Welcome to the second week of our homeschool journal!
I didn’t get around to taking pictures of all of the books that we used this week; these were the main ones.
The Busy Tree ||OWLS ||White Owl Barn Owl ||Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean || The Tree Book || Because of an Acorn ||The Barn Owl || Tell Me Tree || Trees, Leaves, and Bark || Where the river begins
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When we finish reading, I like to have Little Miss give an oral summary of the story. This time she told the story back to her grandpa and gave an alternative narration on how the story would unfold if Nutkin had been respectful, as ‘respectful’ was our character trait of the week. I love to see how she gets more descriptive each time she gives a narration. It’s also very entertaining to hear what she comes up with.
After reading I told her that she could take a break to bake with my sister, who was here for the day while my niece was in school. They both love to bake and my sister is the baker in the family and is here almost all week during school hours, so Little Miss gets quite a bit of baking lessons. They treated us with some scrumptious vanilla cupcakes and homemade Italian butter cream frosting.
For science, we reviewed bodies of water. We covered bodies of water last year, but it was a good refresher and another reason to make some fun salt dough! She used the salt dough to create land forms, which she placed on blue construction paper to illustrate the different bodies of water.
Tuesday
Adopt a tree day! Little Miss and I LOVE this idea. Unfortunately, we don’t have any trees in our yard. We told her that this summer, we would plant a tree or two in our yard, but until then we would find another tree to observe. We went to one of the parks in our town and she finally found one that was perfect. These were some pictures she took of her tree:
Wednesday
We spent a lot of time outside, even though it was raining most of the day. The kids enjoyed splashing in the puddles!
I was particularly excited about Wednesday’s handicraft because we got to felt acorns. Little Miss and I have seen felted acorns on Pinterest and thought they were really cute, but we never thought to make any before. You can use acorn tops you find outside or order them from Amazon.
This is the felt that I ordered for our felting projects. It’s a great starter kit that comes with a variety of colors and the tools you need to get started.
While Lynni bug was getting her copy-work done, I was playing with Little Man. He is at the stage where he loves to drop objects into containers. Here I just have some of our Spielgaben balls that he likes to drop in his Inbucare box
Thursday
Today we just started the morning with free reading time while I gathered everything up for our fun activities for the day. She read about 20 minutes and then we began reading all of our books about our favorite bird, the owl! Some fun facts she gathered from our readings
- Scientists believe they have been around 65 million years.
- The male is smaller than the female.
- One ear is higher than the other. The higher ear hears the sounds from above and the lower ear hears noises from below.
- They can’t move their eyes, but they can turn their necks 270 degrees.
Another activity I wanted to bring into this lesson was dissecting an owl pellet. Little Miss wasn’t too sure about that, but she did it. We found two mouse skulls and something else we couldn’t identify. A lot of the bones looked alike to both of us, so we didn’t finish putting the skeleton together. It was a lot of work and challenged her attention span (and mine too). I found this really affordable owl pellet for our science lesson. It includes one pellet, a dissection pick, and an owl pellet bone chart showing the skeletal structure of their prey.
Talking about owls brought up a trip we took last April, where we attended a presentation on owls. These are some pictures I found from that trip.
During free time we got out our spielgaben and Lynni made an owl with the loose pieces while RT rolled the pieces down his slide.
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She ended the school day with finishing up math on the swing.
Friday
Friday morning was started with all of us cuddled on the couch with the cozy fire going. We were reading our living book, Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter as our history for the week. Little Miss wanted to show her brother where Beatrix was from, so we pulled out our Maps book.
After our English lesson, Little Miss gave me examples of everything we covered for the week. She gave examples of helping verbs, contractions, and interjections. When all of the “formal” schooling was done, we went outside and looked around for things that were interesting to us to put them in our natural journals. We didn’t get very many pictures because we were so focused on what was around us.
When it was time to come in we were ready for our tea time and baked the treat of the week: honey and peanut butter cookies! They were SO good. I tweaked the recipe just a little, because I didn’t have enough honey. I think everyone liked it less sweet. I gave Little Miss a choice of books for us to read while we drank tea, and she chose A Time to Keep.
That’s a wrap for Week Two! Make sure you check out Week One if you haven’t already!
littlehouseof4 
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