Half a Hundred Acre Wood

Christian homeschooling integrating Classical and Charlotte Mason principles

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After losing this entire post at the last minute, I’m quite frazzled right now.  (GGGRRRRR, BLOGGER!!!)  It takes me an entire week to pull a post like this together, working on it a little at a time.  So, I’m going to throw it together in just a fraction of the time before heading to church.

If you traveled west in a covered wagon..
like this, you would NOT make it.

For this week’s history sentence on Manifest Destiny, I thought it’d be cute to make a Craft, a Pioneer Wagon, but we ended up not having the right supplies, so we improvised with popsicle sticks and a hot glue gun.  Only I only had one glue stick for the glue gun, so we ran out.  Then we used superglue (which does NOT work) and gorilla glue.  Needless to say, the boys did not get to do much on this craft except put the base together. The one at Crafty Classroom looks a thousand percent better than this.  Next time our family will just stick to the Crayola craft version of a Horse and Wagon.  Or maybe do one of these other Pioneer crafts.  (Brandy, stop trying to put a square peg in a round hole!  You know you’re not the Craft Queen!)

Manifest Destiny:  

Though we did not get around to it yet, Pages 42-47 of Adventure Tales of America Student Activity Book deals with events surrounding the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion.  This workbook is intended to go with the flipbooks Adventure Tales of America. As an overview, you can just go to Westward Expansion at-a-glance.

Trails West:

We read Apples to Oregon by Deborah Hopkinson, which includes a a Unit Study on Homeschoolshare.  I mention it here because it was such a cute tall-tale – we really enjoyed it as a family.

We went on an Oregon Trail Virtual Tour (Photography of landmarks along the journey) and watched an Oregon Trail Documentary

We played an Oregon Trail Jeopardy Game to see how much we knew.  We learned some things by just trying to play the game!

Our interest in an updated on-line version of the old Oregon Trail Game ended when I had to eat Gary within about 2 minutes of playing the game.  And I really lost my appetite that day.  But for those who are not faint of heart, visit PBS: The Donner Party (for older students).

Other Westward Expansion Topics:

The boys Built a Virtual Sod-House

and played Rail Sail or Overland Mail, even though it doesn’t deal directly with the mail on the Overland Trail. It was still a fun game for them to play.

Note to Self:  Here’s my list of activities I really want to do when we revisit trails west with geography memory work later in the school year.

Westward Expansion Timeline (pdf)
Westward Expansion Art Study
Westward Ho Coloring Pages
Printable Oregon Trail Board Game
Buffalo Bill Mini-Book
Daniel Boone Mini-Book

Our Reading This Week:

 

We are still also reading Amos Fortune, Free Man (Newbery Library, Puffin) by Elizabeth Yates and listening to the Free Audiobook:  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. We are progressing at about 1 page per day right now.  🙂

Other things from this period of history that we will probably not tackle this year but hope to come back to at a later date:

 

Science:
We read Your Lungs Reading & Comprehension Sheet.
Breathing System Activity (We did not get around to doing this…It was going to be a weekend activity, but we ended up searching for a tile mosaic or something – ANYTHING – to match our existing tile.  That sucked up way many more hours than I ever expected, and we still don’t have anything to show for it!)
Once Upon a time….Life-Breathing  The boys have thoroughly enjoyed these “Once Upon a Time” science videos.

Unit 7 of Elementary Life Science Curriculum.  (Student edition has reading; Parent edition has experiments and activities.)  This is Stephen’s favorite science textbook.  He even sneaks off to read the parts that we are not studying right now!  We tried following the lung model in this book, but we ended up improvising.  (Another Build a Lung model is available but very similar.)

What the activity called for.  But the coke bottle kept collapsing, and we didn’t have a piece of wood the right size to prop it open.

 

What our model ended up looking like. We used a Karo Syrup bottle instead of a coke bottle, and kitchen shears instead of a serrated knife.

 

Instructions:  Cut the bottom of the Karo bottle off.  Cut the neck of a balloon off and slip it over the cut end of the bottle. Secure with rubber band.  Slip a straw through the hole in the lid and secure with  modeling clay. Attach another balloon to the straw with a rubber band.  Slip balloon with straw and screw lid back onto bottle.

 

Lightly pull on the balloon at bottom of bottle.  The balloon inside the bottle should inflate a small amount. push in on the bottom balloon, the balloon inside should completely deflate.  The bottom balloon acts much like the diaphragm, the inner balloon acts as our lungs, and the straw acts as our trachea.
English Grammar:
The Notebooking Fairy has a great Lie Versus Lay Notebooking Page, which we laminated and used to practice our Lie v Lay Principal Parts. She also has a Sit Versus Set Notebooking Page.
Other worksheets we plan to use (and recommended by The Notebooking Fairy) are:
Okay, so this took me a little over an hour.  But at least I captured some of what my previous post stated.  And we still won’t be late for church!


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