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."

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...

Fall SWAP progress

I finally have some progress to report on my Ottobre SWAP. There are actually six garments finished, but I only have pictures of four of them so far. You can see that the brown Maya blouse is lacking buttons. I didn't have anything suitable in my stash, so I'll "have" to go find some at JoAnn's. I'm thinking something to match the medium pink in the trim, but we'll see. I almost never buy buttons...I usually always make do with what I have on hand. The cream Maya blouse is made of a vintage pillowcase I picked up at Goodwill a while back ($0.50). It carries that oh-so-fresh smell that I love on my pillows and is super soft. I have a bit left that I'm going to hoard until just the right project comes up. I'm delighted with how dressy the little skirt came out! It's made of chocolate brown stretch velvet. Miss M thought it was great fun to pet it like a kitten. Modeled by the lovely Miss M...and just before naptime (what was I thi...

She Made It!: the Get to Work Apron

This weekend Miss M decided she wanted to sew something. I was elbow deep in a sewing project of my own, so I told her that if she wanted to sew, she would have to do it all by herself. I set up my old sewing machine on a little table for her and answered her questions, but otherwise she did all the work herself! First, she picked a project from Sewing School . (affiliate link) She choose the Get to Work Apron. It's a cute tool apron that helps you carry your tools or supplies with you while you work. Then she picked some fabric from my stash. She cut out the paper pattern and traced it onto her fabric with a piece of chalk. (We had to have a little talk about placing your pattern near the edge of the fabric and not smack-dab in the middle!) Then she cut out her pieces and pinned them together, right sides facing. At that point I gave her a piece of plain white printer paper to practice sewing straight lines on. ...

CHRISTEPHI

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