Heart of Dakota: Bigger, Week 9 Update

So I know most of you who may have gotten this post a few days ago are saying where is the actual blog post? Well, I am on vacation and so far until this very moment I have not had a chance to sit down and write. So I thought I will just post the pictures which would tell the story.

Anyway, now I have time so here we go. Week 9 went well. The first day, Monday, my poor little boy was sick. He was hugging a trash can all day. So my daughter and I had fun doing school together. I forgot what it was like to school just one child. It sure is a lot easier, but not as much fun.

So our first project was to make a wharf kinda like the one that Ben made. We got out our play dough and of course she wanted pink. Hmmm, I do not think I have ever see neon pink rocks before. But it went well, and you can see by the picture she had her dolly try it out. Of course we do not want dolly to get muddy shoes! LOL.

Then like a very good sister my daughter made a get well card for her brother. Everyone say…Awwww! You can see how cute it turned out. My son did not appreciate it as much as I had hoped, but could be that he was just too sick. The next day he did thank her and giver her hugs for the card and her math sheet and her stuffed animal she gave him.

OK, so for those of you who have not done unit 9 yet in Bigger, let me just say that when you do the potato printing, remember to write the letter backwards on the potato before you carve it out. I just did not think about it with my daughters name (R) and her first print came out backwards. My son (V) made no difference. Anyway, they had a great time doing this project and wanted to save the potato. I can not imagine what it would be like by now. YUCK!!

Of course we did our history notebooking pages. My son drew Ben Franklin's battery. It was really a good rendition of the picture in the book. Now I have to tell you on Thursday and Friday I had my girlfriends children all day. Yes from 7:00am till late and three of them. I have to admit that I thought about scraping school those two days, but decided to try it. She gave me a few things for them to do on their own while I schooled my two. Guess what, I am lucky to have a girlfriend that raises really great kids. We got school done. OK, well, we skipped a couple things…spelling and english!

Anyway, back to notebooking. One of the kids I was babysitting asked to see our history notebook. Hmmm, made an impression. They liked it. Made me feel real good and my kids feel good to show off their work..

Our science project was a blast. Again it is hard to take pictures in complete dark. First let me say it really took a lot of work to get that spark. I finally remembered that my husbands old Army coat was made of wool so I got that and sure enough after rubbing it we got a spark. COOL. My kids enjoyed this one. But it was a lot of work to get that one spark. I love my daughter's drawing of it on the science sheet. The wiggly lines are the electricity on the balloons. Cute.

Now, if you all have not figured out by now that I love to change things up a bit now and then, well, I am sure you figured it out with the mapping project. I loved Carries idea, but we took it a step farther. I actually had them measure the large pieces of furniture in our class room and them put them on their map. It turned out pretty good. My daughter was getting a little tired by this time and wanted to play with her friend so I wrote the words on her map for her, but she did the actual mapping.

We had a great week again. Oh, I almost forgot, "Ben and Me" is a great book, I read it to the kids I was babysitting and they liked it too, even thought they came into it a couple chapters later. It is a very cute book. I highly recommend.

Well, I hope you all enjoy you week, and sorry for getting this post out so late. Kinda hard to get 4 people ready for vacation, clean a house before you go, get all your animals ready, leave and blog. But here it is. I will still post over the next two weeks, but obviously not about HOD. My HOD updates will be back in 2 weeks. Have a fantastic Thanksgiving!

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Heart of Dakota: Bigger, Week 8 Update

So am I a bad Mom? This week was just off. Every night starting Sunday night we went to bed no earlier then 10:30pm. Ok, now my kids go to be by 8:30 maybe 9:00 if I read or we are running late at night. So going to bed 2 hours after bedtime was not acceptable. So what this meant is that we ended up getting up 2 hours later then normal. Even I had a hard time getting up to exercise this week.

Anyhow, what I ended up doing, and here comes the bad Mom comment, was only doing history, Geography, Bible, Science and Poetry. OMGosh, will my kids even graduate from High school now? Will they ever get a good job? LOL! Just kiddin. I have to admit I felt bad about it, but I know that they will live and things will be fine.

Besides being tired all week, we had a fun and exciting school week. Maybe even more so since we scrapped the academic stuff which them left us to mosey through the other parts of school.

We did not have our normal Art class this week so we decided to do the art project. They actually had so much fun making the Wampum belt out of rice. My daughter ended up taking the rice outside and playing with it. Thank God we have ducks and dogs etc to clean up the mess she made. Better outside then inside.

When we got to the history activity this week of building with Lincoln Logs, you should have seen the faces. They were shocked that I said it was time to build forts and house etc."Really mommy? That is part of school?" "Yup!" They worked together very well and it gave me a little time to read my emails. We ran out of logs, but if we would have had enough they would have been able to make a wall all the way around. But they have a flower garden and fire pits etc. Check out the pictures below.

Now I think I mentioned last week that we had spent the whole year last year learning about the Solar System, so once again the science for unit 8 was a good review for us. Both kids did a great job diagramming the planets. We added Pluto to our diagrams though. As far as the experiment, well, kind of hard to take pictures in the complete darkness. But we had fun with this one. Raquel and Vincent both did drawings on the experiment sheet. Hers in on the right, his on the left! The real cool thing is that the hole I punched in the index card was so tiny and they were so surprised how much light really got through that tiny hole!

For Geography we had a great time following directions. Except Mommy forgot the camera! Oh Well! My daughter really did a great job at this. I know each week I write at how amazed I am at her, but you can not forget that she is just turned 6 and this curriculum is for 8-10 year olds. So it amazes me how much she can keep up with her 9 year old brother. They had a good time and brother was a good big brother. When she would forget what the directions were, he would help her out. Ok everyone say…"Awwwww!" LOL!

I liked that we got to revisit the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego this week. Hope I got the spelling right. Shocking those names are not in spell check! It has been a very long time since we have talked about that story. My son was totally on top of it and basically told me the whole story, but my daughter said she remembered it, but was glad to hear it again! They loved the courage it took for those 3 men to stand up to Nebuchadnezzar. Great story about courage!

Now for our last Science activity, I have to say we have NO carpet in the house. We have only wood floors. I looked everywhere for wool, but none. Besides, it makes me itch anyway! So we did something very different for science. My husband came in with a battery and steel wool and lit the steel wool on fire with sparks. He explained how the energy form the battery was able to do that. It was actually very interesting and even though it did not have anything to do with static electricity, it still had something to do with electricity. Oh and of course Dad had to show them how to check if a battery is still good. Stick out your tongue!

All in all we had a good relaxing school week. Next week back on track with the full load. Can only be a bad mom for 1 week at a time, right? Then we are off on a vacation for a week right before the holidays. I am sooooo looking forward to it. I did tell the kids I expected them to do their reading even though we will be on vacation. Me? I will be scrapbooking at least one day while away and then we will all go to Lego Land as well as the Aquarium down there in San Diego. Yea, I know we are not going far, but it is still getting away from the everyday! I will write you all next Friday. Have a great school week!

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