Tour 1 Week 10

 

I may have gone a little overboard with the Christmas and Advent themed books this year.  But that doesn't look like an abnormally large stack of books, you might be thinking.  

I have 55 more on hold at the library. Fifty-five. 

It's a problem. 

Unless it works out as I hope and the books I've requested become available at a steady trickle over the course of the Christmas Season. In that case, I'm a genius. What's more likely, however, is that I will become bombarded by a sudden influx of Book Availability and will have more library books in my home than I can be trusted to keep track of. 

I blame the Pandemic. Like most people these days, our regular activities have been cancelled or moved online. Sure, I already home schooled, but that previously included a lot more busyness.  Homeschool co-op and religious ed classes and science classes and community college classes and sacrament prep meetings and volunteer work and fencing practice and dogsitting and...you get the point.  

Now we have time. Time for morning snuggles and reading just one more story. Time to just sit and look at beautiful books and figure out the story from the pictures when it's still too hard to read it all on our own. 

I'm choosing to see the Silver Linings of this whole Pandemic Experience. 

We have a handful of books that gets brought out every year with the Christmas decorations, along with a few I might think to check out from the library before everyone else beats me to it. And every year I quickly tire of reading that same handful of books. Recently I found myself lost in all of the excellent reading lists that harder-working, homeschooling moms put together, which caused me to spend time putting library books on hold like it was my job.  

Although - it kind of is...

You may have figured out by now that I have a "Learn Everything Through Literature" approach to home education.  Obviously, we do more than just read good books, but I've seen the results of raising readers so I continue to make it a priority.  

This week we learned about the sewing machine, the California Gold Rush, the Plains Wars, the Dred Scott decision and the Pony Express. And I finally a got a new whiteboard! And my husband hung it up for me the first time I asked him to!  

It's the little things in life.

Saint Rose Duchesne is the saint we'll be learning about for the next few weeks. We'll continue to study Beethoven for our composer but will change our art studies to Pioneer Quilts.

This week's art project was practicing and learning about the color wheel. I realize that's hard to see on the very busy fruit-patterned table cloth I used. It was all I could find. 

Next week we'll use what we learned about color to create our quilt blocks. I'm planning to supplement the lesson with some sewing machine basics for all the boys since we're doing this project at home anyway. Rather than do the project on paper, as the book calls for, we're going to sew fabric quilt blocks. 

See? Silver Linings. 

We learned about key geographical features of the Mid-Atlantic States and added them to our geography notebooks. Last week I decided to create geography notebooks instead of the lapbooks. It seemed more practical to me to have all the information in an interactive notebook rather than have six different lapbooks (per kid) lost in my house and probably never touched again. 

 

Our geography lesson led to a spontaneous family movie night watching "Sully," which depicts the true story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger's emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009.  You can't ever go wrong with a Tom Hanks movie.

Our science adventures in zoology moved to the forest biome in Australia. We learned about the forest habitat, marsupials, Koalas and Rabbits. 

That was our week!  College Boy is heading in to his final week of the semester and the rest of us will probably continue for two more weeks before taking an extended break for Christmas. 

Resources we used this week:

Books:

• Catholic Schoolhouse Tour Guide and Art Book
• Sassafras Science Adventures Zoology
• Ride On Will Cody!
• The Quiltmaker's Gift
• What Was the Gold Rush?
• Beethoven for Kids
• Ludwig Beethoven and the Chiming Tower Bells
• Baby Koala
• The Life Cycle of a Koala
• Rabbits and Raindrops
• The Little Rabbit
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Little House in the Big Woods 
• Caddie Woodlawn

Other Resources:

• Catholic Schoolhouse Blog (lapbook printables)
• Brainpop
• US History for Kids
• PBS Learning Media
• Catholic Brain (Advent Program)

I hope you're staying safe and enjoying this season of Advent!

~ Dori