Homeschool Weekly Wrap Up

Hi guys! I hope you had a wonderful homeschool week. Here's what we've been up to. 

Unit Study:

This week we learned all about bays, we identified some on the map and created our vocabulary cards.

Language Arts:

We've been trying something different for grammar lately. Our main curriculum is Rod and Staff for my 3rd grader but he was getting bored with it. We've been using this wonderful mentor sentence lessons from here. We read a picture book and dissect a sentence from the book. We look at what makes it a good sentence, identify the parts of speech, and try to imitate the sentence. So far both boys have been loving it and we've been introduced to new books that we've never read before. 

My first grader has been reviewing nouns using a book also. I threw in a worksheet to give him more practice. 

Math:

This week has been a a week full of many changes for my 3rd grader. We were using Math U See Gemma but he was finding it too easy so we switched to Saxon Math. I am hoping this gives him the challenge he needs. We are just going to work through the beginning lessons pretty quickly and slow down once he reaches the challenging material.

We've also been working on geometry for both boys since Math U See doesn't really cover it. We worked on 2D shapes this week and we will cover 3D Shapes and Fractions next week.

The boys sorted Polygons and Quadrilaterals. 

we made shapes using toothpicks and marshmallows. 

They composed shapes using different shapes. Two trapezoids can make a hexagon. They learned about Vertices, Sides, and Angles. They also learned about different shapes such as a nonagon, decagon, do-decagon, etc. You can find this fun hands on unit here. 

History:

This week for history we finished up chapter 6 and started chapter 7. We did some narration, map work, and hung up our timeline cards that the boys put together. 

You can read all about how we use story of the world here.

That's it for our week! I hope you had a fabulous week. :)

Linked Up With:
Weekly Wrap Up

How We Use Story of the World Vol. 2

Hi guys! This year for our history studies we are using Story of the World Vol. 2. The boys and I love this history curriculum, the stories are engaging and written in short bit size chunks to hold their interest. I purchased both the text book and the activity guide this year so that I can get ideas for narration questions, art projects, and book suggestions.

While I was planning our schedule this summer I was looking for a creative way to help the boys retain more facts and information from each chapter. I came across this post from Sunlit Pages and it was the perfect idea.

I used Velcro strips and clothes pins along with index cards. The plan is to have the boys take turns to draw the one thing that stood out to them from each chapter. Once they draw we write a little about what they drew and hang it up above our fireplace. So far we are loving how it looks and we review and go over the pictures every few chapters. We still utilize our timeline figures, narrations, and map work from the book but this is an added step that they enjoy once we complete a chapter.

Here's my son working on what stood out to him from chapter 6. 

The drawings are nothing fancy. Sometimes they add lots of details depending on how into it they are and sometimes it's just a stick figure in a battle.

I can't wait until we complete this! It will be a beautiful project to look over at the end of the year.

Linked Up With:
Montessori Monday