Weekly Wrap Up :: Weeks 19 & 20

We have had two full weeks of homeschooling and also have been busy with showing our house. We are hoping it won't take too long!

We have been very consistent with completing our school work, all the math and language arts lessons were completed every day. Andre switched in the new year his spelling, grammar, and writing curriculum and so far we are both very pleased with the change. He is now back to using Growing with Grammar, which we feel is a better and complete curriculum than the Gage Language Power. When I was ordering his grammar, he noticed that they also offered spelling "Soaring with Spelling and Vocabulary" and writing "Winning with Writing" at his level now and after checking it out further, we decided to try those as well. He has done well with the spelling so far and the writing is interesting for him and gives him more practice than the assignments from Lightning Literature (which he still doing too).

In other subjects, we have learned about animal classification, cnidarians, worms, and echinoderms. Celeste and Andre are working with the same curriculum and we are all enjoying this one. R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey has been a winner in our family this year! I add library books and internet links to our lessons and we complete the labs suggested. I have found that this curriculum has been helpful in helping Celeste discover the field of life science and for Andre, it has been a great review.

A couple of notable links we visited related to what we studied were (we were very interested in jelly fish and in starfish!):

Monterey Bay Aquarium Jelly Fish Animal Guide

National Geographic Kids - Jellyfish (check out the video)

Jellyfish colouring page

Source: mesa.edu.au via Alexandra on Pinterest

For starfish, we enjoyed watching a few videos on youtube, especially this one:

Starfish eating

We will be doing the lab part of our worm study in the spring, when we can find them. We did read a couple of library books about them, and enjoyed Yucky Worms by Vivian French especially. You can see inside the book here.

In ancient history, we studied Greece, Crete and the Minoans, and we are now listening to the Tales from the Odyssey by Mary Pope Osborne. We found this seven disc set at our local library and we have all enjoyed this.

In world geography and cultures, we were also in Greece last week! We tasted Moussaka, an entree made with eggplants and ground lamb or beef (I used turkey).

Moussaka straight out of the oven!

This week, in geography, we studied Italy. We used the Enchantment of the World book and I found a great book of old Italian tales retold by Domenico Vittorini called The Thread of Life. We also used google maps to "visit" Venice and another area of Italy where I had spent some time vacationing with a friend and her family many many years ago!

Last Monday (23) marked the start of the Chinese New Year. We found this page interesting Chinese New Year for Kids and a friend on facebook shared a page with gorgeous photos of the celebrations.  


Canadian Home Learning is now on Google+ ! You can find the link on the left side of the blog. I am keeping the facebook page as well. I have been on Google+ for a while now, but haven't used it a lot yet! I have been quite busy over at Pinterest (that's quite addicting!!), you can also find the link on the left. I have pinned many links related to homeschooling, I have tried to organize them efficiently. All of them start with "learn" then the subject. Let me know if you use either Google+ or Pinterest by leaving a comment!

Some of my Pinterest boards

You can follow other weekly wrap-up posts at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Wordless Wednesday :: In the Kitchen Lately (a great helper and lots inspired by Pinterest!)

Blueberry Muffins and Whole Wheat Banana Honey Muffins

Cheese crackers

Cranberry-Apple Crumble Pie

Wordless Wednesday :: Snow (a little)

Say Something Nice

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 18

We are fully back to our regular school routine now, even Adrienne. Her unschooling experiment is done and we both learned a lot from it.
In case you haven't read my last post, we will be moving in the near future from South Western Ontario to Prince Edward Island for my husband's work. This will be the biggest move we have done as a family (I don't count my move from France to Canada!). We are all looking forward to it and somedays feel like Celeste who said "can we go NOW?"!! We do have a house to sell first, but my husband will be there as of the end of February and we will be following not too long after hopefully.

Back to our routine, with two days completed last week and this week a full week.

Smurfette helped Celeste with her schoolwork ;)

We completed all the main subjects, language arts and math and also managed to include science, world geography and cultures, history, and a new small literature study.

Here are some highlights:

In Geography, we studied India this week. We learned about their culture and religion with the help of the books in the photo above. Adrienne and Andre completed  notebook pages about the country, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. We also listened to some traditional Hindu music on youtube. We will be trying some food next week before moving on to Greece. The video below is one that we listened to:



  
Adrienne is back to her regular schedule, which includes high school biology. This week, she learned about DNA. We used a simple kit from Home Science Tools to help us visualize what we learned.

Andre and Celeste finished their study of the human body with a fun study of fingerprints!

We also had a lot of fun, even though we spent some time decluttering and cleaning our house! We went to see The Adventures of Tintin, which we loved! We have enjoyed the books over the years, I used to read them when I was little, both Andre and Adrienne like them too. We saw it in 3D, which we don't normally like, but it was fine this time.

The girls have been having fun with their AG dolls. We gave this book to Celeste at Christmas and it has been a great inspiration. They made most of the food you see with foam sheets. You can get big packs inexpensively at most craft stores.

There's our week back in a short post! How was your start of the new year?
If you would like to read more weekly wrap up posts by other homeschoolers, visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

2012 Update!

Happy New Year!

Blogging always takes a back seat when life gets really busy, doesn't it? It certainly has for our family, but it is time for an update! I was going to wait until the end of the week but the regular wrap-up post would have been so long, that I decided to do an update post first.

Christmas was wonderful, shared with Nana and Papa at home. We enjoyed a relaxed Christmas day, filled with yummy food, laughter and time together. I managed to make a few Christmas presents and received a beautiful homemade apron from my oldest daughter! She sewed it all in secret and did amazing!

We took time off before Christmas and only a few days after. Right before Christmas, my husband was given an offer of transfer with his work. We had only a couple of days to decide (we said yes), then Christmas came, then we had to get the house ready for sale. It was a very busy time after Christmas for us! We will be relocating from South Western Ontario to Prince Edward Island and we are all looking forward to this new adventure! We will be moving to PEI as soon as we can (my husband will be there at the end of February).

Reading some travel books at the local bookstore!

We started back to our school routine again last week, with only a couple of days of work, but this week is full schedule. Extra curricular activities have resumed and we are focused again, with some interruptions for house showings of course...

Our current read aloud!