Monday, December 28, 2020

Caught up in History!

 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.


And speaking of his writing, HIS BOOK CAME! Abraham wrote a book that is all about his imaginary world of Front Flipping Dinosaurs and he illustrated it as well. It is so stinken cute!!!


But now he has moved on from dinosaurs to "six legged eyeballs," the main one being called "Eyebee." He draws them, paints them, and 3D prints them.



This last photo was for the optometrist. Abraham was quite excited to go to an eye doctor. So was I, when I got to see the photos of the inside of their eyes. It was really cool. 

None of the kids had any eye problems, but William had a slight far? sightedness, and I decided to get him reading glasses to ease up any cognitive load he might be having while reading since he's my most severe dyslexic anyway.




And of course, we've been having Christmas break. I've been taking advantage of this break by getting all my college school work done for myself.

The kids have had an isolated but perfect Christmas. 



And Hyrum helped the downstairs cuties make a stop motion nativity for their Christmas talent sharing that they do. It is so cute, I have to share it here:


Yep, so that wraps up the 2020 year! Never thought we would have such a year, and I'm very excited to get it over!




Sunday, December 27, 2020

Come Follow Me 2021

  IT'S A NEW YEAR!!!!

Hallelujah! 2020 is behind us. I'm so excited to be DONE with 2020, that I created a NEW Come Follow Me Background!!! 

And, don't worry, because if you don't want the hassle of printing out a new background, it is the same proportions as the old background. Both will work with the weekly printouts.



If you want the old background (the blue one,) or if you need instructions on how to use your background, here's the link:


Here are the links for all the different sizes in inches for the NEW Background.






And if you live in a smarter country that doesn't deal in pesky inches, here is the link for size A2 paper:


A3 paper right

And, if for whatever reason you want the png for just the title, here you go:

Title only click here


And the Church has pulled through again and has a video resource collection for Come Follow Me 2021. I highly suggest watching these videos as part of your family Come Follow Me experience.



If you're new here, it's really easy to use my Come Follow Me boards.

1-Print out a background with the links provided above. (There's lots of options, so you should be able to print it out on your home printer, or if you want to take the files to a store to get them print a poster, you can do that too.)

2-Laminate the background. (Clear packing tape works great.)

3-Cut out the weekly 8x10in picture that is in you Come Follow Me manual, and stick it on the background where it says "Image of the Week." For the small image, you can take any other picture from that week's pages, but I always use the one above the title. (This usually means you will need an extra manual for cutting.)

When you've done this, your board will look something like this:


4-Print the cutouts below and cut them up, stick them on the board, and VOILA! You have a visual reminder for your family of what you're studying this week. This is what it should look like:


WEEKLY CUTOUTS
Click on the size to print





By the way, some people have asked where I get the weekly scripture from. First I go to the Scripture Mastery and find out if there is one in the lesson. If there isn't, then I go to the BYU Scripture Citation Index, and look for the most referenced scripture within the reading of the week. (See? I actually do think about it!) Sometimes I decide to pick the scripture that goes with the title of the week.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

ACDC and Robber-barons

 History-

We learned about Edison. I love how his teacher said he was stupid. There is such power in that story for anyone who has been told that they are not good enough. It also inspires me to be a mom like Edison's mom.


A lot of people say that he was dyslexic, but after studying him, the fact that he would read from a young age everything he got his hands on, made his own library as a child, and wrote his own newspaper that he sold at age 12, yeah, not sure about that, but regardless, his ability to prove doubters wrong is inspiring.

We tried to make our own lightbulb as our activity, but we couldn't get it to work. If I remember right, we were able to get it to work four years ago. I'm not sure what happened. At one point we were using power too strong, and the filament would just break with a flash, but at other times nothing would happen. Oh well, it shows how hard it was to get a working lightbulb, right?

The next person we studied was Tesla. Now HE could have been dyslexic (but it is more likely that he had Aspergers.) Such a fascinating guy. Wonder what would have happened if he had been a good business man and had PR skills. I think this world would have been very different.

We talked a lot about the rivalry between Edison and Tesla. I tried not to be too partial to either, and my boys started taking sides. 

For our activity, they played with a plasma ball. This one hasn't actually died or broken yet, which is a new thing for us. They usually die so fast. This one even fell and is still ticking. I think it's Discovery brand.

