What We Studied

The temperatures this past week were unseasonably warm, in the 50s and 60s for most of the week. We took advantage and had two long afternoons at the park with friends. I doubt we are going to get any more mild days until spring, so we took time out of our homeschooling schedule to play. It was nice to get out and about. As such, our lessons were shortened. Thankfully, I planned for shortened lessons in December to have time to soak in all the holiday magic.

Literature and Poetry

We kept at reading The Wind in the Willows. I’m not sure Arthur really loves it, but I’m enjoying his writing style. It sounds lovely when read out loud. We’ll be finishing that book next week.

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

• A Snowflake Fell: Poems About Winter by Laura Whipple

Math

More review, puzzles, and wrap-up. I decided to hold off starting 3B until January. Until then, we are continuing our logic puzzle book and lots of math games.

• Singapore Math Common Core Edition 3A

• Primarily Logic

Social Studies

This week was all about the East African kingdoms of Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe. We made lots of connections to empires from the ancient world. Plus, we got to check out two very interesting archaeological sites.

• DK Timelines of Everyone

• When on Earth

• DK History

• DK Timelines of Everything

• Great African Kingdoms by Sean Sheehan

• Ancient West African Kingdoms by Mary Quigley

• Great Zimbabwe by Mark Bessire

Arthur Independent Time

To allow for one-on-one time with Quentin, I have added an hour of independent work time for Arthur. Each week, he will have a mix of packet work (mostly grammar and math review), independent reading time, and special projects. Many of his projects will be aligned with our literature selections (some taken from B&R Language Arts curriculum) and history. This week, he focused on packet work and some random building projects.

Science and STEAM Coop

Continuing with our Dinosaur unit from Blossom and Root! We covered the Paleocene and Neogene Eras. We ended up watching a lot of Eons to cover most of the Cenozoic. We’ll be wrapping up this giant unit next week.

• The Story of Life: Evolution by Katie Scott

• Life: The First Four Billion Years by Martin Jenkins

• When the Whales Walked and Other Incredibly Evolutionary Journeys by Dougal Dixon

• DK Dinsoaur

• DK Where on Earth? Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Creatures

• Prehistoric by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld

• Dinosaurium by Chris Wormell and Lily Murray

For Coop, we had our Robots and Engineering first week. Quentin and the littles made a simple dog robot and talked about the concept of robots. Arthur got to start building a large hydraulic robot. Next week, the big kids get to learn a bit of programming to set up the rest of their robot.

Art/Music

Nothing this week

Quentin

I have scheduled at least four 1-hour time blocks for one-on-one time with Quentin. I bought Blossom and Root’s Early Years Volume 2 curriculum to use as our base. I love the variety of activities and some of the bigger projects included. Quentin and I read a lot of books, did some alphabet review, and completed a few math packets and units on Khan Academy.

ELA

Math

Other

Field Trip

We didn’t have an official field trip this week, but we ended up running all around town with other tasks. Plus we had two long park playdate afternoons.

Documentary Selection

I have carved out a one hour time block each week to watch a documentary related to our studies. We didn’t actually watch anything this week, but made up for it by all the PBS Eons videos for our dinosaur unit.

Picture books read

• All Right Already! A Snowy Story by Jory John

• Little Owl’s Snow by Divya Srinivasan

24 Days of Christmas Books - It’s become a tradition. I wrap packages of holiday books for each day of December until Christmas. We have a great group of books this year!

• Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett

• Gingerbread Christmas by Jan Brett

• Catch that Cookie by Hallie Durand

• Five Little Monkeys by Eileen Christelow

• The Wheels on the Bus at Christmas

• The Library Gingerbread Man by Dotti Enderle

• Who Will Pull Santa's Sleigh by Russ Willms

• The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup

• Dream Snow by Eric Carle

• Snow Globe Wishes by Erin Dealey

• The Dinosaurs' Night Before Christmas by Anne Muecke

• Olive, the Other Reindeer by J. Otto Seibold

• Santa in the City by Tiffany D. Jackson

• Santa's Secrets Revealed by James Solheim

High

• The boys received their second COVID vaccine on Wednesday! Even with Omicron now circulating, I’m feeling so much better knowing that the boys have at least a baseline protection against the virus. They were amazing at the pharmacy and once again the pharmacist was very impressed. Of course, they got a small toy afterward (Arthur got a Baryonyx and Quentin got a Bluey figure).

Low

• Our lessons are all out of whack this week, but I should expect this during December. I definitely need to remember this for next year and just do half lessons during the month.

Next Week

• Finishing The Wind in the Willows

• Covering the Black Death (and Cathedrals) for history

• Reviewing our math concepts

• Finishing the Dinosaur Unit

• Covering robots and engineering for coop

• Going on our last coop field trip of the year (to DoSpace for robotics theme)

Next up on the TBR pile: