CC Week 4: A little silliness

We started out the week making homemade straw oboes that sound like a…. honk of a dying goose?  What does this have to do with our planned homeschool studies?  Nothing!  But it was ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS!!!  (Sometimes, you just gotta do stuff that makes ya laugh.)

As a side note, we love all of the homemade musical instrument videos by Annie Brunson – not only are the instruments made with items we usually have on hand (and the instructions are easy to follow), but these videos are SO FUNNY!!!  Let me add here that this is where we came up with the idea for Native American Tom-Tom drums, too.

Though we finished our Attitude of Gratitude Lapbook this week, we won’t ever ACTUALLY be finished with instilling an attitude of gratitude in our home/hearts/lives.  We enjoyed using this unit study to focus on the character quality of thankfulness.

We also took the opportunity to write scriptures on the foundation of our house.  (Building will begin next week!)

As far as our history activities for the week, we updated our ongoing projects and then started working on our American Revolution Lapbook.  The things I love about this lapbook are that 1) it’s free, 2) it doesn’t require much writing from my Essentials-chart-logged child, 3) it offers quality, color, and variety that is not usually seen in free lapbooks, and 4) the answers are provided (though they are not necessarily easy to figure out which answer is for which page).  To see a finished version of this lapbook, go to the Just Us Blog.

Stephen also created Scholastic’s American Revolution Mini-Book.  This one required a little creativity on my part to put together, but it provides a good summary of the events of the American Revolution.

We played the Liberty! Road to Revolution Game and listened to The Declaration of Independence from The Founding Documents of the United States of America.  After listening to portions of Common Sense on Librivox, we discussed Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the role it played in sparking passion for the American Revolution. We also colored Crayola’s Thomas Paine, but will save Common Sense for further study in middle school. (That sentence makes me laugh…)

According to historic legend, Betsy Ross created the first stars and stripes flag in 1775 under instructions from General Washington. I used the instructions at USHistory.org to replicate the “one-snip star” that Betsy Ross used to show how simple it is to make a 5-pointed star.  For someone who is not gifted in the crafty department, this was REALLY NEAT, and I was so proud that I could actually do it!  We also are coloring the following Crayola pages:  Betsy Ross, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.  And we listened again to this great audio recording of Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  

And we placed the American Revolution in order on an interactive American Revolution timeline.

Thanks to Tina Marie at Chaisin’ Raisins, we also discovered this really cool Animated Atlas of the Growth of Our Nation (You must check this out!!  We will use this multiple times this year!), an American Revolution Timeline, and a great American Revolution Map

We are taking a short break from Saxon Math 5/4 to review our math facts “The Fun Way.” It’s funny how Stephen will sit and read and re-read the Times Tables the Fun Way and Addition the Fun Way books (and he’s begging me to get off of here so he can play the Times Alive CD-ROM).   If you are sure that your children understand the concepts of multiplication and addition, Stephen recommends this program if they are still finding it dull and tedious to memorize the facts. To see it, go to the Times Table the Fun Way’s Channel.

We also are starting to use multiplication wheel worksheets.

David loves his Saxon manipulatives kit.  Every week he takes something from his kit for his presentation.

Oh, what fun we’ve had with science this week!  We made and played Ellen J McHenry‘s Body Bingo as I cooked dinner – the boys loved trying to figure out which clue was for which part of the body.

Then we made brain hemisphere hats out of paper. Stephen used it for his presentation this week, and because I currently teach his class, I had the privilege of entertaining the kids with it before class started.  🙂

We also discussed this brain article and answered the reading comprehension questions orally.

Reading Well’s audio dramas Our Independence and the Constitution, Paul Revere and The Minutemen, and The American Revolution.

Listen to the other documents in The Founding Documents of the United States of America

My Audio School’s The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States of America, 1787 in audio and pdf format.

Practical Pages Practical Pages Lapbook templates for the Declaration of Independence.

Writing a sentence from the Declaration of Independence with a homemade Quill Pen and Berry Ink.

Watch short films on Famous Moments in Early American History.

Listen to Music of Early America and Stars and Stripes Forever by John Phillips Sousa.