Colonial Week and American Revolution Week

We spent the last two weeks learning a little bit more about the Colonial period in America and the conditions that led to the Revolutionary War.

We did most of the projects in Evan Moor's History Pockets for Colonial America and the American Revolution.

Here are some photos of Andrew's books:

And some from Eddie's books:

We had fun doing some Colonial activities.  First the boys made ink and wrote on parchment with a quill from the kits we bought in Jamestown.  It was much harder to write with the ink and quill than they thought.

Then, we made butter from whipping cream.  We poured some in baby food jars and shook it until it turned into butter.  Then we melted it and put it on some popcorn for a lovely afternoon snack.

Here are some pictures of them playing a memory game they made about Colonial occupations and then one with the paper powder horns they decorated.  Ali stayed with us one day because she was on spring break from school, so she made a powder horn, too.

We spent most of the week on history, but we did do a little math- some multiplication practice and some fraction work.  And we did a music project and a language arts project from Pinterest, and Eddie and I played a mean game of Scrabble.  Andrew and I played some close games of Uno, and Ali and I played a round of Lego Minotaurus.  Also, the kids have been watching the PBS series Liberty's Kids, and they really like it.  They can't wait for the next disc to arrive from Netflix!

Edited to add the books we read aloud:  The Thirteen Colonies by Gail Sakuri, Can't You Make them Behave, King George? by Jean Fritz, The Boston Tea Party by Allison Stark Draper, and Sam the Minuteman by  Nathaniel Benchley. We are still reading Ben & Me by Robert Lawson- with only a couple more chapters to go.

Eddie read Who Was Ben Franklin? by Dennis Brindell Fradin and Andrew read Meet George Washington by Joan Heilbroner, and they wrote very short book reports on them.

Eddie's Lightsaber Creation

Eddie made a lightsaber by taping a test tube to a little flashlight with a piece of green tissue paper over the light.  It's pretty cool.

My lastest craze

I've been making a lot of "lettuce wraps" lately.  I make up a chicken or tuna salad with whatever veggies I have on hand, a little mayo, a little dijon or brown mustard, maybe some pickles chopped up or olives.  Then I plop some in some Romaine leaves, roll them up a bit and chow down.  So good.

Much better this time

The past two weeks have gone pretty smoothly, I must say.  The boys are still being very loving and helpful with the baby.  We've been enjoying the beautiful weather and taking lots of walks.  School has been taking a little longer because we now have lots more breaks to take care of the baby.  She is such a sweetie, though.  She has been falling asleep on the couch with us as we do read alouds, and sitting patiently on my lap or in the bouncy chair when we do history.

I decided to update today, because for the next two weeks, we will be doing a more in depth study of the early American colonies, the American Revolution and the beginnings of the United States of America.  Our regularly scheduled programming will be resumed after this unit study.

Language Arts:

We've read more about subject/verb agreement in Sentence Island, and looked at examples of that agreement on the whiteboard.  We've done some more 4 level sentence analysis from Practice Island.  We reviewed our lists of linking verbs, subject and object pronouns, and prepositions.

The favorite things we did in LA, were synonym rolls and Angry Verbs, both of which I elaborated upon in my Pinterest post.

We've reviewed old poems and started learning The Sun Just Had a Nasty Day by Denise Rodgers.

We finished The Jungle Book and have started The King's Shadow for read aloud.  They are still reading Ribsy for book club.  And, we are still listening to Inkspell in the car- we are on disc 8 now.

Last week's spelling was a 20 word review list from previous lessons.  This week was words with silent gh like caught and thorough.

We did upper case H and I in handwriting.

Math:

The boys did some more pages in the Kumon Multiplication book, and I started giving them timed tests on their multiplication facts.  They did fine on the first timed test, but then developed attitude problems, and didn't do so well on the 2nd through 4th tests so far.  I'm keeping this up, though, because it's making us all see just which math facts they don't have memorized.

I decided to ease us back into the multiple digit multiplication, so I started having them do 1-2 problems on a whiteboard.  Once they were comfortable with that, I made sheets with 6 problems on them, like this:

Once they were comfortable with that, I moved them back to the worksheets from MUS.  They were able to do them without TOO much whining.  Here's Andrew's test from Lesson 24:

We've now moved on to Lesson 25 which is 3 digit numbers multiplied by 2 digit numbers, with some rounding and estimating thrown in.

History:

We read some stories from Children of the Dragon: Selected Tales from Vietnam by Sherry Garland.

We did SOTW lessons on wars in the colonies of North America and we started learning about the colonists rebellion against English taxes and English armies.  We learned about the assembly of colonial leaders who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Science:

Science has been kind of light this past couple of weeks, but that's okay, since we've gone way beyond my expectations for the year.  We finished up reading all the parts we had left in Chemistry: Getting a Big Reaction.  Then I had them do a review page on what they know about atoms and molecules.

French:

We reviewed lots of the words we know, and played some more of the computer games from French in 10 Mins. a Day.

Latin:

We learned nunc aut nuquam and reviewed all our other words and phrases.  I like how they are starting to notice Latin being used everywhere around them.  We watched Hugo the other night, and there was a logo with Infinitum Nihil written on it, and the boys could tell me what it meant.  

Music:

They practiced "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie" and started learning "When the Saints Go Marching In" on the recorder.  We read about Ludwig von Beethoven and listened to some of his music.

Health:

We discussed the nervous system and ways to keep your head and spinal column safe.

P.E.

We did make it to another Swim & Gym.  This time was ultimate Frisbee!  We also have been taking long walks and doing some calisthenics at home.

Art:

We did lesson 15 in Artistic Pursuits, which was about contour drawing.  The boys had to pick a toy and try to draw the outline of it while only looking at the toy and not the paper.  I think they did pretty well at this:

I like how Andrew added details!