couldn’t help spending more time on dinosaurs so we spent a long time reading up on the connections between dinosaurs and dragons. It was quite interesting! We eventually did get around to our two lessons for the day which were about the Sumerians and the Tower of Babel. Did you know that the Sumerians were very well advanced for their time? They had running water, toilets, writing and libraries! They may even be the civilization that invented the wheel. Abram was from the city of Ur, in Sumer, so when God called him to leave his homeland into a land that God would show him, God was calling him to make quite a lifestyle change! Oh, the faith!

Thursday

Thursday I woke up even earlier!! This time I didn’t turn on any music, I just sat down in the half dark, read my bible, prayed, blogged, checked comments.. in the QUIET. Except for the chirping birds and crickets outside the window screen, the house was silent. AND I LOVED IT. We got off to a good start on Thursday, but not before the kids watched Sid the Science kid. Prompted by the episode about reversible change, the kids asked to make popsicles. Uncharacteristically, I felt spontaneous and I agreed. We rarely ever make kool-aid but I almost always have a package in the pantry, so on our mid-morning break we assembled our popsicles and popped them in the freezer to eat on our mid-afternoon snack break.

Thursday was science again, we did a couple of mini projects and completed our sun collages. The instructions said “cut sun pictures out of magazines” — do you know how hard it is to find pictures of the sun in magazines? It not exceptionally photo-friendly. We couldn’t even find illustrated pictures, like the big sun on the box of Raisin Bran. We ended up using mostly sunny pictures of kids playing outside. Yup!

Friday

I slept in “late.” BUMMER. I missed that early morning quiet, and earned myself a headache to boot. =\ Despite slipping in a sneaky nap while Drama Queen read to me out of her McGuffey reader (can I keep reading Momma?.. Sure hon, I’ll lay here and listen).. we still got in all our subjects. It’s all good.

Friday was history again, which came with some mapwork. Even Little Prince colored a map. Oh! And while I was flipping back to the answers section of the history book, I discovered a chart of scripture references, chapters that correspond with each lesson (where there is one) so that we could line up our bible studies with our history lessons. JUST what I needed! The lesson days that don’t have corresponding scripture passages could easily be filled with other bible passages. I was excited to find that list!

In other news:

This week we also decided to take the plunge and start up a blog for Princess to use for school purposes. I found this website of a homeschool co-op blogging class, and you can participate, too! Blogging 2 Learn. In addition to using the blog for writing assignments, we’re going to be following along with those lessons to an extent. Princess would love to find other homeschooling pre-teen girls with blogs, so if you know of any…?

So how about y’all? How did your week go? I cannot believe how much we got done in spite of difficult days, headaches and allergies and whatnot. God was good to us this week.

This post is happily linked to Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.