Adding Some Love To Our School Days

We finished up another great week of school on Friday.  Some weeks are more fun than others and last week was one of those.  We just had a fun time of learning!  Here is a look at what we did-

We are focusing on short vowel "a" in language.  Here is Cruz doing a matching card game with short "a" words.  We also played Memory with those cards several times.

Here he is doing copy work with short "a" words.

We finally got to the first readers that came with our curriculum.  He had two to read last week.

Here is a video of him reading.  He was trying to get Ben to read along in the first book and then he read the second book by himself. 

Our math lesson for the week was Tally Marks. 

writing tally marks

In Science we began a unit on Exploring Chemistry.  Our first topic was Solutions.  We also learned about the color wheel.

Our first activity had us mixing colored water to make new colors.  The boys really loved this!

the colors of the rainbow

We did an activity of watching the colors bleed together.  This was fun but it took a little more patience than my two little ones have, ha.  They expected instant results but instead had to wait a few hours for it to work. 

a little while later it looked like this

One day we painted.  I only gave them red, blue, and yellow and they had to mix them to make other colors they wanted.  My boys love to paint!

Cruz's artwork

Ben's masterpiece.  He did a little better at mixing the colors in his work.  He purposely made it run.  He said it was raindrops falling from his cloud. You'll notice in several photos of him that I post he almost never wears his shirt.  He rarely wears shoes either.  Most days he just goes around in his shorts.

We ended the week by making a tasty solution- purple cows.  You mix milk and grape juice.

pretty tasty!

Our Bible lessons were "The Pool of Bethesda" and "Jesus Cleanses the Temple".  The way our Bible curriculum works is we do a cumulative review each Monday.  We get a new story on Tuesday and review it on Wednesday.  We get another new story on Thursday and review it on Friday.  We have two new stories each week.  I love the review because I think hearing the stories over and over helps to learn them better.  Our new songs were "Little Feet Be Careful" and "Good News".  Our memory verse was Psalm 147:1.  Here is Cruz saying it-

In our read aloud time we began a book by a former IMB missionary to Honduras, Viola Palmer.  We met Viola several years ago at one of our mission meetings and received a copy of her book.  We read it then and loved it.  I have been eager to read it to my boys.  It is a wonderful story about children's lives and culture in Central America.  It also teaches about missions through the work of "the man in the green Jeep" and his friends. It's a great book!

We've been decorating our schoolroom for Valentine's.  I put our tree trunk on our door.  Each day the boys tell me something they love.  I write their answers on a heart and we add it to our tree. We have been doing this for several years now and I always enjoy hearing their responses.  We do the same activity at Thanksgiving with leaves and they tell something they are thankful for. 

our schoolroom door so far

We made tissue paper "stained glass" hearts.

our tissue paper hearts on our schoolroom window

I love this idea!  I saw it posted on facebook and knew it was something I wanted to do with the boys.  It's called "14 Days of God's Love".  We began on the 1st and each morning I hide a heart in the dining room and the boys have to "hunt for God's love" when they wake up.  The heart they eventually find has a scripture verse and description of  God's love on it.  During breakfast we read the verse and talk about it.  It's been a lot of fun and a great way to teach about God's love to the boys.  This is probably something we will continue doing in the years to come.

Homeschooling takes a lot out of me but it's one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.  It's hard, but it sure is fun!