Saturday, December 07, 2013

Weekly Wrap-up: break from texts, but not from learning

We are taking a break from our regular schedule and books for the whole month of December, but that does not mean that we are taking a break from learning.

Bible

During the month of December Anna and I are attempting to memorize the part of the Christmas story that can be found in the Bible in the book of Luke, chapter 2 verses 1-14. We were a little late starting but we're doing okay. This week we managed to memorize verses 1-3. We are using Scripture Typer to help us. We started with verse one on its own. When we had that one memorized we started on verse two. When we had verse two memorized we put verse one and two together and deleted them as individual verses. Then we started working on verse three while still reviewing verses 1-2. We will continue this process throughout the month and hopefully memorize the whole passage by the end of the month, if not before.

Art

Lots of different art activities happened this week. Here's a sampling of some of it:

Completed following the steps on the How to Draw Baby Jesus page at Art for Kids.

This one was done using the Doodle app on her IPad and following the Step by Step Drawing Lessons to draw a drum

Paper lanterns made using the How to Make a Paper Lantern Wiki and the How to Make Paper Lantern With 2 Copy Papers YouTube video

Language Arts

We've had fun completing Christmas themed worksheets of all kinds from education.com. We did a reading comprehension exercise, a choose the correct spelling activity, an alphabetizing exercise, a word search, and an unscramble the words activity. Anna was getting a little frustrated with unscrambling the words so I suggested we use scrabble tiles to help and she really enjoyed that.

We are doing the Adventures in Odessey Advent activities, which include listening to, and discussing, an audio program most days. Along with that we have been watching and discussing, a different Christmas/winter themed movie most days. So far we've watched Frozen, Golden Winter, Elf, Christmas Comes to Canaan, Home Alone 1, The Town Christmas Forgot, Wind at My Back Christmas, and An Avonlea Christmas.

Math

Christmas themed work sheets from education.com were also used for Math. Anna struggled a bit with a word problem sheet but it made me realize that I should be doing more of these with her. Once she recovered from the frustration of not immediately understanding what she should do she did good with it. She had no problem with the Sudoku game sheet. Anna got some practice with money values through counting her money and going to the store and buying something herself. She was pretty proud of that. :-) we also covered some fractions as we did some baking and discussed 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 cups and teaspoons.

Music

We have been working through a 5 Days of Christmas Carols Unit Study and really enjoying it. We're sad that is finished. I'm thinking we're going to continue on with doing a Christmas song a day ourselves for the rest of the month. The unit study covered Carol of the Bells, Away in a Manger, The Little Drummer Boy, Angels We Have Heard on High, and Come oh Come Emmanual. We learned about one song each day and listened to a number of different versions of the songs, printed out the lyrics, and tried singing them ourselves. It was great fun!

Social Studies

Using a couple of different resources - The Christmas Around the World Unit Study and the Online Interactive World Advent Calendar 2013 - we are learning about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. Anna loves finding each place on our wall map and finding the flag for each country on the border around our wall map before we add a flag ornament to a house plant that we are decorating as we do this study. We have also been making ornaments, crafts, and baking suggested by information about the different countries. So far we've covered Malta, New Zealand, China, Wales, Japan, Russia, and Great Britian.

 

And that is the learning that has taken place during our break this week. :-)

 

Weekly Wrap-up Posts inspired by Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap-up Meme. Check out her wrap-up for this week and scroll down to see the links to check out weekly wrap-ups from others.