{Beyond Little Hearts Unit 21, Little Hearts Unit 4, Little Hands Unit 3 & 4}
We’re now doing 4 days per week of Heart of Dakota and one day of our homeschool co-op. We’ve had three co-ops so far, and we are really enjoying our current semester! It’s such a WONDERFUL group of moms and kids!
Alex is taking:
History Through Music, Solar System, Foods & Nutrition, Gym
Max is taking: Sign Language, Solar System, Foods & Nutrition, Gym
I asked them separately, and they chose almost exactly the same schedule! They are LOVING their foods and nutrition class! The teacher lives on a farm, and she brings fruits and veggies from the farm each week. They’ve done a tomato taste test, talked about the vitamins and minerals in different produce items, learned about ‘eating the rainbow’ each day, made a rainbow fruit salad, and made a rainbow salsa with homemade cinnamon tortilla chips. The kids are doing the slicing and measuring with guidance from the teacher, and they are truly enjoying themselves!
Jensyn is in the preschool class, where they sing songs, do a Five In A Row story and character lesson, do a craft, have gym class, and do a show and tell/activity hour all based on the weekly theme. Here’s Jensyn with a few of her preschool friends after we made a fruit salad together on “Fruit of the Spirit” day.
I’m in a mom’s prayer group, helping in a jr. high/high school archaeology class, teaching a Fun In The Fifty States class, and leading the preschool show & tell/activity hour. (Here are the ‘big kids’ in the hands-on archaeology class. They’re using crushed berries to make paint.)
We also had a homeschool day at our local library this month. It’s a new program they are hoping to get going. The theme this month was architecture. They built Jenga towers, read a fictional book about building bridges, and made structures with toothpicks and marshmallows. My kids all had a great time! (Jensyn was here, too – somehow I didn’t get a picture of her!)
Max with his friend Xander (who is also a part of our co-op)….
Alex…
We also had a fun field trip to an apple orchard with our co-op friends!
Now, on to the ‘meat’ of our homeschool…
(Alex, age 7)
As you can see, we haven’t made a whole lot of progress through the guide since the last update. In 13 school days (including 3 co-op days and a field trip, so 9 days at home), we’ve done only one unit in Beyond. Whoops! We’ve been working on getting Alex settled into a good routine in some other areas, so we’ve made slower progress than we normally would. It’s all right – I don’t mind, as long as he’s learning. We can stretch this guide a little longer if needed.
Teaching Textbook seems to be a great fit! We finished Singapore 1B, and Alex has completed eight or nine lessons in TT3. He is excited to do math again!
He is struggling with two-digit odd and even numbers, so we’re going to take a day or two to work on this before moving ahead. Other than that, he has done VERY well with Teaching Textbooks 3! (Below, he’s working on an odd/even color by number that I printed online. We’re gonna master odds & evens with a little fun!!)
Spelling. This boy. He is an excellent speller. It seems like this just comes to him naturally, and though he isn’t perfect (who is?!), he seldom struggles with a spelling word. HOD spelling is a perfect fit for him – it’s simple and quick! I’d always thought I would use All About Spelling with him, and I’d considered continuing Spelling You See (which we reviewed last year), but I just don’t see the need to complicate things since he is doing so well.
We highlight important words in the directions (he LOVES to highlight now!), and this seems to help the directions stick in Alex’s mind. His ability to write a sentence (with subject/predicate, capital letter, and punctuation) has really grown. I am thankful to have come across Growing With Grammar! I have heard it’s repetitive over the years and kids often grow weary of it, but for now, it’s just what Alex needs!
Ahhh, the FUN of science/history lessons! Alex complains that, as he gets bigger, school is less fun and more work. He’s jealous of Max and Jensyn’s short, playful lessons. It’s true that math lessons are more challenging, grammar and copywork are harder than handwriting practice, and everything takes a bit longer. But seriously…look at this stuff…he’s still having lots of fun, active learning projects!
In history, we read about a young French pioneer named Marie. She and her family were traveling in an Indiana canoe as they relocated to Detroit. We read of the adventures they experienced along the way, the Indians they met, and the challenges they faced.
