Easter and Robin Hood

So yet again, history was the main highlight of school....sooooo exciting....LOVE social distancing.....I'm getting pretty sick of this.

So...to continue our Medieval Ages journey, we talked about Muhammad creating Islam. We made miniature prayer rugs as our activity.

Then we talked about pilgrimages and how Catholics create cathedrals to hold holy relics, and I emphasized the importance of Jerusalem for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. For our activity we made stained glass windows.

Don't you love that unicorn!? The cutie downstairs did it.

Then we talked about the crusades. We read from story of the world (who did such an excellent job of concisely telling what happened.) and watch a few "Horrible Histories." We made shields with a coat of arms on them as our activity.

This is Abraham's coat of arms that is all about zombies.

One day we read about King Richard the Lionheart, but we didn't do anything. (By the way, he was pretty horrible-not like all the Robin Hood movies portray.)

Then of course we talked about ROBIN HOOD! How fun. My kids were surprised that he wasn't fictional. Well, apparently, we don't actually know how fictional he was, but I like to believe that it's all real, so why not. As our activity I gave them bows and arrows.

They were hooligans running around the house and being crazy with glee. Very cute fun.

Then we talked about the Magna Carta. We talked about how Prince John became such a horrifically bad king, that it was a blessing, because everyone ganged up on him and made him sign a document that would make the king not as strong as the law.

It was interesting. I remember four years ago when we read a book about this, and they said the the pope was so frustrated with King John that he excommunicated him and then took all the clergy out of England. And we talked about how crazy it would be if the government made it so the church closed down and you couldn't go to church or have church ordinances like marriage and funerals and baptisms.

Now, four years later, we were reading this, but now when we came to this part and talked about churches being shut down....ummm...churches ARE shut down!!! It just reinforced to me what a twilight zone we're living in right now!!

Hyrum asked me if COVID19 was an important part of history, and I said that absolutely it was and that it will be in every history book and always remembered, and he got so excited and he stared singing the end of the Classical Conversations Timeline song and made up a new end that included COVID, and he said "I'm so excited for them to change the song and include that part!"

Yep.

Anyway, we also talked about how King John and all the nobles probably couldn't even read the Magna Carta and we talked about manuscripts and how pretty much only the church wrote and copied anything.

For our activity, we made illuminations.

I was pretty proud about how smooth the progression of history topics went. Muhammad to pilgrims to crusades to Richard to Robin Hood to King John and the Magna Carta. It just flows right into the next.

We of course did the essential learning as well. This is that "magical" month where I actually get out my Alberta checklist and determine what is lacking and make sure we do it so we can fulfill the checklists.

I'm feeling lazy so I'm being a bit of a hypocrite. Yes, I'm actually having my kids do ExamBank.

I feel sheepish. I kind of headed off this campaign to NOT have ExamBank as part of out Westwind schooling. BUT I AM still against how they were actually doing it. The east end were REQUIRING you to do it EVERY week as proof of learning. That's just nonsense. It's like constant government testing! No thank you.

But an end of year assessment that you choose to do instead of finding every example you need to from your own curriculum, is very different. We don't have to send it off to John if we don't like the score. We haven't loved the scores enough to send them off yet.

Also, this is the time of year for Brianpop study. The kids actually really love this. I haven't made sure that they're doing everything, but I will, and it makes my life easier.

Now, as an update on our All About Reading adventure, we had a BREAK THROUGH. It had everything to do with these:

They call them "word flippers" and they are genius. William has always sounded out Every. Single. Letter. for Every. Single. Word. You can never learn how to read if you stay that way. You eventually need to get (oh heavens I forgot the term for it) but that automatic recognition of groups of sounds and eventually words.

This, of course, is one of the hardest things for a dyslexic child to do, and I couldn't remember how my older kids eventually overcame this hurdle. I thought it had a lot to do with Barton's smooth hand motions to help them smoothly blend the sounds of the words.

William read from these word flippers, and instead of sounding out every word, just sounded out the first word. Once he got "pit" he could easily read "bit," "hit," "fit," etc. I was ecstatic. He felt like he wasn't really reading because he knew he wasn't actually sounding it all out, and I had to assure him that he was reading correctly, and it has slowly started to affect the rest of his reading.

I made a hard decision this week. I decided to teach William and Abraham separately. It was just getting too crazy teaching them both and maintaining their attentions and having them take turns. We'll see if that was a good decision.

In other news, we've had easter. We had baskets and made Easter eggs

We also made lego Easter eggs..and bunnies.

We did this as part of Janet's challenges. She's so awesome. The kids need something to feel connected.

Of course, online connections still happening:

And my boys have started "visiting" friends outside of their windows. What a weird world.

But today was a nice day, and I think it's actually beginning to be spring. We've had a few more snow storms since this whole thing started, and I'm ready for summer and freedom.

Catching up with History

Well, social distancing sucks.

But since everything else is cancelled, we get more history done. Because there's nothing else to do.

We've talked about the crumbling of Rome. It never really "fell" did it. Of course the main character in that story is Justinian, and I was too lazy to do an activity, but we found this awesome youtube guy that really gave a kid-friendly in-depth look into Justinian's life.

