Saturday, February 19, 2011

Our Week: Russia, Mars, and Playing Outside

I'm really late getting this week's report written. It's been a busy couple days.

Monday was Valentine's Day so we read the books we didn't get to last week and did some fun things in addition to regular school. It was so nice that we sat outside to do some of our reading. I already posted about what we did here.


Three Rs

Everyone is moving along well in all subjects and there's nothing too exciting to report. In cursive, Caleigh got to z this week so she's learned all the lowercase letters. Now we'll work more on connecting them before going on to capital letters. In reading, Molly learned about silent e words even though she told me she already knew it from asking me about the word, home, once. So I guess I can say we practiced reading silent e words.


History

We read about the Rus warriors' attempt to conquer Constantinople and why they were unsuccessful. We also learned about Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible.
We expanded on this subject by doing a whole unit study on Russia, which I'll be posting about soon.


Science

We read some additonal books about Mars.
Colin made Mars rovers like the ones we read about from Legos.

Caleigh built a volcano from salt dough to represent Olympus Mons, the biggest known volcano in our solar system.

Then we erupted it.






The weather was great this week and the kids have been able to play outside some every day.

We met Colin's robot club group at a park Tuesday afternoon. Right now we're having them work one week and then play the next week, which has really helped to cut down on them asking to play while they're supposed to be programming. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that the stuff they're doing is more fun than when they were preparing for competition.

On Friday, we went to our homeschool group's park day. We ended up staying for 3 1/2 hours. It was the warmest day of the week and the kids had a great time playing. Unfortunately, I'm out of practice and forgot sunscreen. The kids all came home with pink cheeks. Luckily, it wasn't too bad and it's already starting to fade. I can't say the same for my arms, which got the worst of the sunburn.

3 comments:

Phyllis said...

What a lovely week you had. I love all the sweet family time you have, especially the Valentine's Day dinner. So sweet. Looks like you were very active outside the home, too, with lots of friends. A lovely mix. I am interested in hearing about your Russia unit as we are going to be doing a week on that in a couple of weeks.

MissMOE said...

Love any subject that includes legos! Looks like a great week--thanks for sharing it.

schmobes said...

SUNBURN! I wish it was that warm here! Love the LEGO rover is awesome, as is the volcano. I have been trying to figure out what to make ours out of after the failure of our paper mache.