Social Studies - Life in the Plymouth Colony (week 1)

We are taking a quick break from our unit on explorers and are studying about life in the Plymouth Colony. This unit is timely since it is all most Thanksgiving. I felt like it would be a good use of our time to learn more about the Pilgrims and their struggles. We have been reading about them in our day-to-day homeschooling with Sonlight.

As our spine, we will be using History Pockets - Life in the Plymouth Colony. This book has 8 different aspects of Plymouth Colony and a neat way to learn it. Along with this book, we will be reading several different books from the Library as well as books from our collection. We worked on two pockets per week so we started in late October in order to finish in time for Thanksgiving.

The first pocket we worked on was about why the Pilgrims left their home country to voyage to the New World. J mapped their voyage on a mini map.

She wrote about what she would take on the trip - she had to make sure it fit into the trunk.

The, she drew the items to see if they would all fit.

We learned about the Mayflower and how little room the Pilgrims actually had on the ship!

Pocket one contains a model of the Mayflower, the map of their voyage, her trunk with all of her items, and some basic vocabulary.

The second pocket was about the New World. There wasn't too many activities for this pocket. J worked on the vocabulary. I had her put the words in alphabetical order and then she wrote the definitions of each word.

There was a word search. Not too much planning for this pocket. We read a ton of books about the Pilgrims. After a while, they started to sound the same! (but we still read them:) This Life in the Plymouth Colony has definitely reinforced what we have been reading about with Sonlight. Love that! Hope your week is going great.

American Artists - Harriet Powers

We are currently working through Great American Artists for Kids while we are studying American History this year. Each week we take one artist and learn about his/her life, works of art, and then try to create our own art work. This week's artist was Harriet Powers - a quilter of picture quilts. Her quilts told a story. I love quilting so this artist was definitely one of my favorites!

I found a book about Harriet Powers from the library. We read about her life and her quilts. J loved looking at all of them. I kept emphasizing the simplicity of her patterns.

J wrote a notebook page for Harriet Powers and added it to her art notebook.

She wrote an artist card for our artist wall. It seems our composer wall is lacking but our artists are doing well.

Here is a picture of our artist wall. We had to move it out of baby's reach. He was bending all of our cards and such. We couldn't have that!

J added Harriet Powers to our timeline.

The project suggested in the book was somewhat different. I thought it would be good for J to create her own quilt square based on a Bible story. Here, J is working on her plan. We discussed simplicity (again). I didn't want her to create a plan for something she was going to loose steam over quilting!

We went shopping for fabric. The very day we learned about Harriet Powers, I received a coupon on my phone for JoAnn's. Yay! We went shopping and I allowed her to pick out all of her fabrics and such. The next day, J ironed out the creases int he fabric. (Now, typically, if you are a quilter, you would wash the fabrics before all of this. But I decided this square wasn't going to be washed regularly so we skipped this step.)

This is the finished square (rectangle) with all of her pieces fused on. She will be sewing the pieces as well as quilting in the same step. Again, I didn't want her to get bored of the project so I simplified it. Her Bible quilt is the story of David and Goliath, in case you can't tell. She will add a button as a rock onto the top of it.

J is sewing her Bible story quilt. I love how she chose with fabric for David and Blacks for Goliath. Pretty cool. She worked on this quilt all week as well as other projects. She made a snowman for me. She asked her friend what they wanted her to make. I may have unleashed a sewing monster :)

Links

Georgia Encyclopedia - has some basic information on Harriet Powers as well as a great photo of one of her quilts.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston - great picture of another of Harriet Powers bible quilts.

My Hero - Harriet Powers, my hero project, another site with some information about her and her quilts,

Art Threads - more information and more pictures of her inspiring quilts.

Tolerance Website - has a lesson idea called Stitching It Together complete with mini unit to download.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History - has a few more pictures of her quilts and some information.

Tot Tuesday

Look what my baby can do!!!!!

Character Training - Courage with free printable

This school year, we are working through The Virtue Training Bible. Our virtue of the week was Courage. We definitely had fun with this one! Here are a few activities that we accomplished.

We started with our Courage Notebook printable (link below). J looked up the definition of courage in the dictionary. She wrote the definition under the Courage header.

We discussed courageous people in the bible and read about the fiery furnace. J created a furnace scene using tissue paper and glue. She included the angel in the furnace. This idea came from Meaningful Mama (link below).

This is her finished product. We put an electric candle behind the furnace scene to represent the flames. I love her angel!

She colored her Courage ring card. We read the verse all week. Be strong and courageous....

She watched the videos from Character First (link below) while coloring the badger sheet.

We read through the Bible verses and marked them with the correct highlighter and colored tabs. Our Bible is becoming pretty colorful.

We read about David and Goliath. J drew a pictured of Goliath on a sheet of paper complete with helmet and silly grin.

I hung it on the wall as far up as I could. I found some sling shots at the Dollar Store with soft balls. J tried her best to ping Goliath in the head like David did.

