Show & Tell: Adventures Week 1

Here they are . . . my big 4-year-old and my even bigger 7-year-old on their very first day of school!


This week we successfully completed our first week of 2nd grade. And what a wonderful week it was!

We started out by taking a closer look at the pledge of allegiance to see what we actually mean when we say it. Hannah did something unexpected that made this old homeschooling mama very proud! As we went through the pledge, we would stop and talk about any unfamiliar words or phrases. But before we would move on to the next word, she would go back to the very beginning and restate the whole thing using the new, more familiar words or phrases we had just talked about. So by the time we made it to the end, this is how her pledge of allegiance sounded:

I promise to be loyal to the flag of the United States of America and to the government run by the people for which it stands, one country under God, that cannot be divided, with freedom and fairness for all.

We worked throughout the day to make a red, white, and blue snack to kick off our study of America.


We served it after dinner that night, and it was delicious! Well worth the effort it took to make it!


We colored and labeled two maps this week. The first was a map of the United States with our four neighbors labeled: Mexico, Canada, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean. The next day we labeled all of the continents on a map of the world to see where the United States was in the grand scheme of things.


Notice how Millie chose to sit in with us for this activity? And would you believe she colored that entire map?!


In history, we studied the Vikings. Here's the Viking notebook page Hannah made to add to her United States notebook.


One of our book basket books was a Viking arts & crafts book, and we followed the directions in it to make a paper mache Viking helmet and a pizza box Viking shield. We tried to get the girls to pose as fierce Viking warriors for this picture, but from the pajamas on their bodies to the grins on their faces, you can see there's not a fierce bone in these Vikings' bodies!


I picked up a neat little resource over the summer called Interactive 3-D Maps: American History , and it happened to have a Viking map in it that we made. It showed the route Erik the Red took from Iceland to Greenland and the route Leif Ericsson took from Greenland to Newfoundland. The girls both had fun making it, but Millie has stopped to play with it every time she has walked by the counter.


In science, we looked at what science is and what, exactly, a scientist does. In a nutshell, they ask questions, come up with theories, conduct experiments, and observe their results. Then we conducted a simple experiment to go through this scientific process. Our experiment was to see if adding salt to water would help things to float in it. The results were pretty obvious!



Our Bible study this year is looking at the names of Jesus. This week, we emphasized that every name has a meaning, and we learned the meanings of the girls' names.

Hannah = Favor, grace
Elizabeth = My God is a vow.
Camille = Pure, chaste
Renee = Born again

One of Hannah's friends gave her a silk screen t-shirt designer for her birthday, and she has been asking every single day if she can "pleeeeease make a t-shirt today." I figured this was a great opportunity to let the girls make some shirts and just add their names to them. That way every time they get their shirts out to wear them, they'll remember what their names mean. (Well, in theory, anyway.) I think they turned out really cute!


We also made a dozen sugar cookies, and one night for dinner we put everyone's name on a cookie. We had eight cookies left over, so we made another message to hopefully segue us into next week's Bible lessons.


And this final picture . . . well, it doesn't have anything at all to do with school. It's just a picture of Millie that's so stinkin' cute I had to include it somewhere. Oh, wait . . . she's wearing red, white, and blue. Does that count?!


All in all, this was a wonderful first week, and I'd say without a doubt we're off to a great start!