It's a Wrap! Session 2 Week 3: Gobble! Gobble!

In Our Life This Week

Happy Thanksgiving...a day late! Did you have a wonderful dinner with family and friends? We spent the day with Mimi and Pop, my in-laws, and had a yummy dinner with all the fixin's, and played "Apple to Apples", listened to a few clarinet songs from Sugar Maple, and watched a little football. 

Homeschool High School

White Pine's week was a bit "off". There are times when LIFE takes precedence over school. Not that learning DIDN'T happen, but the TEXT BOOK stuff was less. Taking care of Olive, one of our ducks, was important this week. White Pine is our "Duck Whisperer", so his care of Olive was needed to get her feeling "ducky" again. Administering antibiotics for her respiratory infection hasn't been simple! ::wink:: He did wrap up his 3 experiments though, completed most of his South America unit, and read lots.

Accomplishments
The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas Approach Paper, Cellular Respiration, Succession, Population and Cell Types/Parts Labs, Bird Anatomy and Care, South American History and Geography

Homeschool Elementary

Math woes. ::sigh:: I guess it's going to be one of those years for Balsam Fir. But I think hope I found a solution for the time being. I really don't want the Saplings to dread a subject even if they must do it. I try hard to find things that will make learning at least tolerable during these "You're not making me, Mom!" phases. He's now working through a Math workbook from Education.com. And he's still progressing: he learned to regroup addition problems this week!

Balsam Fir's Education.com Math workbook and his first double digit addition secret puzzle page with one
carrying problem.

But, he taught himself to tie laces! With his fine motor challenges from SPD, I haven't really pushed learning to tie laces. He'll be 8 in a few months and I know most kids learn sooner, but I figured in his own time...Sunday morning he picked up the Learn to Tie Your Shoes box and within minutes he was a professional! 

Using a Learn to Tie Your Shoes box, Balsam Fir practiced a few times getting the loops and tugs right and then
moved onto sneakers. Isn't that an awesome bow?!

Oh, and do you remember me posting about Sugar Maple taking the Saxon 65 tests to move along quicker in her Math? Well, she finally reached the end of "moving along" (i.e. scoring 85% or higher) with test 14 and started lessons back up this week. She made it through 1/2 the book! Pretty impressive, huh?

We started our Erupt! unit study on volcanoes. (Did you see my planning post here?) We've dropped Apologia Botany until spring. It'll be more interesting to study plants when they're not all "preparing" for the winter. ::wink:: We mostly watched Bill Nye and You Tube videos on volcano basics and studied the layers of the Earth and how eruptions occur.

An Earth's layers flipbook with composition, width and state of matter information, and mini paper volcanoes.

And we continued on with our SOTW, learning about Ancient Egypt. Have I mentioned that I love the pronunciation guide from the activity book? Has that ever come in handy lately! We read about Amenhotep (AH men HO tep), King Tut, Thutmose and Hatshepsut (hat SHEP soot) and filled out our maps.

Ancient Egypt mapwork with places, people and event notes, and more cards added to our wall timeline.

Sugar Maple's Accomplishments
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian, Citing Passages, Spelling and Reading Comprehension with Samson, Cursive, Operations with Mixed Fractions, Volcanoes, Ancient Egypt, Dance Mat Typing (11wpm)

Balsam Fir's Acoomplishments
I am the Turkey, Writing (Capitals/Periods/Commas), Sight Words/Spelling with Samson, Handwriting, Double Digit Addition with Carrying, Volcanoes, Ancient Egypt

Helpful Hint

Index cards make really good Math visual tracking aides for younger learners. Balsam Fir uses them when puzzling out multiple digit Math problems. Graph paper is also great for organizing problems when kiddos have to write out the numbers. These simple "tricks" help keep those numbers where they should be!

Balsam Fir lines up the index card to block the tens column, adding up the ones. A simple tracking tool for those
with visual challenges or just learning multiple digit computations.

Places We Went and People We Saw
♦ Basketball Clinic and Parents of Players Meeting (SM)) ♦ Scouts (SM/BF) ♦ Kinderconcert: Brass Quintet (SM/BF) ♦

What We're Cookin'

We brought dessert for Thanksgiving dinner. Sugar Maple whipped up a creamy pumpkin pie, and White Pine baked a sweet pecan pie. (If you'd like the recipes, click here and here!)

Sugar Maple's pumpkin pie and White Pine's pecan pie. Isn't it awesome to have other cooks in the kitchen?

Something to Share

Those of you who know me probably know I don't like to shop. Ever. I shop when it's necessary, getting in and out as quick as possible. So, I had to share this SomeeCard from Facebook because I can't imagine shopping on Black Friday willingly and because I'm posting this ON Black Friday! ::wink::

Thanks for stopping by and reading at Our Side of the Mountain! We're linking up to these fun blog hops. Why not click over and check them out. See you next week!