Then we moved on to the north and started learning about medieval England! We started by learning about Beowulf. I forgot that Beowulf is a Danish character. But he's the first character written for ENGLAND, so whatever.

We tried to make Celtic knots for our activity. I needed round thick string, and I just had flat suede. I made one that looked relatively close to the desired effect,

But this was the best that my boys could create.

We also learned about Camelot. We watched "Sword in the Stone" as part of this, and realized that my boys have missed out on some great Disney classics. We'll have to fix that.

I've learned so much about Camelot with my boys. I've always thought it was excalibur that Arthur pulled out of the stone, and so I didn't get the whole Lady of the Lake thing. Well, now I know.

We made marshmallow castles as our activity. Everyone was pretty happy about that.

We then focused on feudalism and what that meant. We talked about the different levels of power and read a cool book by magic school bus about castles and this reading rainbow book about medieval feasts. For this activity we made crowns.

Then (this was dumb of me for not organizing things better) we left England and randomly talked about ancient Africa. Africa is fun, because we talked just a little about some ruins that we don't really know anything about, and then talked mostly about how since Africa doesn't have much written history, we need to learn from their stories, and then we brought out all the cute African story books I have.

I need to get another Anansi the Spider: A Tale of the Ashanti. That book got loved to death by my older kids, and my younger kids should experience it.

For our activity, we made finger puppets out of gloves to help us tell the stories.

Then we learned about Genghis Khan (which made me realize that I've been pronouncing "Khan Academy" wrong, because I was NOT pronouncing it the Genghis way, and you should apparently.)

And again that Youtube channel that had a Justinian series, had a series about Khan, so that was nice. Crazy bloody guy, eh? We just coloured a picture as our activity, but since we don't do that very often, they loved it!

And Daniel again tried his hand at drawing. Behold Genghis Kahn:

I was pretty proud at some of the detail that he included.

But not only did we get a lot of history under our belts, we accomplished some other awesome things. For instance HYRUM IS DONE WITH RIGHTSTART MATH!!! I'm so proud of him!!! He has made it through some tough concepts, and he's done great.

Another cool thing, is that DANIEL'S DONE WITH BARTON BOOK 6!!!! And that means we're practically done with Barton, because I just have them watch her videos for book 7 and then call it good, so this is really exciting.

There's a chance I will never teach Barton again (umm probably not true, since I see my empty-nest life full of tutoring.) My younger boys are continuing with All About Reading. It's weird because it's fun but painful (hard to sound out words etc-not as smooth as Barton in the beginning.) But just look at them feeding monsters words:

Also, math has been continuing for everyone (but Hyrum) and Abraham is starting to really get to some tricky stuff.

Maxwell totally rocked the "quadratic formula" unit he did and has it memorized despite him BEGGING me not to sing the "pop goes the weasel" rendition of the quadratic formula.

These are his notes. LOL

So, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, we are now "social distancing" not quarantining. Which means we can go to the store! We were running pretty low:

When we were still in quarantine, we did get fruit from a wholesaler that my friend had connections with, and they sent it to our door. We had oranges galore.

And somehow, even deep in quarantine, we hosted a pretty awesome birthday for the sweetie who lives in our basement. It was a "Frozen" birthday complete with swimming in our garage, going on a frozen treasure hunt, making marshmallow Olafs, watching frozen ll, and making frozen slime.

I have to admit, that during this time of self isolation, the device time has laxed. They need that friend time, and that comes online only now.

The whole world has gone to teaching online, which has been fun in some ways. Mark Rober taught my kids science for the past two weeks. They love it! Why does helium make your voice higher? Does farting make you weigh less? Why is the sky blue? How to waterproof your hand? How do astronauts weigh themselves? All these questions and more answered!

Also, we had a parents meeting with Westwind, and NO school is NOT cancelled. The teachers will still be involved as they can remotely, and John will still do class craft, and I will still need to do checklists and someone is still reading this blog.

They've even started doing zoom classes.

I was so happy about this. I listened in when Heather got all these teenagers talking about the hard questions and concerns that they were all having with COVID-19. It was so healthy for them to get together and express themselves and what they were feeling.

Westwind didn't even cancel their Paper Bag Book Share where they asked us to decorate a bag according to a certain book we've read and put things in that bag that had to do with the book. Hyrum did "Tales of an 8 Bit Kitten" Daniel did "The Cay," William did "If I ran the Rainforest" and Abraham did "Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears."

It was pretty chaotic, but good.

We've continued some things during this crazy time. Piano lessons are now over FaceTime. And Daniel has suddenly realize he should be doing Spartan gym training every day.

And in other news, during Conference, the boys all made posters for Janet, their art teacher, who was able to go in for surgery to get cancer removed. It was really scary, because they thought they might not be able to get her into a hospital because of the virus, but they did, and I'm so happy she's home and hopefully cancer free. I've realize how much she mean to me during this crazy time.

By the way, what a crazy awesome General Conference!!! One to be remembered, that's for sure!!