Week in Review - Week 3

I have been writing our Weeks in Review a week behind so we are actually in our 4th week of school but I am currently posting about last week - our third week of school. I just have to mention that I am working on this blog post while on a mini-vacation. We are at the Sauder Village Inn in Archbold, Ohio. We spent today at the Sauder Village and had a lovely day of living history. My wonderful husband is down at the pool with the children and I am blogging right outside our hotel room in the courtyard. It is truly and completely lovely out here with a lovely flower garden and waterfall. I feel as if I could sit here and soak in the relaxing sounds of the waterfall for weeks. Blogging in the courtyard feels decadent! More about our trip in Week 4's Week in Review!

We are really settling in to the new school year now - I enjoy the routine and the rhythm of our days, though I am seriously wishing I had a kitchen support staff. I suppose that is the wish of most homeschooling mothers.

Week 3 found us primarily studying George Washington in our unit study of the American Revolution. We watched a very interesting video from National Geographic, "The Real George Washington." I did enjoy it, but at times, I found it to be a bit sensationalistic, as if one of the goals of the video was to ferret out some negative historical information about George Washington. Overall, though, I felt the video was well-done and I would recommend it. We also watched American History for Children - American Independence. As usual, this video from Schlessinger Media was quite well-done, informative, and entertaining. I also read "George Washington, A Picture Book Biography" aloud to the children which I thought was excellent.

All of the children are progressing well in their independent work which they usually complete in the afternoon after lunch.

• Amber is particularly enjoying Spanish. We are using Rosetta Stone Homeschool Version 3 and I couldn't be more pleased with the program.
• The new workbox system that I am using with my boys this year is working out extremely well and I am so happy that I decided to give workboxes a try with my boys.
• Amber is almost done with Teaching Textbooks Math 7 now and will start Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra soon.
• Mason is taking a two week break from his normal math curriculum to focus exclusively on long division as he was struggling with long-division problems.
• Amber is continuing to work on her novel and is almost done with the third chapter now. Go, Amber! She is using "Learn to Write the Novel Way" although she hasn't referred to the curriculum in quite a while (she started working on the curriculum this past summer). She's been writing, writing, writing.

Once again, one of the highlights of our week was our art lesson on Friday. This week's lesson focused on the color wheel, Expressionism, and mixing colors. The lesson was a bit different from the other two we have completed in that the video portion was quite long. We watched the video and simply paused it when we needed more time to complete the project. In retrospect, I think it would have worked a bit better to complete the color wheel in one lesson and the art project in another but we followed the lesson as presented and completed them both in one lesson. So, this week's art lesson took us about 2 1/2 hours to complete.

First, we followed along and completed a landscape drawing in pencil, practicing perspective. Starting with the three primary colors, we then added secondary and then tertiary colors to the color wheel. After mixing each color, we needed to add that color to the landscape drawing, gradually painting in all of the areas. We were encouraged to use color to express our emotions as the Expressionists did. Amber LOVED this lesson - this was her favorite lesson so far. Duncan and I really enjoyed it, although I felt a bit rushed to finish my painting at the end. Mason, on the other hand, did not enjoy this lesson as much as the others. Regardless, I thought all of the projects turned out great (except mine - I think mine is TOO yellow!).

I just love the use of color in Amber's painting.Mason's turned out great - complete with a mushroom house!Duncan's is so bright and cheery - his house even has a smiley face!I was still working on mine when everybody was done and everybody wanted to eat so I felt a bit stressed at the end. I added WAY too much yellow to fill in the rest of the picture. Lastly, keeping with my goal of using up the "random experiment" kits that we have collected over the years, we completed the activities in the Crazy Crystals kit.

All of the activities in this kit center around cross-linked polyacrylamide copolymer gel. They are uber-absorbent little crystals and are used in disposable diapers. The highlight of the activities was tinting the crystals with water and Tub Tints. Each of the children got to tint their own bag of "crazy crystals."

Then we waited until the next day when the crystals had absorbed most of the tinted water to transfer them to paper towels.Finally, we made a cool rainbow in a tube. The crystals mixed with each other and made other colors in between the crystals.That was our week in review - if you would like to see what other homeschoolers are doing, check out the Week in Review at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.