Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Week in Review: Wee Gillis, Migraines and Flag of Scotland Built From Legos

Pardon the corporate jargon but last week’s key learning was “learning happens all the time”. Praise God for the opportunity to homeschool first and for most. Last week was a struggle for both mom and student with a healthy dash of only child homeschooling guilt on my part. But let us start at the beginning….

We started the week learning about earth’s core in Co-Op. TS came home with a model of the earth made of clay and our job was to cut into the layers and discuss it as a family. It was so AWESOME!

However by midnight I felt like my planet was cracking in half. I had a blinding migraine headache. It was not your typical sinus relative migraine this happened after I took new allergy meds. First I had the chills, and then the migraine and the pièce de résistance I broke out in bumps and hives all over. After talking to the allergist apparently I had an allergic reaction to the allergy meds. So much for Mom being proactive and preventing down town.

The most I could handle was Read-A-Loud of
Bring Me Some Apples and I'll Make You a Pie: A Story About Edna Lewis. We then drew “What-Ifs” of the story.
The week got better as we had a wonderful time on a nature walk and started Wee Gillis. In order to get fine motor skills into this unit I incorporated Legos. I built the flag of Scotland out of Legos, took a picture of it and challenged TS to rebuild it from the picture.
He had a BLAST! Now he wants to do all the flags of the world. Hmmmmmmmm let me work on that.

For Math we did more Horizons but also worked more on graphing. Then we read Stuart J. Murphy’s Lemonade for Sale introducing bar graphs. We took a Slinky and graphed how many stairs we could get it to go down. (I had so much fun with this….)

Additionally we:
• Daily Journal
• Handwriting Without Tears
• Redefined Chore Expectation Chart
• Workbook Reading Comprehension

I am now designing basic Capitalization Rules Chart Jedi style.

Blessings!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Lego Education Rocks!

The good people in the Education Division of Lego forwarded me my FREE Lego Education kit from the spring. We moved and it didn't get forwarded via the regular mail. After clearing my email box I realized "Hey, where are my free Legos?" So I sent a quick email and three days later free Legos.

We were to late for the contest but had a good time building some of the challenges.

Thanks Lego you live up to your name.

Lego Defined: The name 'LEGO' is an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well".