Wrapping Up the First Month

Whoo hoo!! We just wrapped up our first month of school for the year! It feels good! It's been a good first month, too. Not perfect and not easy, but a great start to a great year.

This week in Bible we completed our first character study on loyalty. Each week we had a different definition of loyalty and a corresponding Bible story to focus on. I've been very pleased with how well the kiddos have learned during this study.

In history we are still talking about the early Egyptians. We flooded our *Nile River* again, but are still waiting for our *crops* to grow. The kids made their own scrolls with hieroglyphic messages. They had a lot of fun with that!

We are still studying the sun in science. We made sun prints this week using construction paper and random objects. They didn't photograph well though, so you'll have to take my word for it that they turned out:) Their notebooking for science is going well also, they seem to really be enjoying it.

Language arts are going very well. Mr. B is doing so well with his reading! We're nearly through learning long vowel word families and he's over halfway through his first reader.

This week I scaled way back with The Princess' spelling lessons. I just don't think they're a productive use of her time. I did quiz her on Monday with the week's word list and she did great. We'll review it, but the rest of the busy work we are skipping.

We had lots of fun with art this week! One day we made color wheels. I actually had one that I'd made in high school that I dug out and we followed its style to make our own. I thought they turned out great! The kiddos really enjoyed mixing the paints to get the various colors~and it was good prep work for the painting project we did later in the week with our Van Gogh study.

Van Gogh's Still Life Vase with Twelve Sunflowers was our main focus this week and instead of doing a coloring page of it we painted it. Very fun!!

They turned out beautifully!! We have quite the art gallery in our house these days:)

We did have a couple of fun outings this week, too. First, on Tuesday we took the kiddos to Chuck E. Cheese for a long lunch. This past summer they had completed the Reading Rewards Calendar to earn free tokens and we had not yet redeemed them. It was a lot of fun!

Then on Wednesday we joined some friends from our homeschool group at the State Fair. You can read more about that day here. It was a great day!

This week's weather has been absolutely gorgeous and as we were enjoying dinner on the patio last night I thought it would also be fun to build a fire and make some s'mores. Yum-O!! So we enjoyed some very quality family time while hanging out in the backyard.

Yes, it's been a good week, if a little bit off-schedule and busy. We've got a fun weekend planned, too, that I'm really looking forward to! We're off to our regional apple festival!! I hope you have a great weekend as well!

This post is linked to the Weekly Wrap-up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.