We learned about the Wright Brothers! With all of these inventors we've been going through ( I purposefully have an inventor-focused modern history slant,) I've tried to point out all their failures, and HOPE that my kids realize that GRIT pays off, and failure is learning.
For our activity, we got balsa wood planes. The instructions were in Chinese, and we used Google translate to figure it out. They loved it once we understood how to make it.
Then we did Henry Ford. I think my favourite thing about him is that he paid his workers enough that they could afford his cars. Although we had already learned about assembly lines by doing the stocking assembly lines, we did ANOTHER assembly line. This time it was of car cookies!
Then we learned about Teddy Roosevelt! Love that guy. talk about GRIT! He took down the robber barons, preserved our parks, built the Panama Canal, and had the big stick/speak softly policy. I'm sure there's tons of bad things about him, but I like to focus on the good.
My boys love the teddy bear story.
Here's Abraham with his teddy, and the children's book about Teddy and the national parks:
Then, even though we had already done WWI because of Remembrance Day, we had a tiny refresher by watching "War Horse." I love it because it shows how the world was changed by the war on an industrial level as well as a psychological level.
We also learned about the Russian Revolution. I think it's important to hear how the road was made clear for Stalin, who we will study in more depth later.
We watched Anastasia as our activity.
Then we learned about Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart at the same time so I would have enough time to also learn about Marie Curry later.
Lindbergh and Earhart subjects work together well since they both got famous by flying over the Atlantic. Of course, I HAVE to teach about Lucky Lindy. Such daring amazingness!!! He stayed awake for over 55 hours!?! And to know of people who had died, but still to go for it! Nothing but a wicker chair and some sandwiches. Love it!
We finished learning about Earhart on our way to Waterton for an outing (we NEED to get out of the house these days!) and as our activity we made a lot of paper planes from that awesome paper plane book I got a few years ago.
Then we learned about Marie Curie. I think I've got to change my outline so that in four years, we do this again, because she's too important to skip. There's a Nest Entertainment Animated Heroes about her. This series comes in handy a lot.
We didn't do anything for our activity, but we should have gotten glowsticks and played with them. That's what I'll do next rotation.
Then we learned about the invention of movies. Watching Steam Boat Willy is always a must.
We made our own stop animation movie as our activity:
We then briefly learned about prohibition....I think we made Rootbeer sometime recently....so that counts, right? Okay, so we did a poor job with this subject (which is a bit ironic of you knew about Cardston politics)....moving on....
Speaking of politics, we learned about Women's suffrage! My boys were quite shocked to hear about how unequal things were (I taught this 4 years ago...love children's memories...WAIT I remember now...I had my nieces teach them this while I was gone. Hummm) And for our activity, we made picket signs:
She's green and purple because those are the colours for women's suffrage. It has nothing to do with Elphaba, I swear. Although, I'm sure Elphaba would support women's suffrage.
WHEW!!!! we are caught up in history!!!
We had the time to catch up mostly because all other forms of schooling with others have been cancelled. Thankfully we had a Christmas party at the alternate school....where they only saw their teachers. They try so hard to let the kids have fun regardless of the COVID rules. Bless them.
They made chocolate covered pretzels as part of the "party."
We are not completely alone, however. There is the little cuties in the basement apartment. THANK GOODNESS!
I'm not sure why Lily couldn't play at that moment, but I just loved the note! In the picture above, William is putting on a puppet show, I believe.
As far as core subjects, ummmm let's skip Hyrum because I can't find any photos, but let's just say he's writing a murder mystery party, and doing division of fractions.
Daniel--I'm not sure why, but I have tons of photos for evidence for Daniel.
Daniel is writing a book. He will do it even if I don't remind him to!
He's also learned the Pick's theorem, which I think is so interesting. He found the land area of Efate by using it.I thought I would include this photo, because it show how Rightstart makes them create their own algebra equations. Brilliant.
And he's been having an introduction to trigonometry, which always makes my kids' brain gears grind.
And here's a worksheet that is kind of a sum-up of what we've been doing lately:
William....umm, skipping William as well I suppose....no photos, but he is almost to the point where he can do long multiplication, and he is moving quite reluctantly along with All About Reading.
Abraham, again has a ton of photos, not sure why.
Here's his "9 week" math review test. I was WAY behind with him, (obviously if this was a 9-week test,) but now we are pretty much caught up.
He is doing his handwriting. Thankfully, he is consistently holding his pencil correctly. This has been a year long struggle, and I feel like he's still not strong in the way he holds it.
He is moving along with Logic of English, who is having him write in salt! So fun. I think this is an OG technique that we haven't really done very much for the rest of the kids.
