For the last few weeks, we've been focusing on farm animals with our My Father's World kindergarten curriculum. We learned about goats, cows, and horses. This week, we were off to the wilds of Africa learning about elephants; but, first, here's my wrap-up of our horse unit. We made a shape horse complete with a fence and mane and tail. I gave the boys the shapes and asked them to form a horse. We also did an exercise in classfying animals. Using cards provided by our curriculum, we sorted wild animals from farm aniamls in a preparation to launch into our study of wild animals in the next 3 units.
This week, we began our study of elephants and the letter e. We watched two short videos on elephants and read many, many books from the library. As always, I enjoy learning right along with the children. I now can tell you the difference between an African and Asian elephant, how much water an elephant drinks in a day, how long an elephant drinks milk from his mother, all about the elephant family structure, how much elephant tusks are worth, and lots more! One humourous story from a fact learned in this unit.... We often tell the boys they sound like an elephant on the stairs up to their room because they can make such a racket going up and down. Well, we learned that elephants actually can walk very quietly. According to Elephant Families by Arthur Dorros, "A family of elephants could walk right by you and you wouldn't hear them." AJ came down for a drink in the wee hours of the morning this week. My dear husband got up to see what he was doing and during the course of the 2am conversation, AJ enlightened my husband all about how an elephant could walk right by and you'd never know! Now, I guess we need to teach them to walk like elephants so we can sleep through their early morning water runs. We discussed the saying "An elephant never forgets," and related it to how we shouldn't forgot God's blessings to us. (This fit nicely with Thanksgiving being on our minds.) We also played a memory game where I displayed 10 objects, they closed their eyes, and I removed one. Then they had to try to remember what was missing. In studies other than elephants, AJ has been working on measurement and telling time - two subjects that greatly interest him. For reading, we have taken a break from the My Father's World first grade reading that he was doing. The phonics lessons were advancing too quickly for him. He can now can read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, CVCe (consoant-vowel-consonant-silent e) words, and several sight words, but he is still sounding them out. So, we took a break from our curriculum to enjoy a Summerbook Reader - a delightful treasure I found at our local bookstore. These books have real pictures and simple stories to read. (I will be writing a detailed review of this wonderful resource soon, if you're interested in more information.) CJ continues to learn to blend sounds and sound out words. He has learned the "blend ladder" concept well. A little too well. (If you aren't familiar with the blend ladder, picture a ladder with the vowels on the rungs. Take a consonant, such as "t" and put it with a on the top rung and say "ta." Slide it down the ladder and say "te," "ti," "to," and "tu.") Our curriculum always puts the vowels in order. So, CJ can blend consonants with vowels beautifully as long as he goes in order, but ask him to blend "di" and he has to say "da" and "de" first to do it. I happy he's blending sounds, and he is now able to decode some CVC words. Thanks for stopping by my blog and reading my ramblings! Have a super weekend! This post is linked to the weekly wrap-up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
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It has been two weeks since you've heard any ramblings about our homeschool. We were visited by a rather unpleasant stomach bug last weekend. Due to his visit, I didn't get my blog post out last Friday and we missed a few days of school. However, we are all better now and back to normal. Thank-you, Jesus, for health & strength! We wrapped up our study of cows last week with making our own butter. I began the butter experience with some doubts - Will this really work to use store-bought heavy cream to make butter? Will we be able to stick with this long enough to see if it works? We put the cream into a pint jar with a lid and ring on it and began shaking. I explained what "cream" is to the boys because we drink goat milk (which does not separate like cow milk) and store-bought milk that is homogenized. We took turns shaking the jar as we reviewed the letter c, our verse for the week, and the character lesson about cows - God's word helps us grow. (Our curriculum has a character lesson or truth for each unit.) After about 10 minutes of shaking (and several peeks into the jar), it seemed like the cream was too thick to shake. We opened the jar and were delighted to see that the cream had thickened into "whipping cream." I eagerly sampled some, but the boys were rather hesitant. Mmm...it was delicious, but I knew we weren't at the butter stage yet. The cream wouldn't shake in the jar because it was too full. I dumped it into the blender and tried whipping it, but that didn't work. The whipping cream just sat there in the blender. So, I dumped just a bit of the whipping cream into the jar for easier shaking. After about 5 more minutes of shaking, suddenly we had butter!! I was surprised how quickly it happened. There was also a liquid in the jar with the lump of butter. I've heard this liquid called "buttermilk" and "whey." I'm not really sure what it is (can anyone help me in the comments section?), but I dumped it out and we had our butter and 3 proud boys! This week, we began studying horses and the letter h. I love the lesson to go with the horse - I will obey right away! We discussed how important it is for a horse to obey his master immediately for his safety and well-being. Of course, I related this to how they need to obey for their safety and well-being. We began our unit with making a clay model of a horse. As we made them, we discussed some parts of a horse - hock, withers, quarters, muzzle, etc. MJ was delighted to take part in this activity! We compared and contrasted horses and cars today. The best part of that discussion was in what "waste" they both leave behind. The boys got a smile out of that. We will continue horses next week. For now, I'll leave you with two of my favorite baby EJ photos. First, a smile!! He's been smiling since 3 weeks old, and I finally captured one. Second, a precious moment between brothers JJ and EJ. Blessings on your weekend! This post is linked to the weekly wrap-up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
We moved from goats to cows in our homeschool studies this week. We learned about the letter "c" and the sounds it makes. Our lesson for cows was that God helps us to grow. We discussed how milk from cows (or goats) helps us grow physically and milk from God's word helps us grow spiritually. We talked about how to get milk and meat for our hearts - reading the Word, praying, singing, and memorizing Bible verses. Since cows, like goats, is a fairly familiar topic to my boys, I decided to have them come up with some questions they have about cows. They wanted to know the answers to the following questions: "How are calves born?" "How do cows make milk?" "Why do some cows have rings in their noses?" We answered these questions through some youtube videos and books. One of my favorite books from this unit was Milk: From Cow to Carton by Aliki. This one answered how they "make" the milk. (I appreciated how Aliki even included goats at the end of the book!) We made a cow collage on our school room wall. We included different breeds of cows, where cows live, what they eat, and what products we get from cows. Since our units are set up for 6 days, we will be finishing up cows next week with attempting to make our own butter from cream. I'm not sure how this will work with store-bought cream, but we'll see. In other news, there is a new goat in the pen. Meet Ziggy - our 2016 buck for breeding. He's been busy already, and we are eager to test our does for pregnancy. We need to wait until 30 days post breeding to test them. We like to test for pregnancy and CAE with one blood sample in the fall. We will be opening our goat kid waiting list in the near future, if you are interested in a Nubian goat.
To wrap up my post, here's a picture of EJ - just riding along with life here at Russell Homestead. He's a very happy, content baby! Thanks for stopping by! |
AuthorVanessa from Russell Homestead. Follower of the Lord Jesus, wife of my knight in shining armor, mother of 5 wonderful children, and joint-keeper of the Russell homestead. Thanks for stopping by! Archives
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Vanessa Russell
Independent Field Representative ID#20249934. |