Friday, September 30, 2011

MFW-ECC - Week 9 - Brazil - Free Rainforest & Brazil Lapbooks

Our Week in Review


Art/Music

The song Brown Girl in the Ring was eerily familiar to an episode of the "Wiggles" show my kids used to watch over and over and over. 
The Global Art activity (Carnival Dancers) on page 157 turned out to be a BIG hit. We did things a bit differently though. 1)The wire form the book called for was quite pliable...a little too pliable and the figure kept distroting into a crumpled mess. 2)I could not find the carpet thread the book mentioned, but I did have a ton of the colored wire. 


So, I hot-glued together popsicle sticks in the shape of a person instead. 

Then, we used the pliable colored wire to wrap the popsicle sticks.
A styrofoam head was added and our Carnival Dancers were complete :)  




A was the one one who ventured out to make clothes and hair for her dancer. She and I spent quite a bit of time drawing and cutting out clothing while the boys were at band practice.  


Science

Kiddos took turns reading pages 96-97 in the Living World book and then located and colored the various rain forests around the world on their notebook pages. 


I pretty much read all of pages 45-47 in Properties of Ecosystems. It was all very interesting, and for the most part, on their level this time. We learned about chicle (which is used to make chewing gum) and thought the brand 'Chiclets' gum sounded a lot like that. Well...guess what? That is exactly where the name 'Chiclets' came from ;) 


The kids were fascinated with spider monkeys and Banyan trees, which were mentioned in the reading. So we took some extra time to look up info and pictures about those on the internet in leu of the blue box 'researching rainforest animals' activity. Quite interesting! 


We completed the greenhouse experiment, although, it will still be a little while before we start to see any results.


Kiddos took turns reading pages 98-99 of Living World. After that, we completed our terrarium. The kids had a blast hunting through the woods finding various plants to use...AND...the rain was just what we needed to cool things off :)


Click here to get some great ideas from Family Fun on how to make your own terrarium.

Geography

The flight to South America (namely Brazil) departed at 10am. We almost left behind one of our passengers because she was late boarding the plane. LOL! Passports were stamped and Flags of the World sticker books were updated. We also looked over pages 68-71 in the Classroom Atlas book
Once again, the crossword puzzle was a big hit and the kiddos completed that while I read over the interesting facts on pages 13-14 of A Trip Around the World.


The South America part of the geography game was MUCH easier to put together this time around. It was so nice not having to clip and snip all those little square markers :) 


Bible

We are *loving* Nate Saint. So interesting! It is awesome to see how events from Cameron Townsend's story overlap with Nate Saint's story. The kids totally picked up on it too :-D 


Lapbooks

Because we are spending the next 2 weeks learning about rainforests, I thought the kids would have some time to work on a simplified version of this free rainforest lapbook (example below). This week, we printed out various pictures and the kiddos began coloring them. They will work on this over the next 2 weeks, cut them out, and glue them all together. I'll post pictures of the final outcome in 2 weeks :) 

I'm not sure we'll have time to complete the free Brazil lapbook, but here it is (example below) in case you are interested :)



Ahhh, it's nice to have a week every now and again when it feels like you've actually accomplished something and had lots of fun while doing it!

(This post has been linked up at Discover Their Gifts and Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers)

6 comments:

  1. Lots of fun! I love the terrarium!

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  2. Wow looks like a lot of gun. Those carnival dancers are very cute

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  3. I love the carnival dancers! Thank you for sharing the link for terrarium directions. We might be able to use that when we start our unit on botony. :)

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  4. Another great week, Pauline! The kids carnival dancers looks great - tell Aleeya she did a good job on the clothes - very chic! ;) And I'm sooooo glad to know we have a decent week of Properties of Ecosystems coming up!!

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  5. Jennifer, as we read, I used your idea about the maps and had the kids point at the different areas referred to in Prop. of Eco. and that really helped. This section was full of interesting facts (which we backed up with lots of cool internet pictures) and things the kids could relate to from vines growing in the trees in our yard, to chewing gum, to medicine, to fruits and veggies. It was nice to have an 'easy' week of Prop. of Eco. - lol! I have found though, that showing them lots and lots of internet pictures of what we are talking about helps them grasp the concepts better too.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this post and leave a comment :)