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At Home With Jesus!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
School Review
We've been working hard in school the past couple weeks, and we've made a few 'transitions' in MFW. I think things are looking up.
First of all, we have finally turned the corner from "B.C." to "A.D."
The kids made notebooking pages with short summaries of Jesus' time here on earth.
I was rather disappointed that we didn't cover it a bit more
...but I realize that this year in MFW is more about the establishing of 'the Church.'
We also finished Augustus Caesar's World! I have such a mixed review of this book.
I really liked that it gave a lot of the background about the 'setting' in history into which Christ was born. Why were the Jews looking for a Messiah, who was Herod, and why had he been made ruler of that region? (It also gave us a LOT of insight about the festival of Saturnalia ...and where a lot of our "Christmas' traditions come from. I gotta be honest.... I've always LOVED Christmas, but after reading that...I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of the aspects of it now!) 
As informative as it was...I am also quite glad to be done with the book.
There was so much talk of paganism/false gods, and it just got to be heavy and depressing to me after awhile. Also - I must admit that while the book gave the historical reasons why a Messiah was needed - that author 'missed the point,' biblically, in many instances - and I ended up re-wording a lot of the materials so that my kids wouldn't hear false doctrine.
So now we have moved on.
This week we began Galen and the Gateway to Medicine.
The kids really enjoyed the first couple of chapters...and I'll admit I did, too.
 We also began a new read-aloud - Twice Freed by Patricia St John. The book is a work of historical fiction, based on the Book of Philemon.
Julie really likes it so far, but Joseph can sense the 'romance' aspect of it...and, as a 9 yr old boy, I don't think he's quite thrilled with that - 
Hopefully, that aspect won't be too heavy that it over-shaddow the 'message' of the book.
In science this week Julie is learning about the skeletal system of the body. we haven't made this weeks model yet - so I'll share her models from the past couple of weeks -
the skin:
and the eye:
 
For music, we begin our study of Mozart this week.
Unfortunately, as we did not buy the MFW 'deluxe package', and our library does not have the Mozart CD's we needed - we are sort of doing our own thing.
(It's okay though...I actually prefer it in this case) ;-)
We enjoyed the Opal Wheeler biography of Haydn so much, that we decided to read the Mozart one as well.
We are also doing our own unit study on instruments/sections of the orchestra
last week we studied the strings
 This week I think we'll learn the brass family of instruments, as well as a bit of theory....
I also bought this wonderful book
It's sort of a more grownup version of the "Hymns for a Kids Heart" book that we loved so much a few years ago. We won't be reading all of the stories in it, but I thought for sure we would focus on the Christmas ones during this upcoming season.
But since it's November, I thought this one would be a great place to start
As for art - I have to admit - we've just sort of been doing 'crafty' things on our own.
Julie has been working on a latch hook kit, and beading;
Joseph has been drawing 3-D pictures, and working on a picture of the Roman Colosseum;
and the little girls have been having lots of fun sponge painting.
(I also wanted to mention that Katie took her first Light Unit test for the CLE Learning to Read program....she got 100%) 
It's been a productive week.
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Daisy 
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