Here's some of our home schooling highlights.
Mid Autumn Festival was coming so we decorated the house with lanterns. We decorated many of the lanterns ourselves, through painting and colouring, and tried out a number of different styles of lantern.
We finished the ancient tale of Gilgamesh this week. Near the end of it the Hero is told story of a flood which covered the entire world. MsC was quick to ask if this was the same story as the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible, so we read Noah's Ark too.
We talked about what was similar and different between the two stories. In each story a giant ark is built to save the animals and it comes to rest at the top of the mountain as the waters go down, but the builders have different names and it rains for different periods of time in the two stories. We also looked on the map and saw how both stories originate from similar parts of the world.
MsC was very helpful this week. She has been helping MsE with her math work and reading books to her sisters. The Littles have been learning their vowel sounds, so I had printed off a short story book of the internet to highlight vowel sounds.
After MsC spotted it she wrote her own story book all by herself on the computer for the girls. She was very careful to select words with the correct short vowel sounds that the girls are working on. It's got pictures too and everyone got a copy to colour in. It goes like this:
My Little Vowel Pets
My pet a-a-alligator is a-a-amazing!
My pet e-e-elephant is e-e-elegant.
My pet i-i-iguana is so i-i-interesting.
My pet o-o-ostrich is so o-o-obsessing.
My pet u-u-urchin is so u-u-unbelievable.
Seeing MsC write a little book turned MsE onto writing this week too. She's written 2 books so far. The first was My Family. She included real photos of us in her book. I love that she included our Helper, Auntie Hazel, in the family too. Her second book was My Animal Book. I typed it, but she made it up all on her own, including the sentence format. I was very impressed with her descriptive words. She's got a whole book of animals in the format below.
For some extra math, I pulled out all our jewels and sea shells. The little girls pretend that the tray is the Ocean and have little sea creatures to play with in it too. I called a little figurine a Pirate and told MsE and MsI that the Pirate would trade them an enchanted sea shell for every 10 jewels that they put my treasure chest. They were only allowed to put 10 jewels at a time in the tea-cup treasure chest.
After most of the jewels had been traded with the pirate, MsI counted her seashells by 10s to figure out how many jewels the pirate had and we talked about how counting by 10s is a lot faster than counting by ones. MsC got in some extra math by practicing her times tables playing pass with me at the basketball court.
We're not getting in as many adventures as we once did, and so MsC is learning to incorporate more movement in to her school work. She drew a crowd of admirers at the playground reading on the bars, because she really was reading upside down.
