Our Weekly Update

The boys are plugging away with our time at home.  Ashton tends to be hard on himself during his drawing lessons, but I honestly think he's done an incredible job.  We're continuing in our study of the Ancients and Egypt, working our way thru the Exodus.

This week the boys drew Moses and also had the choice to draw a frog or a locust from the plagues God sent down to Egypt for not allowing his people to go.  Ashton drew a frog and Ethan drew a DYNOMITE locust.

For our hands on history project, we designed a 3 dimensional pyramid.  We covered it in watered down glue and sprinkled sugar all over it.  This was to mimic the shimmer the limestone rocks gives off that were used by the Egyptians.  Later, we turned the lights off and shined a flashlight down on the pyramid.  You can see it's great shadow cast over the land.  The boys traced the shadows and colored in the surrounding desert sand.

I found this really great IMAX movie on Netflix we were able to Instantly Watch.  It's a 38 minute film all about the Pharaohs and the mysteries surrounding their mummifications and burials.  It was REALLY interesting.  It wasn't a stuffy documentary either so the boys liked it as well.

Wednesday was International Talk like a Pirate Day and, in honor of this, Krispy Kreme was offering a free dozen glazed donuts to anyone who dressed like a pirate!  Well, Shiver me timbers!!!  We weren't going to pass THAT up!

Unfortunately, I couldn't really find much of the boys' pirate costumes, so they had to plunder my closet for various pieces that would somewhat work for a pirate outfit!

Bless Ethan's heart...he looks like some type of gypsy gone wrong! LOL

 We got our Booty and headed home!

The boys continue to do really well in math!  Both receive top marks on their tests and quizzes. I like the math program we use, it's gentle, yet effective.  It's amazing how they teach the multiplication tables to Ashton without him even realizing he's memorizing them.  He's been skip counting for years now so that by the time he's in this guide, it's really old hat what 8x9 is.  Ethan has been diving into integers, negative numbers, adding and subtracting fractions with different common denominators.  I've been adding more word problems to his daily work so that he can keep strengthening this skill with multi-step problems!

We are also studying the works of Robert Louis Stevenson all year.  Every week we read and discuss one of his poems.  The boys also do a writing activity based on that poem.  I would not say the boys are accomplished poets yet, but I'm certainly proud of the progress they are making coming up with their own poetry.  It is certainly NOT as easy as these poets make it seem.

To change things up this week for our bible work memorization, I decided to write each word down of the verse on index cards, scramble them up, and time the boys to see how long it would take them to re-arrange the cards into correct order.

Our bible verse for the week was:  Psalms 9:9-10

The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.  Those who know your name will trust in you.  For you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.

One of the boys' favorite things each week is the science experiment they get to do.  This week they continued their study of the desert.  The question this week was:  How does dew form on rocks or cactuses in the desert?

We put cold ice cubes in a glass then filled it with room temperature water, added food coloring, and waited a few minutes while the dew started to form on the outside of the glass.  The boys wiped the dew off with a napkin and saw that it was not the water from inside the cup (cactus) that the dew comes from (since there was no food coloring on the napkin).  

Instead, they learned that as night comes in the desert, the rocks and cactuses get cooler as they lose their heat in the the air.  When the temperature of the rocks or cactuses drops below the dewpoint of the surrounding air, water condenses on their surfaces forming dew.