Show & Tell: Adventures Week 3

We have another week of school successfully under our belts!

In history this week, we traveled back in time and spent the week at Jamestown with Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.

Here is the summary page Hannah made for her United States notebook.  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get it down to one page without eliminating pertinent facts.  The brown triangle at the top is her drawing of Fort James.

My Father's World didn't have any hands-on projects scheduled for history this week, and since Hannah has really been enjoying those, I scoured the internet and found a couple I thought were age-appropriate.  The first was a Jamestown & Pocahontas lapbook.  I found most of the Jamestown printables at Currclick and most of the Pocahontas printables at Homeschool Share.



This is what's under the Jamestown flap.  It includes the reasons they wanted a settlement in the New World, information about their voyage over, and hardships they faced when they arrived.



This is what's under the Pocahontas flap.  It includes information about Pocahontas' early years, as well as how she helped the settlers in Jamestown and how she saved John Smith's life.

 Our second hands-on project that I thought was age-appropriate was a paper model of Fort James, which I found at Homeschool in the Woods.

Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, either.  When I looked at it, I thought, "Map colors, scissors, and glue.  How hard can it be?"  But after I printed it and saw how tiny everything was . . . well, let's just say it ended up being a pretty mom-intensive project!  I did all of the cutting and assembled all of the houses, and Hannah helped put up the fence and arranged all of the buildings inside of the fort.

Speaking of the arrangement of the buildings inside the fort, did you know that the church was the center of the community?  Literally?  I love the symbolism in that.

In Bible, we spent time talking about what it looks like to follow Jesus.  The girls were introduced to the phrase WWJD (nope, they had never heard that before!), and they each made a WWJD bracelet.

This morning, they also each made a Jesus suncatcher to hang in the window.

In science, we did a few more experiments with air.  At lunch one day we took our empty juice boxes and saw what happened when we changed the air pressure in the box.



First we decreased the air pressure in the juice box by sucking all the air out through the straw.  The result was that the air outside of the box pushed in on the sides, causing the box to "crush."





Then we took our mouths off the straws and the air pressure stabilized.




Finally, we increased the air pressure inside the box by blowing into the straw.  We saw that, as the air pressure increased, the air inside of the box pushed out against the sides, causing it to "puff up."

 For our second experiment, we put a ruler on the table and tapped it.  It easily fell down.

But when we laid a piece of newspaper over the ruler, we had to push much harder to make the ruler fall.  This is because air was pressing down on the large area of the newspaper and helping to hold the ruler in place.

And for our final science experiment, we filled a glass up to overflowing with water, put a piece of cardboard on top of it, and turned it over.  The water was supposed to stay inside of the cup, but this is what happened . . .

Glad we decided to do that one over the sink!  We popped in our Inquisikids:  Discover & Do DVD so we could watch "the pros" do it.  We realized they were doing it with a glass instead of a plastic cup, so we decided to try it again.  It worked!

 

So we realized that, yes, air was pushing the cardboard against the cup in both scenarios.  However, the plastic cup was actually changing shape, which broke the seal the water had made with the cup, and air was getting in, causing the cardboard to fall.

The three R's are going well.  Hannah set up a school table in her bedroom for her and Sweetie to do a math lesson.  She even declared math her favorite subject!  Whaaaaat?!  WOO HOO!!

And at some point during the course of the week, Hannah was able to get in a little handwriting practice ...

Yep, when Mama's busy building Fort James, the cleaning gets overlooked!  :)

In Tot School this week, Millie mastered the letter M.  I'm so proud of her!  We're using MFW K phonics with her this year, and she's doing far better with her lessons than I ever would have imagined!

She also had a big day on Tuesday when she made her first 10 Train!  We're also using MFW K's math for her preschool, so she's going to get a lot of practice making 10s.  She even kind of counted down before she made it to 10, like, "Mom!  We have 8!  We only need 1 . . . 2 more to have 10!"  Yesss!  She gets it!!!

I'll leave you with a few fun pictures from Monday.  We made a library run and met some friends at the splash park right next to the library.  The kids played and splashed, then we all went to Chick-Fil-A for a drink.  All that and still home by 3:30.  Ahhh . . . behold the joys of homeschooling!