Skip to main content

ECC: USA, Part 2


We spent two weeks introducing our year (Part 1, Part 2) and shared Part 1 of our travels in the USA. Here's part two before heading off to visit our neighbors to the north.

Bible


This year we are reading through the book of Matthew.  To help us along the way, we made bookmarks featuring the name Matthew or Matthaios in ancient Greek.  This is the language the book of Matthew was originally written in.  The back of our bookmarks have the readings for the year broken down into portions with a space for checking off each one as we go.


Miss M never reads her Bible without a dry highlighter in her hand…and she highlights everything she reads.  I think she would eventually like to have her entire Bible highlighted.  Hey, if that's what it takes to get her in the Word, then it's fine by me!

Music


Somedays when you wake up and it's bitter cold outside, you just need some fresh scones and a tea party to get ya going!


For USA we listened to some Wee Sing Around the World: a song in the language of the Omaha Tribe and the Eentsy Weentsy Spider.  (We always sing it Itsy-Bitsy though).  The kids loved them both!  Lots of good excuses to dance and prance around, going over and under, around and through.  We also studied the hymn Rescue the Perishing that we enjoyed very much!

Art

We continued our study of Van Gogh in our final weeks of USA.  You can see our art "wall" in the kitchen where we posted our new works as we studied them.  Little Guy was particularly bothered by the red color on Van Gogh's ear in his self portrait.  He thought he must have gotten sunburned and that it looked yucky.  In fact, he repeatedly told me how much he didn't like the self portrait at first, but a few weeks later he told me that he changed his mind and he likes that one best.
We used this sunflower project as a springboard to make our own.  Miss M used acrylic paint, crayon, and chalk pastels.  I'm getting a nice frame to put her finished product in!



Farewell USA Picnic


To wind up our stay in the USA, we had an indoor picnic!  It was much too cold to have a real picnic, but we had fun.  My mom came to visit that day and joined our festivities.  We served hamburgers with all the fixin's, carrot sticks, potato salad, grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella cheese pearls, and pink lemonade!  I had a few toothpick pinwheels in patriotic colors from when we celebrated the one year anniversary of Hubby becoming a US citizen.  They added the perfect touch to our burgers!


We enjoyed learning about our own country -- Miss M said her favorite new thing she learned was about the colors of our flag, their meaning, and that Congress did not establish a meaning for them -- but we're excited to move on to another country!  We'll be "flying" to Canada soon!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
3 comments
Read more

Pilcrow pajamas

I finally finished a sewing project...it's been a while, huh?  Little Guy has outgrown most of his pajamas and bodysuits.  He has several onesies, but they're mostly short sleeved which isn't really appropriate for this time of year without a cardigan.  Ottobre to the rescue!  I had traced off the "Naava coverall" (Ottobre 6/2009, #3) but it was already a size too small.  I "remedied" that by simply cutting it out a little larger all around and keeping my original seam allowance...a bit sloppy perhaps, but time-saving! I actually cut out two at the same time from the same material.  I was going for practicality (something for the kid to wear!) rather than fashion.  The other one is nearly done - just the leg binding and snaps left to do.  Still, I needed to do something fun to spruce 'em up a bit.  The other one was voted by hubby to be video game themed, so I decided to make this one reflect my abject nerdiness personality....
8 comments
Read more

Letter posters with memory verses

I have very fond memories of the cursive letter banner that was posted around the top of the walls in my fifth grade classroom.  I thought it would be fun to make something similar for our homeschool classroom (a.k.a. our kitchen). I decided to include a Bible verse for each letter.  At this point it's mostly for my own benefit since Miss M doesn't read yet.  They serve as great reminders to help her memorize these important bits of Scripture while her little mind is still a sponge.  (It saddens me that my memorization skills are not what they were when I was a kid!)   The fun part is I saved my work in a pdf file for you to use too! Just click the image above to download the file.  I laminated mine before sticking them around my kitchen walls with ticky tacky.  (The laminator is a new toy!)  Enjoy!
8 comments
Read more