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!!
No comments:
Post a Comment