Saturday, February 19, 2011

Weekly Wrap-Up Feb 14-18th

Life was pretty ho-hum this week as far as school went. I have been put on a new medicine and it has totally drained me. We still did what we needed to do but it didn't have the usual pizazz. It happens.

Valentines Day came and went. Mike and I had a mini celebration over the weekend so other than a really nice dinner of Black Bean and Rice Burgers and stuffed mushrooms we didn't do anything else. Jakob had made each of us a card and Hazel spent the day wishing everyone she saw or talked to on the phone a Happy "Valintimes" Day! I made the kids French toast for Breakfast and sprinkled it with powdered sugar and they were ecstatic.

This week we studied the Iroquois Nation. We looked at how different their houses were from the Cherokee and the similarities in their modes of transportation. This week's stories involved ranged from frisky tales of Raccoons to How the Big Dipper Came to be in the sky. We looked at how the Native Americans would draw symbols to represent words and saw how this was a similar writing method to the Ancient Egyptians.

I was hoping to get to the Pequot Museum in Connecticut this week but there was an issue with the passes so we weren't able to go. There is a Native American display at our local Museum of Natural History so we may try to get there next week when it rains. I had planned for our big craft to be stringing wooden beads in patterns but a sewing book came in for Jakob at the Library and he has been consumed with a special project ever since.


We really began to focus on reading the music this week and noticing where the notes rested on the staff. We also worked on recognizing when a note had 1/2, whole, and 2 counts. We played all of our songs only by sheet music this week which was fun and challenging for the both of us.

Jakob conducted his own science experiment this week with a fleece shirt and found that his shirt was "strong enough" to keep water from coming through. Which led to a short talk about waterproofing, wetsuits, and "Oh yeah! I wanted to learn how to surf! Can I do THAT this summer?"

Since we didn't make it to the Museum this week (which was also suppose to double as a Scouts requirement) Jakob browsed through the history books of Pawtucket that the Librarian had sent us home with and picked out a few fun facts. This brought about a little lesson in gleaning information from books which he works on each week researching facts about various states, but this was a little different and he found he had to pay just a little more attention than normal because there were not the usual "key words" to look for.

We worked more with block crayons this week discovering how they can be manipulated to make pictures. Its much harder than it looks and definitely takes concentration. Which is also why I choose for it to be our before breakfast activity many days. It gets both kids who wake up on two very different frequencies a chance to come together and start on the same page.... sometimes.




A winning activity with Hazel this week was painting cookies. I got the ideas from this post by Artful Parent. Because I used whole wheat flour our cookies were already brown so we accomplished more "shading" than actual coloring. This was a good exercise for Hazel to focus on filling in areas completely with color and working on her fine motor skills. And make cookies... that's the main thing right?

Such serious work...
at least there's a pause for a smile

Yum!

The cookies were a recipe we had made before came from a kids cooking book called
Cooking Fun by Rae Grant.
An almost daily activity here is Hazel washing eggshells. I put them in our compost and also crush them as added nutrients to our seed starting containers. She likes to clean them for me and they are definitely a test of mental and physical strength as she tries her best to clean them without cracking them further. Of course after they dry she smashes them to bits and sweeps them into whichever container we are working this week. Simple but so much fun.


Other than that we spent the week getting WAY to excited about 40 degree weather and played outside with our chalk, scooters, lots of mud puddles, and started "warming" our dirt for our seeds to be planted soon. (This basically means we took the dirt out of the bag and placed in in our seedling containers...)

Now to enjoy some more of this sunshine and the 3 day weekend to come!

1 comment:

MissMOE said...

I love the artwork--exspecially the surfers. Looks like a great week.

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