Day #74/175 Days

Together

• Calculadder Drill
• Geography project (and my oldest actually declared it was "FUN!" I was shocked and amazed.)
• Institute for Excellence in Writing - creating a "Key Word Outline" or KWO on their own. Lego-Man got this but Conductor and I will still need to work on this for a bit I think. (TOS Crew review product)

A bit more about our geography project. At the start of January we switched to Tapestry of Grace. We are still meandering through week #1 as I continue to wrap my head around scheduling and such. It is vastly different than anything I've ever done in the past. One of the projects in week one for the Grammar level students is to go over a number of geography terms and create a salt-dough map with labels. I'm not one to jump in to salt dough maps willy-nilly so the boys and I sat down (and yes, I included Lego-Man even though he is technically doing the dialectic level) and we went over all the terms. To the best of my ability I illustrated the term and defined it as well. The first ten or so I did without issues. Then I pulled out the dictionary and Wikipedia to help me. Here is just a sampling of what I did for the boys:

As I mentioned, Lego-Man loved this project. So much so that he wants to turn it in to a 4-H exhibit. He was also super hyper because he was having so much fun. I'm glad I finally hit on something he enjoyed! What I ended up doing was giving the boys a large piece of paper and they had to include as many of the geographic ideas in their make-believe map as they could. In the coming weeks we will create the salt-dough map. The boys will get to paint it (that excited Happy!) and even create mini-labels for everything. Hands-on is really the way to go as much as possible with children - especially boys.

Happy

• Get Ready for the Code book pages 66-71
• Alpha-Phonics - review Lesson 5
• Practice the piano

I truly am thrilled with how Happy is doing. He is very ready to learn and it's showing in everything he is doing.

Conductor

• Practice the piano
• Read 3 chapters in Island of the Blue Dolphins

And no, this wasn't posed. While not a great shot, I was making 

popcorn in the kitchen and he wanted to watch, but also wanted

to finish his school reading.

Lego-Man

• Read 3 chapters in Swiss Family Robinson
• Practice piano

This was mostly a "fun" school day so a lot of other things were not tackled today.