Sunday, March 26, 2017

VANUATU

I'll be honest: Not a huge amount of purposeful homeschool has happened this month. But REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE? Oh you bet baby!!!

We learned all about:

Airport travel (my kids did awesome!)


Oceanography:

Flower Botany:

Fresh water springs:


Poisonous creatures, and how to treat them. Abraham and Daniel stepped on sea urchins, and we swam with a venomous sea snake (a docile breed) and we've seen venomous centipedes and stonefish.

What "rainy season" truly means.

Snorkeling lessons:

and Entomology. Lots and lots of Entomology.

We have also found out how to start BUILDING A HOUSE!

This house will not be our primary residence, but it will be our beach house.

Also, we have had a lot of cultural experiences! (Obviously) We are in the minority ethnic race here, and even if you are white, you are most likely an Australian or french.

We go to church, and it's all in Bislama. Our boys have learned a few words, and are so proud, but the cutest is when Abraham says "tanku tumas" which is "thank you too much."

We've hired a house girl, and she assures us that she will teach my kids bislama. Haha.


Even with all these awesome social studies hands-on fantasticness, we did get a chance to finally end our WWII unit by talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We made lanterns and set them into calm ocean waters to remember those who had died and suffered from those two explosions.


As for Math? Well yes, we did do some:

Daniel can now do long subtraction


And the book had him take his "midyear test" even though we are more than 2/3s of the way through the book.



Hyrum can now do long multiplication by double digits, but it was not easy. He dragged his feet, but he gets it.


And this was pretty awesome of him: we play this game of "guess my rule" and he nailed really tricky rules fast and easily:


Also, I'm not sure I've said this, but he understands how to square a number and what "square root" means.

Maxwell's math has finally moved beyond tessellations. THANK GOODNESS! That was a long unit. He liked it, though. Now he's studying exponents and things.


And English? Well, not as much has been done.

Maxwell was on a reading frenzy before we left, but I couldn't take very many books with me (whimper whimper sniff sniff) but he did read "Babe" and a couple of other books.

I'm really going to start focusing on his writing.

Hyrum and Daniel have been reading to me from a Barton "chapter books." My nephew will start tutoring them tomorrow. (Did I mention how it became to much of a source of anxiety to teach my lovely boys so I've been delegating?)

So yeah, we are in VANUATU! And we will be for the rest of the school year. Crazy ride.