Year 5 :: Week 4 :: Starting Canadian History and sharing some of our Life lessons..

Math:

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  Teaching Textbooks Algebra 1 - lessons 11 to 14. (Adrienne)
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  Teaching Texbooks 6 - lessons 12 to 15 and quizz 2. (Andre)
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  Miquon Math Red Book - lessons B5 to B8 (Celeste)

Language Arts:

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  Spelling: Sequential Spelling 1 - days 10 to 13 (Andre)
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  Spelling: Sequential Spelling 3 - days 9 and 10 (Adrienne)
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  Handwriting: Italics Book E - 2 days (Andre)
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  Handwriting: Italics Book B - 4 days (Celeste)
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  Explode the Code 1 - pages 8 to 12 (Celeste)
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  Elson Readers Primer - Alice and her kitten - introduction, sight words, reading practice (Celeste)
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   Poetry: Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization - Level 1 Poem 2 "Celery" - 3 days of practice (all 3)
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  Commonplace Books - independent reading notes - Andre: Eragon, Adrienne: A Study in Scarlet.
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  Every day over lunch this week, I read aloud Nurse Matilda (just the first story) to all 3 children. This was a very funny book, and perfect for all ages (something that can be difficult to find lately!).

World Geography:

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  Trail Guide to World Geography: North America Week 4 trails (trivia questions) + map work. This week, we continued studying North America with a focus on Canada and the United States. We read a short picture on North America. Adrienne and Andre continued work on their illustrated dictionary (bay, sound, island, plain). They also completed 2 country fact sheets (Canada, USA).

Canadian History:

We started our Canadian history study this week! We are using a few books as spine for this study.

This week, we started with the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada by reading the first chapter from The Story of Canada (Janet Lunn) and the Glooscap story in Footprints in the Snow. I gave a short assignment to Andre and Adrienne. Andre was to find out what type of food Iroquoians ate and one recipe. Adrienne was to find out more about the Iroquoians, where they lived, and tell me the story of an important person/character from this tribe.

We then read about the Vikings in the Story of Canada (chapter 2) and researched the location of L'Anse aux Meadows on a map. We continued in the Story of Canada and learned about more explorers. As we read, we followed some of the routes on a map.

We moved a little faster with these chapters because it is a review. We had started a study of Canadian History 2 years ago, but only got so far as the 3rd chapter in the Story of Canada. We will slow down soon!

I have been reading Canadian History for Dummies for myself as we go along and I am really enjoying learning myself about Canada and its history.

French:

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  Adrienne started French this week, using L'Art de Dire 6 with me. We covered 2 lessons.

Life:

After reading Living Simply with Children , I wanted to do the suggested activity of writing a family values and vision statement with my children. I decided to include it in our monday and friday meetings.

On Monday, I explained the topic/question for this week, and told them to think about it over the next few days. The question was: What do you think a successful life is?

On Friday, we met and worked through 3 more questions: What do you  hold most sacred, what characteristics do you value in your friends, what makes you happy, what activities do we like to do together as a family?

I was really impressed with all the answers my children were able to come up with.

Next week, we will combine all our thoughts and come up with examples to include in our family values and vision statement. 

On Monday, we decided to have a little experiment at the mall. We went to do some people watching and also to notice advertising at work.

I didn't want to take too many photos in the stores. I did take this one in the book store. Besides Celeste, who just enjoyed herself, my 2 older children and I were disapointed with what we saw. This store just renovated their children section and now it includes more toys than books. They also removed the tween book section from the children section. They have toys set out so that children can try some out. The focus is definetely on toys, not books, and we thought it was just sad for a bookstore.