Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Birthday, Science & World War I

This was another short week for us! On Monday, it was Family Day here in Canada. We celebrated by taking the day off from school work and relaxing at home. On Wednesday, Andre turned 12 and we have a tradition of taking birthdays off. My husband always tries to take the day off work too. He did and we had a nice time together.

Andre's cake: Glazed Lemon Cake (super delicious!) 

All that celebrating left us with three days of school! We covered our main subjects (Math and Language Arts) and continued with World Geography, Science, and History. Here is a short recap from those subjects.

In World Geography, we concluded our study of Africa by filling in Country Facts sheets. In these, we write down for each country, its name, the area in sq km, the GNP per capita, the infant mortality rate, the population density, and the type of government. We had gone over what each term meant at the beginning of the year. We have filled in these fact sheets for each continent we have studied so far. We also read another story from the African Tales book.

For Science, we finished the gears section and built a hand-crank theater. It had two pictures, one with a bird, one with a cage. When we rotated the crank, the image blended together. You can see the theatre in the photo below and a little bit of the effect in the short video. It was hard to capture!

Still in Science, we started a new topic: work! In Science, work has a different meaning, and we learned together about work, force, energy and joules, Newton metre (Nm) and watt seconds. Adrienne built a water-powered sawmill and we tested it. We used a bottle of water and poured it onto the angled blades of the water wheel. We changed the height and speed of the water and noticed the differences. 

 In Canadian History, we are learning about World War I. We are still using the Story of Canada book as a spine, but I added a few extra books to read aloud this week. We finished The Great War by Robert Livesey and we'll start soon Brothers Far From Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates from the Dear Canada series. I read a little bit from the Horrible Histories book today. That series is always fun and interesting! The Archie's War book is great, but not really for read aloud, so we're all reading it on our own. I am planning on using this PBS site to review all that we learned about this war, hopefully by the end of next week. I think the animated maps will be very helpful for our review. This site has some more interesting resources, like maps to fill in, quizzes, games, videos and more.  

Today, we listened to Johann Strauss Jr's music. We each filled in a notebook page with a short biography and a list of the music pieces we listened to. We all had different favourites. Andre liked the Blue Danube, Adrienne the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, and I liked the Radetzky March (each link brings you to a youtube video).

While we were listening to the music, Celeste was sitting right behind us and listening too. When we were finished, she said she was done too. She then showed me what she had been working on. She had copied a part of a little book! She does this kind of copywork often, not because I ask her, just because she wants to...very different from her two older siblings!

Finally, I wanted to start adding an extra part to these wrap-up posts. We love reading here and I talk often about our favourite books, in Book Sharing Monday posts or even in wrap-up posts, but I don't often mention what my kids are reading on their own for fun. So, I thought I would add that to the bottom of my weekly wrap-up posts.

Adrienne is currently reading Catching Fire from the Hunger Games series. Andre is reading Firewing by Kenneth Oppel. I am reading a variety of picture books and also another Rainbow Magic book (Stella the Star Fairy) to Celeste.

If you would like to read more wrap up posts by other homeschoolers, visit the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers blog.