Heart of Dakota: Bigger week 20

This week was cut a bit short. Yesterday afternoon both my kids and the entire household came down with fevers. So needless to say we only completed 4 days of the 5 days for week 20. That is OK, we will just do Friday on Monday and then combine unit 21 day 5 to day 4 next week.

So far this week we did learn a ton of stuff. I loved our character study this week of loyalty. We actually had a great example of this on Thursday where the children were not loyal to me and the instructions I give them on how to behave inside the home. I am glad that each week we learn a new character study, but sometimes I wish it would go 2 weeks long on each character trait! This one would be one of them. As far as the hymn this week…well, this one was not for me. I know we will be on this same hymn for a few weeks, but I may change it to something else. We shall see.

I loved our geography this week. Mapping was always a hard thing for me until I got into my late 20’s and my husband actually taught me how to use a map. So this activity with the grid was fantastic for us to experiment with. However, I did things a bit different. I did not explain what we were doing. I had the kids lay down the grid and mark the numbers and letters. I knew my son understood right away what we were doing so I had my daughter go first. It only took her about 2 tries to get it without any instruction. The kids were having fun doing this project and so did I.

Learning about the war of 1812 has been very interesting. OK, call me dumb or whatever, but I had no idea. I know, I know, I probably did learn this stuff in elementary school, but I did not remember ANY of it until this week. I was learning 100% right along with the kids. I really enjoyed playing the card game WAR with the kids. We have not played that game for a while so it was a lot of fun to do it over, over, over, over and over again. Yes, we played 5 times. LOL. It gave the kids a different perspective on war. Red cards were the Indians and black cards were the settlers.

This Pioneer Science is very fun and interesting. It has given the kids a great perspective on how EASY our lives really are. Yea, we may have all these chores we have to do and learning in school etc, but it is NOTHING compared to what they had to do in the pioneer days. This week we once again learned the layers of the tree so we could better understand tapping into a tree for maple syrup/sugar. I promised the kids that Friday we could go and buy TRUE/REAL maple syrup not the fake stuff we get at the grocery. But we are all sick and it will have to wait till next week.

We also learned how the pioneers measured things. In most cases they really had no real means of a measuring stick of sorts. They had to use their bodies as some sort of measurement. My kids hit that straight on. They knew from me using body parts over the years to measure. The tip of my thumb=1inch, my two arms =2 yards, my foot as almost = 12 inches etc. But we still had fun measuring each other’s body parts!

I really wanted to do the art expression this week, but as we kept going on the kids were getting tired and at this point I realized that no one was feeling good, so we may go ahead and do it on Monday with day 5 of unit 20. We shall see, especially since we do not have our art class this week and next.


Well, as I write this I am praying that I feel better by Sunday and the kids do too. My children’s choir, MERGE, which I direct, is singing for our Missions conference this Sunday morning. I and the kids need enough strength for about 30 minutes! Anyway, we are off to sleepy land for a while and then Monday morning back to finish week 20 and on the week 21. Have a great week ya all and we’ll write to you next week!

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