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Homeschool Week Wrap-Up – Grades 5, 8, 10… but mostly about my 10-year old’s week!

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Life in Our Homeschool

This was our first week back and it didn’t go quite as planned (though, when does homeschooling ever go exactly as we think it will?!)

At the end of last week and into the weekend, I was quite sick.  My older two were away for the holiday weekend with some friends.  When Monday rolled around, ED was excited to start back.  We jumped back into homeschooling without her siblings.  That was nice, though, because this year ED will be doing some units separate from her brother and sister.

We jumped right back into Greek history and mythology where we left off a month or so ago. This summer we read the Lightning Thief and made it about half-way through the Greek history book (which we love!)  This week, we continued on with that and started diving more into Greek mythology.  ED started on a family tree of the Greek gods (Those are the cards you see at the top in the picture below.)  I’ll be sharing that new packet sometime soon!

Greek MythologyWe bought a new board game called Constellations: The Game of Stargazing and the Night Sky (affiliate link) that the girls and I brought out for the first time earlier this week. It’s pretty fun if you are learning about the constellations! The object is to gather enough star points by either drawing a card or picking one up off the table to be able to grab one of the constellations (face up on the right) and place them (face down with the constellation pictures showing) on the board next to one of the other constellations. The person who has gathered the most points at the end of the game wins.  It was pretty easy to understand the game and the girls and I really enjoyed it. 🙂 I love adding educational games like this into our homeschool routine.  (Elementeo Chemistry Card Game is another great game to add to your homeschool if you don’t have that!)

She also worked on an activity (which I hope to share on the blog next week) about “where I live.”  She has loved working on that!  I had thought it might be a little easy for her, but it prompted some wonderful discussions!  We talked about how many stars there are… and about the Canadian provinces (we had just driven across Canada from Ontario to Alberta)… we talked about various cities in Australia (since she was born there)… and used google maps to focus in our neighborhood… and more.  I love when we do so much more and dive deeper than I think we will! Below was when she was drawing our house (on the first day)… and then various pages/notebook pieces that she’s finish. (She hasn’t quite finished this activity yet… you can see that she hasn’t folded/put together the booklet yet.)

Where I Live Activity - Drawing our HouseWe also jumped back into our other subjects like reading, writing, math and German. Since my other two were sick, ED and I watched a sweet cartoon series (in German!!), Die Kinder vom Berghof, about a girl and her friend (and their families) who live in the mountains of Switzerland. We watch TV shows and films (in German) pretty regularly (often while we’re eating lunch!). We also work on other things (we read stories in German, work on grammar & vocabulary, etc. but didn’t get much other stuff done this week.)

German TV show For writing, we’re doing a combination this year of Writing Workshop and Essentials in Writing (a homeschool writing curriculum).  She likes both.  (My older two are doing the high school level version.)

For math, she’s using two workbooks as her spine at the moment. She’s working on fractions mostly (though also practicing arithmetic skills) and she also started a Geometry workbood by Caron Dellosa that I used with both of my older kids (points, segments, rays lines, etc.). It’s out of print, but I was lucky to find a new one on Amazon for a good price this summer.  At this point, they only seem to have used ones in stock over at Amazon. 🙁  If you manage to find one I think these introduce geometry really well!

EDs 5th Grade MathAs for my older two, they started back on Tuesday.  We are doing biology this year and we started with a brief overview of symbiosis.  We’re going over all the biological relationships and specific terms for those.  We also jumped into unit 2 of Thinkwell Biology.  I was a bit apprehensive that is might be too challenging for them because the second unit is on Biochemistry.  We were so happy, though, because it starts off with the material from our chemistry unit last spring… valence electrons, ions, isotopes, etc.  They knew the material well! If made me feel really great about what they’ve learned! ?

They also started in on their subjects just briefly… math, writing, reading, German, etc.

Unfortunately, on Thursday both LD and DD came down with the same terrible cold I had had last weekend.  They have been in bed sleeping most of the day yesterday and today.  It made for another quiet but fun day with ED! She’s loving having me to herself!

Oh, I forgot to say that one of our friends has a butterfly garden. ED and I got to see the monarch caterpillars in various stages… from munching leaves to making a chrysalis!

Monarch Caterpillars

Next week all of our outside activities start up. This year the kids are still doing homeschool band (saxophone, flute, French horn), sports, scouts, choir, youth group… and also have some outside classes – computer science, Spanish… so it will be a busy year!

I hope you had a fabulous week!

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~Liesl

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.

Here are some other posts that give you a glimpse of our homeschool week and various things homeschool related!!

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