Week 2 March

It's so nice Spring is in the air. The kids were so excited to see our pussy willows bloom soon the flowers!!!!!

We're studying Ireland,St Patrick,owls (fiar Owl moon) and still the Little House Series. We'll be dissecting Owl pellets as soon as the kits arrive. Glad Chris is looking forward to the pellets. We did them with Ike and Nadia yuck!
Here is a playlist I created for owls
Click here to view playlist



and another playlist I created for the movie Patrick and other St Patrick's day videos. LOVE this movie it's such an eye opener about who Patrick was.
Click here for Playlist




Some crafts and cooking we did.



Irish stew,interesting titbit about it. We found out the reason why the Irish stewed a lot was they were hiding the meat under the vegetables so the tax collectors wouldn't see all the meat. Apparently if you were rich enough to cook with meat,you had to pay more taxes. Also our normal cornbeef and cabbage St Pat meal is an American dish. LOL Irish immigrants mixing with Russians in America is how that dish came about.



Planting our shamrocks.

Trying to blog more about our days, hopefully I will. LOL (Shaking our homemade butter above.)
We are using eclectic bit of curriculum right now. We usually do bible together, Maxwell's bible story. I had a set of them when I was a child and enjoyed them. Then first language lessons, poetry, scripture memorization, then reading a chapter-book together. Right now the book we are reading is Little House in the Big Woods.
We use our chapter books as a jump off for more thorough research. So from The Little House in the Woods book we have studied a number of different mammals, Andrew Johnson, Georgia O'keefe, Wisconsin, Pioneers and more.
Sebastian on his own is doing Sonlight's Introduction to American History part 1. He usually asks me about things he's interested in, and we do research on them using the web and the library. For Ollie and Francesca we're using Sonlight's "Explore God's World" and "Introduction to the World Cultures". I'm also using Waldorf (Enki LOVE it!!!) methods to introduce letters to Ollie.
Here we are making homemade butter. Yum!

Corsets were mentioned in little house and the kids were curious so we watched this video on them. They were horrified! LOL They also thought it was horrible the rules for Sundays back then,no moving,no smiling,cold food etc.. So we talked about cultural Christianity vs real Christianity.


One thing I really like about homeschooling and having access to the web is pretty much instant access to information. We watch a lot of little videos. Not so much to teach, but more to pique their interest.
Our school day is usually much longer then I plan because of all the questions they ask. We try to jump off and follow their interests.
For instance Ollie right now is big on tracing. He spends most of the day tracing different images. What a great way to work on small motor skills and I never have to say finish that paper.

I've been using this http://www.abcteach.com/free/b/book_littlehouse_bigwoods.pdf for study questions.
Francesca keeps asking for a pioneer dress so I ordered off a pattern today. I think I'm going to involve Nadia in the making of it. I keep telling her how easy it is to make your own clothes but she feels overwhelmed by it. I think she would enjoy creating her own. I used to sew a ton of clothes. It was a great creative outlet.
We're also learning how to square dance
http://www.videosquaredancelessons.com/lessons/m01a.htm

I've already taught Francesca how to knit. She taught Ollie how to finger knit. They made blankets and pillows for Francesca's "little house". We found a beautiful old doll house at the thrift store. We made little house on the prairie dolls for it. We picked from here and there to create ours.
We've enjoyed some Laura's music thanks to youtube






We watch this nature series and other animals mentioned in little house in the big Woods.

Because Little house in the woods took place in Wisconsin. We're studying Wisconsin. One of the famous persons from Wisconsin is Georgia O'keeffe.
We watched this video,very interesting.



We studied Robins
great site we checked out
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Robin/videos

Here are some unedited images I took nothing special but you can see some of the things we do.

lapbook

Georgia O'keeffe was known for her large Flower Paintings so we did some of our own.
Of course flowers weren't up Sebastian's alley so imitating O'keeffe's style he painted Ollie's ear as a close up paying close attention to shapes. He is such a crack up!

Some of our art work from the last couple of months. We do a lot of paper arts,modeling and painting.