MFW-ECC - Week 11 - Head Hunters, story spoilers, and an 'egg'speriment

Our Week in Review

Before I jump into this week's review, let me start off by saying, the Nate Saint Bible notes you are supposed to read from the MFW manual each day this week will spoil the Nate Saint Christian Heroes chapter book you read each day...specifically starting with Wednesday's Bible notes. I did not like the fact the chapters and Nate Saint Bible notes were not better aligned. The first few Bible notes seemed redundant as well. Knowing what I know now, so as not to spoil the story or be overly redundant, I would follow this plan instead...

  Day 1 - Read chapter 11 as indicated in the lesson plans then do Monday's Bible notes on Nate Saint and plane activity as indicated in the lesson plans.

Day 2 - Read chapter 12 as indicated in lesson plans only.

Day 3 - Read chapter 13 then read Day 2's Nate Saint Bible notes.

Day 4 - Read chapter 14 and 15 then read Day 3's Nate Saint Bible notes as a recap.

Day 5 - Read chapter 16 (it's very short) then read Day 4 and 5's Nate Saint Bible notes.

Geography

We decided to wait until this week to make our Brazilian treats. On Monday, we made Brigaderiros...4 simple ingredients to toss into the pot, then we kept stirring and stirring and stirring and stirring, well, you get the idea. No joking, I think we stirred for 20 minutes!

I really didn't think the kids were going to like them, but they surprised me...S, A, Dad, and my other brother (J) gobbled them up. J ate his 1st one, but wanted no more. I licked my fingers and that was enough for me ;)  

Science

The kids took turns reading pages 106-109 in Living World. We decided to look up some videos to go long with what we read. Short videos depicting the Argus pheasant dance can be found here and the Peacock dance here. Chameleon color change here.


We learned about eggs and God's design for bird reproduction through laying eggs. We also learned of the egg arch shape and how its shape is one of the sturdiest and strongest shapes in architecture. The kids, as well as myself, were quite surprised at how hard it was to break the egg. 

It was only until we fractured or made a tiny crack in the egg that we were able to break them by squeezing.

The next part of our 'egg'speriment, as J called it, was to see how much weight our egg arches could hold.

12 workbooks and 2 spiral notebooks later and the back 2 egg arches collapsed.

The 'popping' sound of the shells made us all jump. LOL!

Bible

{We consider the read-alouds as part of Bible.} As we were reading Chapter 11 in 'Nate Saint' this week, the kids were intrigued with shrunken heads and wanted to know more. Before delving more into the subject, I took the time to explain how sad it was that people were killed for this and how sad it was for the Jivaro people to not know the one true God who could save them from this kind of life and treatment of others. With that being said, we looked up pictures of shrunken heads on the Internet. Of course then the kids wanted to know how they shrunk heads.  I found a short article here and we discussed a few of the elements they saw in the pictures...not everything though :-/


The kiddos also had fun flying (or *trying* to fly) their little yellow Nate Saint planes.

I hope you had a great week as well!

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

MFW-ECC - Week 10 - "Honey" the Police Dog

Our Week in Review

Field Trip - Yay!

On Friday, we had the pleasure of meeting "Honey".

Honey is a beautiful 2 year old police narcotics dog. She is trained to sniff out 4 types of drugs. The officer showed us how she does this by hiding something in one of the kids backpacks. She went from pack to pack sniffing. Just as soon as she found the pack containing the "illegal substance" she immediately sat at attention, very still, staring at the pack. It was pretty neat to watch. 

The kids had fun when the officer let each of them take turns throwing Honey her ball.

 They really got a kick out of racing Honey. Boy was she fast!

Art/Music

The art project we chose this week was to make flutes. The kids had a lot of fun decorating and playing their straw flutes. A word of warning though...I would snip off the sharp ends of the flutes and NOT allow the kiddos to walk around with them while playing them. We had one kiddo bump into another, the straw got shoved into his mouth, and he got a pretty good slice at the back of his throat. OUCH! 

Science

We started the week off by watching a short movie from Netflix about biomes. The kids liked it and the narrator is pretty goofy, which is always a plus in my kids' minds. lol!

The kids took turns reading pages 94-95, 100-101, and 102-105 in Living World.  I did take MFW's recommendation and change the wording, however, we still used this opportunity to discuss the lies they may see in textbooks from time to time regarding evolution, apes, and humans.  

Geography

Kids took turns reading pages 24-27 in the Illustrated World Atlas.

We also watched another Netflix show the kids really liked called "Really Wild Animals: Totally Tropical Rainforest". 

Bible

The Auca people we are hearing about in our Nate Saint story, reminded us of the Yanomamo people we read about on Monday. It is so sad to read of the killing and hatred between people, the mistreatment of women, and the child brides. I came across an article in a National Geographic magazine about Child brides when visiting a relative's house a while back. So, so sad and heartbreaking! You can see the full article here. I will warn you though, although there are no graphic pictures, many of the factual issues facing child brides are discussed and are likely to turn your stomach as it did mine. 

We had a GREAT week and were so glad to get out of the house and meet Honey. 


How was your week?

(This post has been linked up at 2 Ladybugs and a Lizard and Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers)

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)