Week in Review: Week 23 February 16-22

Theme: Three Names & Prairie Life

This week we started reading "Three Names" by Patricia MacLachlan .  This is a cute story about a great-grandfather who likes to say he lived "a hundred years ago".  The story is about when the grandfather was a boy, his dog, and school life in the prairie.  I really was born in the wrong century because reading this story made me feel at home.  I love the simplicity of life before technology took over.  Yes, it was more difficult, but people just seemed to be friendlier and appreciate so much more.

                                                   

The boys first colored a map of the great plain states to see where this story took place.   We discussed what it would be like to go to school in a one room school house and compared it to our homeschool experience.  We also read a book about current life in the prairie and compared what it is like today and 100 years ago.  We learned about toys from this time period and made our own yarn dolls.  We started to learn games from pioneer times, but the boys couldn't seem to focus for the directions, so we had to go back inside.  Hopefully next week I can teach them the games.

Yarn Dolls

Our favorite part of the week was their pioneer lunch.  I made bacon, biscuits, and packed apples and carrots all wrapped up in a towel.  We also made sugar cookies and had lemonade just like in the story.  We also read Little House School Days, which gave the boys a better idea of what school would have been like then,  We ended our first week with this book by watching part of the pilot episode of Little House on the Prairie.  It was a really fun week.

 Making sugar cookies

100 Book Challenge: Mr. Popper's Penguins and Henry Huggins

We finished up Mr. Popper's Penguins this week.  We all really liked this book.  It was really fun and had the boys laughing.  Although, I was slightly disappointed by the ending.  I know the whole premise of the story is far fetched, but the ending was pretty silly and just didn't seem to make sense. If you have read it, what did you think?

                                                      
We started reading Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary.  The language of this book keeps making me laugh.  I love the  "Golly", "Swell", "Sonny" talk.  So far the boys are liking this story.  We are not too far into, so we will see if it keeps their attention.

                                               
We also finished #4 in the Unfortunate Events book, The Miserable Mill.  Here's the thing, after reading 4 of these books, I feel like it is the same story over and over again.  But, I feel like  have invested time into these books and I must finish the series,  But, the series has 13 books, so have I really invested enough time that I must finish them all? I don't know what to do.  We are going to start the 5th one and see what we think.  I'll let you know.

                                                       
Tea on Tuesday

Tea on Tuesday was great fun this week.  We had 3 envelopes to open and one had some really great Mr. Scent Markers in them.  They smell just like smells from a movie theater.  So strange.  The boys are coloring everything now! We read a poem on super heroes.  Then the boys learned about similes. They ended up writing simile poems about themselves as superheros.  Then I took pictures of them pretending to fly and added them to their poems.  They thought it was pretty funny.  I also had them create their own super hero.

Chinese New Year

On Thursday, my husband had the day off of school because it was Chinese New Year.  We had really hoped to make it down to Chinatown this year, but it didn't end up working out.  (Which was an even bigger bummer because we were going to meet a family that is traveling through Asia.  We met through my facebook page.  I love meeting families from all over and I hope we are able to meet up when they pass through Bangkok again!)

We ended up just going to to a mall near us and watched the Chinese New Year show they put on.  It started with little kids dancing.  They were the silliest dance performance I have ever seen.  I will have to post a video.  The kids just shook their hips and moved their arms.  They never even moved from their spot on stage the whole time.  It was funny.

Then they had an awesome acrobat troupe perform,  It was pretty amazing.   The show ended with a dragon dance and drummers.  So, while we didn't make it to Chinatown we still had a fun Chinese New Year.

We also read a book on Chinese New Year, decorated, and cut out Double Happiness signs.

What we are learning this week 

Greyson and Lincoln have been learning about Rome and King Nero.  They learned about what a terrible ruler he was and they made crowns and pretended to be King Nero. They also finished up their giraffe research paper and I was very proud of their first try at a paper.  It took a long time and was a struggle at times, but they completed it!  Greyson and Lincoln also finished up their phases of the moon unit and both got a 95% on their test!

 King Nero Crowns

 Learning about phases of the moon.

 Learning about the Christians and the catacombs and making their own secret symbol

Britton is working on sight words, how to read a map, and his phonics book.  He is also adding double digits and doing a great job! He has also taken more of an interest in coloring and reading.  He finished up his week with a fun superhero birthday party.

We also celebrated Ben's birthday on Sunday and I didn't take one picture!  I did make a strawberry cake and we ordered dinner from our favorite Lebanese restaurant.

Next week is a busy one with Britton's birthday on Wednesday and his party next weekend.  Time to get started preparing for a party!!

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