Unit 9 with Bigger and Little Hands

It is so hard to believe that we just finished unit 9 in both Bigger and Little Hands! The kids are learning a ton and having fun. Our week was back to its "normal" routine :) Ian had his last baseball game until the spring season starts back up on March. Emersyn is pretty much back to herself. She had a runny morning nose but is all clear by afternoon. 

Ian recieved his progress report from his speech therapist and it was filled with nothing but glowing remarks! I am so pleased with his progress. He is also  better at recognizing his letters with LHTH. He can recall most of the sounds and write them but he mixes up F,G, and H. I know he will get there. Next week is a review week so I am hoping that helps him out. I have also learned that I cannot double his lessons like I could the girls and that's okay! 

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The big girls learned more about Benjamin Franklin this week. He was discussed and learned about in our bible, history, art, geography, and science lessons.We read about his early life as well as about the many things he did with his life and how he used the idea of being thrifty and helping others. This went along with our Proverb for the week. 

We used a map scale activity to map his travels from Boston to a New York to Philadelphia. We used carrots for art to do printmaking a task that Franklin did as an apprentice to his older brother James.  We made a history notebook entry of facts learned about Franklin as well as a science notebook page about one of his famous science experiments like the Leyden jars, the lightning rod, and the kite. One story we read told how when Ben was young he used rocks from a nearby building site to build a pier for he and his friends to fish on instead of standing in the muddy marsh. The kids had fun building their own pier in the sink! Our vocabulary words also came from out study about Benjamin Franklin! 

In writing we used the book Anansi and the Talking Melon as our springboard. We compared and contrasted real spiders to the fictional character of Anansi. We made puppets and retold the story. I had the girls make a book of similes based on the book and they loved that. The final thing we did was write a letter to Anansi telling him what we thought about the trick he played in the book. We also worked on verbs in language using Rod and Staff level 2. 

In math we did more with money in that we subtracted money. What a great life skill! I am always spending money. We brought our bible theme of thriftiness into our math this week! 

One fun thing in our science study was our discussion on how science has helped us over the last several centuries. We talke about robots and I pretended to be a robot programmer and give the girls task to follow. 

In reading and storytime we started our new genre of historical fiction. To start the unit we watched Kit Kitteridge an American Girl Movie :) We defined the genre and the we started out storytime book, Farmer Boy. My girls LOVE some Laura Ingalls Wilder. We discussed retellig, setting, and Faith in our discussions. 

In DITHOR each of the girls was given their new books. Ally is reading Sarah Plain and Tall and Molly's Pilgrim. Audrey is reading Hannah and Pioneer Cat. They both like their choices and did well with identifying the setting as well as finding examples of Faith and perseverance in their books. They each finished one book and will start their other book next week. 

Our poem this week was called Consider and we talked about how to read to the end punctuation as well as emphasizing repeated words and why they would be repeated. Our poem had us consider all the things that God does for the flowers and birds heads and how much more he does for us because he loves us! 

Next week will bring us to unit 10, wow! It will not be long until we are halfway done for the year!