We have really enjoyed our Exploring Creation with Botany. Since we all love flowers and plants it has turned out to be perfect for us right now.
A few weeks ago we were to make clay models of flowers. I was not sure how well this would work but the flowers turned out great.
Rebekah is patiently forming her parts for her flower. She has made her stem and leaf with the calyx on top. On the table she has cut out her petals and is now forming her carpel and stamen.
Rebekah and her finished product.
Here is Rebekah's flower from a different angle. I think it turned out very nice.
Sarah is working on her flower. She is working on the last few pieces before we put it all together.
This is Sarah's finished product.
* * * * * Flower Dissection * * * * *
We also dissected a flower. The girls had to find three flowers so that we could all do the activity together. They had fun finding the perfect flower for dissection.
This is the flower that the girls picked for the project. Below the flower had discolored a bit but this is what it looked like the day we taped them to their books.
This is Rebekah's dissection page.
This is Sarah's dissected flower.
We have also done some other activities such as seed collecting, seed dissection and activities with leaves and now we are on to the roots. As we have more interesting activities I will share them with you.
Happy Homeschooling
I have taken several pictures this month in order to blog and I have not sat down to work on them. This weekend I intend to catch up. We officially completed 12 weeks of school today. We are on track in all but one of our read alouds and I plan to read some extra in order to not get behind on our next term. The girls are either right on track with their subjects or a little ahead. It feels good to finish the first 1/3 of the year and not be behind.
We have had our good days and bad days but over all I think we are getting back into the groove of homeschooling. Sarah was in a private school for 2 years so there are a few habits that we are having to undo. The attitude of just doing enough to get by and finishing as quickly as you can are our two main hurdles to cross.
Keep watching I have several post coming. In addition to my post I am going to be posting some pictures that Rebekah posted on her Facebook about her Bible study of Revelation.
I can't believe that I have not blogged in a whole month. I will try to do better :)
This month has been good We have chosen an area of study for our Nature Challenge. Since we are studying botany for science it is just natural for us to study plants.
Our family, minus Rachel, went to minister in a rural community about 2 1/2 hours from here. The people were wonderful and the time was great. We took school books and Rebekah and Sarah got a good bit done. I can't complain.
The first day we went on a walk to the River and we turned that into a nature hike. Here are some pictures that we took on that walk
These are just a couple of the amazing plants that we saw.
Just before we left the River we saw a beautiful sunset.
We did not take our nature journals with us but we each came back and wrote about our walk and sketched some of the plants that we saw.
Well we finished the week and the girls completed almost all the work that I had scheduled. So thing are looking up and they are doing better. We received our books for Science Notebooking and Geography (for everyone) and Texas History (for Rebekah) this week so we were able to add these into the schedule at the end of the week.
Sarah was able to complete the work for the week early because she was. invited to two birthday party sleep overs. Because school has no started for her friends it does not interfere with there school. She left yesterday to go to the parties across town.
Since Sarah was gone Rebekah and I had a easy day. My goal on Friday is to have a light day any way. Rachel and Joshua both have half days on Friday so I don't want to homeschool in the afternoon other than our nature study.
I am just happy to still be on track and a little ahead is some areas since we did a few days of school work in June. I know that the frustrating days will come but I want to keep them to a minimum.
Today has been one of those frustrating days. Nothing seemed to go as I had planned.
The day started off good as Joel and I walked Joshua to his first day of school. But when I got home it continued to go down hill. We were home by 8:00am but no one was ready for school. It has hard to get the two girls up. They didn't seem to want to do anything. I wanted to pull my hair out. I had to leave at 11:15 to go with Joel to get Joshua and when I came home not much had been done (if anything) on the workboxes. It was like pulling teeth all day to get things done. I had thought that with Joshua gone all morning it would be easier to get our work done. But no. And did I had at 6:00 we still had workboxes that were not completed.
I sat down and wrote out a list of Family Rules that I am going to inforce so that tomorrow might be a better day.
1.Get up each morning in time to do chores and get started with school by 8:00
2.Do your chores on the list before school time.
3.Be on the couch with a smile and anything that you want to work on during read alouds by 8:00
4.We will begin each day with read-alouds and then you are responsible to complete your work boxes.
5.In order to get my help, present a “work with Mom” card to me and then I will either begin helping or I will give youa “wait” card.
6.If you are too noisy I will give you a “quiet” card. If I have to give you more than 2 quiet cards a day you will give up your free computer time for that day.
7.I will be available until 4:30 to help with work boxes after that you must work alone.
8.During school time is not the time for conversation. You need to be quite and do your work.
9..After doing work with Mommy return to the table. All work must be done at the table.
10.Be in bed by 9:30 each night. So you will be ready to get up when called in the mornings.
I have really found it to be difficult for Sarah to work on her own. She has been in an American school for the last two years and she has forgotten how to work independently without someone spoon feeding her. So I know that I have a challenge on my hands. I want them to have a fun day but they need to re-learn how to focus and not be distracted.
