ECC: USA, Part 1

After our first two weeks (Part 1, Part 2) of introductory material, we were ready to start out on our traveling adventures! We spent the next three weeks "traveling" around the USA, learning about it's geographical significance.

Bible

One of our texts for this year is Window on the World. In it we read about a couple different people groups in North America where Bible translation work is on-going. The kids loved that each section includes a list of items to pray about and to praise the Lord for! We each take turns lifting these items before the Lord.

We also started reading about Christian heroes from Hero Tales, beginning with Dwight L. Moody. I printed the copywork pages from Mama Jenn. Miss M enjoys illustrating these pages. Though at times her zany sense of humor comes through rather strongly!

Math

Miss M has been trucking along through Singapore Math 2B. I've been faithfully remembering to have her drill her basic math facts: addition on Mondays, subtraction on Tuesdays, multiplication on Wednesdays, and division on Thursdays. Fridays we forego our Singapore lessons and play math games -- often involving dice or spinners or timers or something of that nature. I got a set of Wrap-Ups from a deal on Zulily that have been a big hit with Miss M. But the favorite activity of all is playing Timez Attack! (And sometimes math lessons require ensconcing oneself in a little nook somewhere!)

Language Arts

I mentioned last time that we may end formal spelling lessons when we complete Spelling Power. Well, I was thinking about that more and decided that once we reach that point I'm going to focus more on vocabulary (including proper spelling). Miss M is very good at reading and spelling words, but she's only 7, so she hasn't been around long enough to learn all the words in the English language. *wink* In other words, there's plenty of material out there for her to learn even though she is an excellent speller! I ordered this book used from Amazon and I think it'll be an excellent place to start. If you have a vocabulary resource you love, please let me know about it in the comments section!

Read Aloud

To enhance our "travels" in the USA, I selected The Cricket in Times Square to read aloud to the kids. They *loved* it! Even Little Guy didn't want to miss a single word as we read. I found some interesting resources on Pinterest to go along with it:

Make your own cricket cage
Examples of the music mentioned in the book
What crickets look like and sound like
A cartoon version of the story (I recommend waiting until you've finished the book to watch it)

No one ever said that only the kids are allowed to be inspired by good literature, right? 'Cause I was inspired by The Cricket in Times Square to make a Chester Cricket stuffed toy. Cute, no?

Geography

Since we spent most of last year studying the USA and all 50 states, this was nearly all review. I quizzed Miss M on the states by handing her a blank map of the USA. She correctly filled in every single state! That's pretty impressive, if you ask me! We also looked up some facts about our flag and tried some regional recipes. The New England Pumpkin Cake we made was gone so fast I didn't even have a chance to take a picture!

Science

To complement our study of the countries of the world, we began studying the biomes of earth as well. We started with forests. Miss M made a large poster of the layers of a forest, did a forest vocabulary page, and pasted some pictures of forest dwellers to the layer of the forest in which they'd likely spend most of their time. We also watched some films about forests on Netflix -- my favorite was called Moving Art: Forests because it had no talking, just pretty pictures and pretty music!

Tagalog

We've been slowly working through our Tagalog flashcards working our way through the family members. The kids love it! It feels like a snail's pace to me, but they don't seem to mind!

I'll have to share the other books we enjoyed and our studies in art and music in Part 2. We have certainly been enjoying our travels in the good old USA, but we're getting ready to move on to other parts of the world. But as always, "Good things come to those who wait."

Review: Seed Starting by Gary Emmett (an ebook)

As I've already confessed, I am a plant murderer . I have, however, had marginal success with container gardening. The past year or two I started seedlings with my dad, which means the kids and I dropped a few seeds in pots and my dad cared for them. Once they were established outside, I was able to keep them alive long enough to harvest a few peppers and tomatoes and have a pretty pot of flowers on my doorstep. (At least until a horrid heat-wave and drought came along and killed them all; it's hard to keep containers well-watered when it's that hot!) In spite of the 10+ inches of snow on the ground right now, it's time to think about starting seeds again and I figure if I'm ever going to develop a green thumb, I better start educating myself! That is why I jumped at the opportunity to read Gary Emmett's book Seed Starting: The First Step to Gardening . (affiliate link) Available for your Kindle or Kindle app from Amazon. Currently priced at $2...

MFW ECC: What's different this time around?

I am so excited to go through Exploring Countries and Cultures again. The last time my kids were so little -- 3rd grade and Kindergarten. And now they are in 5th and 8th grades! They have grown so much over the past five years. As I began to think about our plan for this year, I realized two things: 1) my gifted eldest child remembers just about everything we covered in ECC the first time, and 2) my younger one hasn't had many of the basics that ECC covers. So I was faced with a dilemma -- how do I adjust ECC to suit the very different needs of both children? How do I shift the focus for my 8th grader to aspects of ECC that she hadn't spent time on before (such as types of governments, imports and exports, etc.) while also taking my younger child through the more foundational information that he missed when he was just a kindergartener? ECC is designed to be parent-led, family learning, with a supplement for 7th and 8th grade. But I came to the conclusion that I need to deco...

No More Quiet Time

I have always thought it sounded trite to speak of “falling in love with Jesus.” But trite or not, isn’t that what I want for my children? To learn to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). With that in mind, and having run across this blog post on Pinterest several months ago, I created a morning devotion basket for the kids and I to use. You see, up till now, I would typically find time to read the Bible and pray away from my children. Away from distraction, away from the demands of dust and dirty dishes, and away from the 437 questions a four-year-old asks every day. Then I realized I was doing them a major disservice by disallowing them to see me in the Word regularly. If I want them to love the Lord God, then I must show them how I love the Lord my God! Our new routine is to wake up in the morning, prepare a simple breakfast — usually cold cereal for the kids, toast and tea for me — and sit d...

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