We watched "Current Wars" to go along with our ACDC unit.

We did talk a bit more about inventors, but then we moved on.

We talked about immigration. We talked a lot about Ellis Island, and it was perfect, because Chelsea served her mission there and was able to give a lot of insight about what happened there. I'm excited to take my kids there someday (not that I have anything planned...COVID blah....) We have the cutest book about Ellis Island:


We made Lady Liberty crowns as our activity. 


Such a controversial topic, that I'm glad I'm the one teaching my kids about immigration.

Then we talked about the infamous Robber-barons. Yes I call them robber-barons instead of "captains of industry." Maybe that's because I'm super frustrated with the modern "robber-barons" of information ie Google, Twitter, and Facebook. We talked about them too.

We talked mostly about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, and Carnegie. We read the part in History of the World about stocks and Carnegie, which I love. I love how Susan Wise Bauer has the ability to write in such a way that it makes things interesting and engaging for kids. 

For our activity we played Monopoly, but I didn't take any pictures when we actually played, so here's a picture after the fact:


Science!

Soooo sad. We are stopping science club at least until the new year because of the stinker COVID19. I really hope we will be able to commence again soon, but I am honestly not very hopeful. Not until we can start going outside again will this spike go down (I HOPE I'm wrong.)

I wish we could at least do our last club about animal classes (mammals) but we just couldn't.

We had a lesson on reptiles. We didn't have any dissection for reptiles, but I had students bring in REAL LIVE reptiles for show and tell. That was super fun, and the older class brought a turtle that kept pooping all over!

I think this is the turtle from the younger class, he's 35 years old!

We had fun little activities such as putting snake "tongues" on our noses so we could "smell," and putting balloon lizard "tales" on ourselves that we tried to take off....yeah it was a crazy game I made up, but I think they loved it.


I also knew I wanted those sticky hand flinger things to pretend to be lizards' tongues, but they weren't at the dollar store. I knew were I had seen them in town. I took a ton of quarters and went to the dentist's office and asked if I could buy their prizes! I remembered they had the sticky hands as a prize in a gum-ball machine. I felt really awkward, but I got my sticky hands!

Then we talked about birds.  We looked at different kind of feathers and talked about warmblooded animals and we looked at a real nest and other things, and then we dissected owl pellets!!!

One of my favourite activities. It's like a treasure hunt.

This is my friend, Amy, who's been helping me lately. I REALLY appreciate it. She even brought extra owl pellets from her back yard! My owl pellets were from Amazon cost $70 bucks! And even then I wasn't going to have enough for everyone. But with Amy's we did! THANK YOU!

I love how excited the Youngers were when they found a skull or jawbone. The olders were a little grossed out (I just need to brake them in more I guess, silly kids) but most got into it, and look at this cool bird foot one of my science kids found in their pellets:


And now we will wait--and wait--until we do mammals. I guess we could do it virtually, but honestly, you could just watch youtube videos instead. It's about being together in person, seeing things and touching things! I'm bummed.

 As for core subjects, here's a little writing by Daniel that was inspired by write into winter:


And some write into winter by William:



Umm, yeah, I guess I didn't take too many core subject photos this week.

However, here's a video of William doing his math. The way he makes up a story to help himself understand long subtraction cracks me up:

Moving on-

Abraham, always the artist, gets my phone or iPad, which is always locked, and takes a photo (which you can do when locked) and then that opens up the ability to edit the photo. This all means that he found a way to do art on my phone any time he wants without permission and I'm always finding new creations such as these:



Don't you love the sparkle in the little boy's eyes?

Abraham also encourages me to do random activities. He saw this fruit train in a random book that I didn't know we even had and begged me to create it. 


And then Hyrum gave Abraham a lesson on how to do iMovie. This was Hyrum's example:

Hyrum is always having fun making movies:

And as for holidays, we were able to meet with the Thulin extended family over zoom. I sometimes love technology. I saw more people than if I had been there in person in a normal year! We ended up talking for hours. It was so good.

But, to be honest, I never wait for US Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas. I don't even wait for Dustin's birthday either. One fun thing we've done this year is to help our local Youth Centre with stockings for teenagers. 

We made an assembly line to fill all the stockings, which is perfect since we are going to learn about Henry Ford soon.



And lastly, with new restrictions, we had our mom's night via zoom. Not as good, but still something. I love my mom friends!!!