Not everyone in Illinois lives in Chicago.

Ancient West Africa!

History

This week in history we learned that there is more to Africa than just Egypt!

I can see it now,  The kids meet someone from Africa here in the U.S.:

"Wow so you are from Africa?  What are the pyramids like? "

"I don't know because I'm from the Congo."

I mean pyramids and mummies are great but there is an entire continent here!

So to counter that idea we looked about Ancient Western Civilizations.  We learned that the Sahara desert actually used to be a grassland and about 5500 years ago the earth started heating up and it turned into a desert.( Perhaps the Giraffes were emitting to many gasses into the Earth's atmosphere and it caused global warming.  I'm not really sure.)  Even mom learned something new there.

Art

So in art this week we made our own paper beads and strung them on necklaces.

See I knew there was a reason I was saving all my old magazines!  Home-schoolers have to hoard!

Literature/History

  We read Anansi and the Magic Stick and Anansi the Spider.

  

We also listened to two Anansi stories read by Jim Weiss.  The stories were Anansi and Turtle and Anansi and the Make Believe Food.  The kids and I were laughing outloud at Anansi and the Make Believe Food!  It was hilarious!

After listening to Anansi and Turtle the kids decided to make their own puppets and retell the story.  Here are Matthew's puppets:

Kaitlyn took a slightly different approach.  She went in her room and created a puppet stage out of an old shoe box.  Then she created two different back drops and attached them to a paper towel roll so that she could spin it to change scenes.

It is not a very good picture because she very distinctly told me not to take pictures so I was trying to sneak.  I love seeing her creative ideas and it was definitely more fun than writing another summary to put in a notebook.

The next day we listened to another Anansi story read by Jim Weiss.  This was "Anansi and the Make-Believe Food."  Today's assignment was to pick a scene from the story and draw a picture of it.

Matthew's picture of Anansi collapsing from hunger outside his hut.

Kaitlyn being Kaitlyn couldn't just draw a scene from the story she had to create a collection.  Here are some of here pictures:

Anansi arriving in the town of potatoes and then the potatoes throwing themselves into the fire so that Anansi will eat them.

The rice asking Anansi how he wants to eat them. I think hey are cute!

The rice boiling themselves.  It is a really bizarre story.  

Tot School

Samantha's work has been a lot more haphazard lately.  Here are a few shots of her working:

 

This is from her Get Ready for the Code A workbook.  She really seems to like this book and I am thinking of ordering her book B and C for Christmas!  

Here she is working in her "magic" book.  You scribble in pencil next to a letter and a picture appears!  I bought this last year at the home school expo and turns out I should have bought one for all the kids-the other two were jealous!

Samantha created another dot page M for moon.  I believe I got the printable from 1plus1plus1equals1.com  It is a really great site.  She has a lot of great FREE printables.