One of the projects in Beyond was to make homemade salt dough (measure and mix) and then build a canoe with toothpicks and dough, using a picture in the history book as a model. Alex LOVED this project, and I love how his canoe turned out! He is very proud of this canoe!
Here is his history book, propped with a pencil box, so he could use the picture as a model.
During this unit, we learned about different types of clouds. Alex made the clouds out of cotton balls and glued them to a paper chart. This correlated with our history lesson when Marie and her family were travelling by canoe during a rainstorm.
We also read about Marie spotting a hummingbird. After this history reading, our science reading was about birds. Then we filled several containers with different foods (rice, popcorn seeds, colored water, etc) and used a variety of household items as “bird beaks”. We explored to see which kind of “beak” was best for picking up each kind of food. This was really neat, and all three kids wanted in on the fun!
Each unit ends with a Bible study on Day 5, rather than a history lesson. I absolutely LOVE how Heart of Dakota ties in Biblical truths with the history lessons for the week. This week, we read from Philippians and talked about how the pioneers had to learn to be content with very little. We talked about feeing anxious or worried, and what it means for US to be content.
LITTLE HEARTS FOR HIS GLORY, Unit 4
(Max, age 6)
We are off to a slow, but steady start with All About Reading Level 1! Here is the much-loved rhyming word ice cream cone project. Alex loved it several years ago, and now Max enjoyed it just as much! When he finished, Max colored the ice cream so that each family member could have a cone in their favorite flavor.
Here’s Max working on the “Feed The Monster” activity in Lesson 3. He LOVED feeding the words to the monster!
We’re working through Rod & Staff’s “Going On Eagerly” book. Max enjoys it, especially the ‘finish the pattern’ pages. Beginning with the “G” book, each R&S book features a different biome. Max is not too interested in the arctic facts on each page, but I try to read those to him whenever possible, as they are interesting facts!
My little math whiz is zooming through Singapore Kindergarten book B. I’m pretty sure he’ll be starting first grade math sometime after Christmas. Other than the occasional backwards number, he is handling the math with ease!
…and sometimes, we are GRUMPY about math…when it’s straight fact practice with no fun!
After reading our Bible story, we had an activity about rain and clouds. We played with dry cotton balls, wet cotton balls, and a cup of water. We made heavy clouds and rain. Max thought this was GREAT fun!
LITTLE HANDS TO HEAVEN, Units 3 and 4
(Jensyn, age 4)
{THIS POST contains links to some of the extra worksheets we find online…}
Somehow, we’ve made more progress with Jensyn than with the boys. I’m not quite sure how that has happened. So I’m including pictures of two different units here. It’s not much, as I somehow didn’t get many pictures of her, but she is thoroughly enjoying her school time with Mommy!
Jensyn LOVES to make playdough. Because of this, we’re doing the printable playdough mats from 123HomeschoolForMe. In these pictures, she made a playdough “C” (with a little help from Mama to roll the snake-shape) and is driving a playdough car around the c-shaped race track.
Things Jensyn loves – her Rapunzel playset and her Bible. This is from an activity related to the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Jensyn had to hug her Bible and say she loves it more than anything – even a special toy.
We talked about how we can’t hide from God. We tried to hide (camouflage) our names, but we could still find our names. Here is Jensyn’s ‘camouflaged’ name. She is very proud of it!
In this picture, Jensyn found and circles (and connected…) all of the D and d letters on the page.
Number Four page to correspond with the activity in the Little Hands guide – Jensyn drew 4 ‘ladies’ and traced the number 4.
Jensyn takes great pride in making these pages PRETTY! (It’s not schoolwork unless you can find a way to decorate it!) On this page, she traced the lines, circles the D and d letters, and then colored it pink and purple to make it pretty.
And…her counting page. We drew 5 ladders. Then I turned to help her brother for a few minutes. When I turned back, Jensyn had made her page pretty. In each little box (meant for the numbers), Jensyn had drawn a purple heart filled in with pink. We wrote the numbers inside the pink hearts.
And last of all…she INSISTED she needed more work. So I gave her this page…color the uppercase Ds pink and the lowercase ds purple. She was all excited, but then she started to pout and say that her hand hurt. I told her she’d done enough, and she was welcome to be finished. Instead, she INSISTED on staying at the table and completing the page…with a pout on her face. Silly girly!
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