Weekly Wrap-up – January 9, 2010

 

I used to do these homeschool “Weekly Wrap-ups” on a regular basis and have gotten away form doing them. Since I have a renewed blog and a renewed drive to write more, i thought I should get back into participating!

This post will be short and sweet, as I was sick for the first half of the week and we had a light week of school…

This week we finished up Y1U1 week 4: Creation Through Noah in our TOG curriculum. Our next 2 weeks we will be covering week 5: Babel to Ur: Early History of Ancient Mesopotamia. I already have our activities all planned out and scheduled. All that’s left to do is print our pages and fill the workboxes!

The planning for week 5 went very smooth today. Up until now, it has taken me the better part of a day to get everything figured out and scheduled. I think I am now getting into my own “niche” and have a pretty routine way of going through the curriculum and transferring it into a weekly lesson plan. I am glad I decided to go back to TOG, it has been such a fun journey! I will definitely be staying with TOG this time for the loooong haul (meaning someday I will be doing it all over again with Joey)! I can’t wait til we go through the cycle again when the boys are HS aged and see how much deeper we can go.

We also had a good snow this week so the boys got to bundle up and play outside one afternoon. You can see pictures from their fun here.

We got to read some really great books this past 2 weeks and I want to recommend some to you:

I am not sure if you find this one to purchase (unless to happen to find a used copy) but you may look for it at your library. Here is a review posted on Amazon:

“In Yellow & Pink . . . Steig has created a pair of characters who seem the embodiments of his bright esthetic. Named for the colors of their freshly painted costumes, Pink and Yellow are wooden dolls left out to dry in the sun. They are odd fellows, bumpkins, incorrigibles, clowns, countrymen of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, Laurel and Hardy. Philosophers both, they no sooner ‘awaken,’ come to life, than they begin to ponder by what means they might have arrived in this world. ‘How,’ Yellow demands . . . ‘could anyone make something like me, so intricate, so perfect? Or, for that matter, like you.’ . . . One marvels at the expressiveness, the nearness to animation, of Steig’s vibrant drawings.” – Leonard S. Marcus, The Washington Post Book World
-- Review

We really enjoyed reading this book and I loved the creative way the author addressed the question of where we came from.

We could not find this book at our local library, so I purchased it from Amazon. It is the most thorough, accurate children’s book I have read about Noah’s Ark. It is full of extra information in the back and includes a panoramic, pull-out illustration of the inside of the ark. We spent a lot of time just looking at the pictures and noticing all the little details the illustrator included.

The kids also go to design and paint their own coffee cups yesterday. We had purchased the little kits as Christmas presents and had not yet had a chance to paint them. They really enjoyed them.

As I said, it was a light week and we pretty much treated it as a catch-up week. We have much more planned for the next two weeks. I am totally ready to get back into full swing!

Click here to see more Weekly Wrap-up posts. See you next week!

Blessings,

: ) Cassie