We had fun with this. J informed me that she chipped his tooth! When my olders were young, we did this same activity but we used large, wet marshmallows....and tried it outside. The marshmallows were fun but the ants afterwards weren't.

J's Courage ring card added to her other virtues. She is starting to decorate her letters more.

Here is her Courage notebook page. We will add courageous people from the Bible as we learn about them. On the back of the page is her Bible verse mini book and the Courage checklist. If you would like the Courage printables, you may download them below. Hope they help you discover the trait of Courage. If you have any problems, please let me know. Also, I would love to hear about it if you are using these:) Have a great day.

Download Courage Notebook Pages HERE.

Links

Character First - courage lesson with free printables and videos.

Meaningful Mama - has a few posts on teaching about courage. Love the furnace craft idea.

Science - Week 8

We are currently working through Considering God's Creation for our Science curriculum. I love the simplicity and the easy, not too much prep lessons. This week, we worked through the Plants lesson.

We started our lesson with the vocabulary. J wrote the definitions under the vocab flaps that I created for the lesson.

An easy experiment was to place a piece of celery into colored water to see what it would do. We left it in the water overnight and the results were great. The blue ran right up the stalk (cohesion at work).

I also found a mini grass growing kit at Target and thought it would be perfect for this lesson. Here, J and Kaleb are working together to plant the grass seed. They hope it will grow soon so they can give it a haircut. We were planning another experiment (link below) with a leaf but we didn't get to it in time. But we will do it next week. Have a great weekend.

Links

Adventures with Kids - has a simple leaf experiment to see if leaves breathe.

Social Studies - Week 7

This year, we are studying American History with Sonlight Core D. We are reading a ton of chapter books that J absolutely loves. But she also loves the hands-on aspect and I included Homeschool in the Woods Unit - New World Explorers. We are loving our read-clouds from Sonlight and learning about explorers from Homeschool in the Woods.

This week as part of J's Language Arts, she was to create a timeline of a historical figure and I decided it would be a great idea to work on a timeline of Thomas Jefferson. I found a mini lesson printable about him (link below).

J read the information about Jefferson and created a mini timeline on paper. Then, she had a bright idea! She wanted to make a life-size timeline of Jefferson - a visual representation of his life. I loved the idea (who wouldn't?).

J drew Jefferson and colored him in some wild clothes! But I assure you that it is Jefferson.

Then, she added the facts about his life on him. It turned out so cute! We hung it on the wall between our World map and our American map.

Our explorers for the week were Amerigo Vespucci and John Cabot. J decided to practice her cursive handwriting while writing about Amerigo for her notebook.

J practiced the states and capitals that we have been learning. She is matching them together.

The state that we studied was Pennsylvania. A few years ago, I participated in a state exchange and we received a box from a family in PA. We finally got to open it and enjoy the contents. (Well, we couldn't eat the tastykake but everything else was in order.)

The box was awesome. It contained a treasure hunt of sorts all about PA! J and Kaleb enjoyed going through the scavenger hunt and learning all about our state.

J's been fascinated with tornadoes so what better time than to add Tornado Alley to our American map. She also added the Liberty Bell and Statue of Liberty. Each week, when we learn a new state, J make a scrapbook page and colors in the state on our map. I just recently felt like we should begin adding important landmarks to it as well. I love the way this is turning out!

We will be taking a mini break from our explorer unit to study the Pilgrims, just in time for Thanksgiving. So, for the month of November, we will be learning all about Plymouth Colony. After that, it's back to explorers! See you soon.

Links

Jenifer Bazzit's TPT store - has the free printable Thomas Jefferson timeline activity.

American Artists - Mary Cassatt

Studying American History, I had decided it would be a good time to study American Artists. We are using Great American Artists for Kids for our base curriculum. Our artist for the week was Mary Cassatt.

We started by reading about Mary Cassatt. I had found several books from a thrift store that were about Mary's paintings. J filled an artist page for her notebook.

One project that I found was from Harrington Harmonies (link below) to make Cassatt hats. This was a simple project using construction paper and oil pastels.

She created a pattern onto the hat with the pastels.

This is her finished Cassatt hat. She added cat ears at the top of her hat. She thought these were cute.

Mary Cassatt was known for her paintings of Mothers and Children. Another simple project was for J to re-create a picture of a mother and child. J actually didn't choose a mother/child picture but a big sister/little brother picture.

I love how she has put Keke's hair intoner face which is typically where she wears it. IT is very Impressionistic, isn't it? Two great projects to add to her art notebook. I am looking forwards to next week's artist - a quilter! See you soon.

Links

Harrington Harmonies - has a cute project of making Cassatt hats. These look so cute.

Art for Small Hands - has a simple project of drawing mothers and children.

Contented at Home - has a few links to free note booking pages as well as information on Mary Cassatt herself.

Making Art Fun - has a free printable bio page on Mary Cassatt, if you can't get to the library:)

Shower of Roses - has a cute project for Cassatt, making hats with designs. Simple, easy.