Ancient Egypt

What an awesome weekend at the Marriage retreat!  It was so nice to get away with Jon!  I learned so much from the lessons and I enjoyed spending time with a lot of other couples from our church that I don't normally spend time with!

But with being gone all weekend it meant I did spend as much time preparing our week as usual.  Luckily I used my 2 free hours at co-op last week to plan a lot of Matthew's and Kaityln's school work but poor Samantha's drawers didn't get changed.  

Which is fine because she needed some extra work on the letter I.

Preschool Activities

I've been torn on how exactly to teach Samantha her letters.  One part of me wants to work on a letter till she has it's sound perfectly memorized and not teach another letter until it is mastered.  The other part of me just wants to teach 1 letter per week and move on whether or not the sound is mastered.  Then hope that through review she will eventually remember all the letters.  I still haven't decided.  But since last week we only spent 3 days on the letter I , I thought it was ok to spend some more time on it.

It seemed by the time we traced the I again today, played short vowel shuffle, and found all the I's hidden in the beans she had the sound down.  So maybe we will spend 1 more day on it to make sure and then move on.

Samantha built block towers and made block necklaces while the other two did school.

She also played with the ball themed sensory bin that I brought to co-op this week.

 I buried Matthew's sight words in the ball bin and he searched for them.  When he read a word correctly he would use a spoon to scoop out one of the eye balls into a bowl.  Everything is more fun when it involves eye balls!

Matthew's Reading Program

Matthew uses Rod and Staff 1st grade for his phonics/spelling/reading/bible curriculum.  It uses a 1st grade level bible as its means to teach reading and phonics.  It entirely workbook based which is a little scary for a boy who is extremely active.  However, it has been working very well so far.  It allows him to be very independent in his work and he seems to like that a lot.  

This is one of the activities Matthew enjoys a lot.  He draws a "slide" on the board with a letter f on top and a letter e on the bottom.  Then he takes a small magnet of himself and slides down the slide saying"ffffffff" until he hits the e and then he blends it into he "e" sound.  We do this changing the vowels at the end of the slide to practice his blending.  This is a review of skills he already learned last year.  In fact most of the work he has done has been a review.  I was tempted to skip him ahead in the work but I am glad that I did not.  His confidence in reading and writing is soaring.

In fact I heard him say something today that I was beginging to believe I would never  hear one of my children say,

"I think I am starting to like reading and writing!"

I believe this is do to the fact that I let him do the easy review work that I was tempted to skip.  When learning is constantly difficult and frustrating it can make you hate learning.
Don't get me wrong I push my children.  Struggling is important because in life you will struggle.  But sometimes it is nice to feel confident that you can do something well.  That confidence can help you tackle the more difficult things that will come at you later.  I am glad to see he is gaining confidence in his reading.

History

This week we continue our pursuits into ancient Egypt.  We started off learning about some of their God's Osiris and Set.

This week we read
 

Everyday Kaitlyn spends time reading on here own in addition to the books we read together.  Here are a few of the books she has been reading:

Combining science and history this week we built our own shadufs.  When I announced the project of building our own shadufs Kaitlyn immediately asked, "Do you have directions for this project?"

I told her I did not and they were to use whatever items they could find around the house to build it.

"Yes!"she replied

Kaitlyn loves a good problem to solve.  So building a simple machine without any instructions is her idea of a good time.  We had read about shadufs the previous week so the kids set out to work.

This is Kaitlyn's 1st attempt. She discovered she needed to make the front length longer than the back which caused her to discover she needed to add weight on the back to even it out.

  

Right after she lifted her 1st bucket of water her string broke.  I asked her if she was an Egyptian what would she conclude she needed to do to fix it.  Kaitlyn told me she needed to find a stronger string.  I honestly did not expect her to fix it.  I told her it was now lunch free time and she could play.  She however was not satisfied with merely telling me how to fix it so she used her free time to find some yarn which was thicker and fixed it.

The yarn wasn't strong enough either so she fixed it again by using safety pins and duct tape:

That solved all her problems and she did this without any input from mom!  Duct tape fixes everything!

Matthew's went together a lot easier because of two things:

1. He waited for kaitlyn to start her project so he could copy her.

2. He allowed mom to help him.

We also studied the 1st written languages this week.  We learned about Hieroglyphics and Cuniform. We also learned that at first writing was carved into stone and then later into clay tablets.  So of course we had to make our own clay tablet writing:

Kaitlyn planning her message.

Then they rolled out the clay and wrote their message.

Blue says" Kaitlyn Wooff"
Brown says  "M W"
Yellow says" Family"

To end the week we started learning about how Ancient Egyptians created mummies.  After listening to our history lesson and writing about it for our history notebooks we completed a small project that will be used next week for our big project.  We made our own scented oil with oil and spices.

Matthew dumped every spice he had available into his jar.  He didn't care what it smelled like he just wanted to use every possible material he had available to him!

 Kaitlyn on the other hand smelled all the spices first.  Then she combined only the good smelling spices into her jar.

Then we added oil and shook it up!  We called it "Egyptian Perfume" .  The kids dabbed some of their perfume on their skin and saved the rest for when we mummify our chicken!  Kaitlyn's perfume actually smelled good while Matthew's smelled awful.  He wore it anyway and he loved it!