Well we are pressing on. I will let you know how things are going.
Because of the price of plastic containers here in Brasil I had to use an available option here. I had a friend in the states send me some velcro so I was able to label the boxes with numbers. I also downloaded the forms from the Workbox web site. Rebekah's boxes
Sarah's Boxes
Sarah's no. 1 box ready to be completed (and her cinnamon toast for breakfast)
Because Rebekah wants to finish her 7th grade work by February her day has been longer than her sister. Sarah was finished by 3:00 but Rebekah just finished around 5:00pm. So I am going to have to look at her work and see what I can do to reduce some of her other work.
Our day began with a little instruction of how things work. I then read our read alouds and actually stayed on schedule. We did not get as much completed before lunch as I thought we would. They only had 4 or 5 boxes (out of 12) completed when we sat down for lunch. I had a couple of times when they were both needing my help at the same time and they wasted a little time while I was trying to figure out how to help them as quickly as I could.
I think this would be much easier it I had been able to start this system when they were younger. But I still think that it is a system that will work great once we get thing going.
I can´t believe that I am actually excited about one of my children going to school!!
But here is the situation. We have been in Brasil for almost 2 years and Joshua wants to learn Portuguese but he needs more exposure to the language. He already understands a lot of Portuguese but he just needs to speak it. He needs to hear it on a daily basis. We have talked about having friends come over and play but all of his friends at church are in school all morning. So our solution is to send Joshua to school, a Brasilian Christian school. He will start in the middle of the Kindergarten year, the schools run from Jan - Dec. here. But we have asked them to put him in the class with the younger students. Some of them are still 4 and there were some boys that are his size that are just like him (a little immature, just turned 5 and such) He will go from 7:30 am to 11:30 am. The school told us at that age they don´t do writing and reading. So that falls in line with my goals for him.
In the afternoon we may do some of the school work that I had planned but not all. Since we plan to be here in Brasil for the next 18 years or so we want him to get a good foundation. A year ago he was not ready for a situation like this, he would have cried just talking about it but the time is right. He is so excited. The plans are to start him in August after the July vacation month here in Brasil. We have plans to travel some ourselves. I will take the camera and try to post some of the sites that we come across.
I´ll keep you posted on his progress and what I decided to do in the afternoons. Nature study is still on my list but I may delay some of the other things.
We are so far behind where I wanted to be in our Nature challenges but I am happy that we are getting back to it. We have had a good time relaxing since the kids have been out of school. This week we started some light work using the Work Box System. But that is for another post. I have a lot to say about a few changes in our homeschool and so I will have several post this weekend.
Rebekah and Sarah did a little nature investigation on their own yesterday. Sarah found a high perch to over see all the nature in our yard.
Challenge #3 was to continue to focus on using your sense as you observe nature. The challenge also encouraged drawing. This was great because my kids really like this part of their nature journals. They both choose to do a leaf rubbing. Even though we have many leaves in the yard I think they chose a leaf from the same tree.
Here is Rebekah sitting in the corner of the yard shaded by a cocoa tree.
(below) Here is Rebekah view of the yard from her position under the tree.
Here is Rebekah's journal page. She had decided to use a binder with sleeves for her journal pages so she included her leaf for future viewing.
Here is Joshua having fun in the yard with his sisters.
Joshua is just monkeying around!!
We had fun with this challenge but I don't know if we will be able to do much in July. We have meetings and other ministry activities planned so we will just have to see. We will at least be back to schooling full time in August and I have scheduled Nature study as a weekly activity.
Because of supplies here in Bazil it is not always possible to do all the suggested experiments in our Apologia Science book. A while ago Rebekah did the experiment about "natural selection". The deer was the prey and the Cougar was the predator. This was showing the correlation between the population of the deer and cougars. It was very interesting to see how the numbers would go up and down.
Here is Rebekah casting the Cougars among the deer.
(above) The cougar landed upside down and did not "eat" any of the deer. Poor thing he died. The cougar needed to land on/eat at least 3 deer to survive.
Here is a better shot of the cougars and deers. This time there were 4 cougars and only one of them landed on/ "ate" 3 deers. He survived and the other cougars all died. Each of the deer that were landed on all died (even if the cougar only landed on 1 or 2) .
I wish I had more pictures but at the time I was involved with the process and did not get many more.
Another activity was cutting out the map of the world and seeing how it may have been prior to the plates of the earth separating.
Here is what it may have looked like before the plates separated. The paper moved a little before my picture was taken but South America and Africa fit snuggly together.
We did not take pictures of all the experiments but we had fun getting everything together. And Rebekah did learn something in the process. Out of the experiments that we were able to find the supplies I think they have all been a success so far.
This is Sarah's dissected flower. 
Rebekah's boxes
Sarah's Boxes
