Because of my kid's disabilities, they do best with a very predictable structure to the day. School is a very important part of that structure. We mostly follow a 4 day school week in our homeschool. I organize the lessons so each week's lessons can be done in 4 days. That leaves one day during the week free for field trips, doctor visits, or getting together with friends. If we have a stay-at-home kind of week, we just take Friday off and work or play outside... It's a good system for us, and seems to give us the right balance of work time and play time.
Well this week, despite spending Monday afternoon with our homeschool group doing
this, we somehow ended up done with the week's work by Thursday afternoon.
And then it started to snow... and rain, and snow some more, then thunder and lightning while it snowed, then finally it settled down to just snow!
I could tell we were going nowhere yesterday, and playing outside wasn't happening, so I had to fill our regular afternoon school time with something... preferably fun and interesting... to keep us from from feeling as snowed in as we were (are).
So we spent a couple of hours doing activities from our
Story of the World history curriculum, then finished the afternoon reading one of our math stories and experimenting with the concepts it introduced.
In Story of the World we are learning about ancient Egypt... So after listening to the chapter again (we have the book on CD, and we listen to each chapter a couple of times before moving on), answering questions about they heard, doing some map work, and taking a quiz (my kids are so funny, they LOVE little quizzes...), we sat down to make sock monkeys.
Yes, it's probably a stretch to consider sock monkeys history, but since the Nubians brought the Egyptians gifts, including monkeys, when the Egyptians conquered them several millennium ago, and the idea came right out of our SOTW activity book... I'm counting it as history!
The kids worked hard for a long time filling and sewing their monkeys.
M's level of concentration was amazing.... he had to really think about what he was doing.
When the monkeys were done, we read one of our math stories, "
What's Your Angle, Pythagoras?". M already knows what right, acute, and obtuse angles are, and R understands what a right angle is, so they had a good frame of reference for learning about the Pythagorean Theorem (M) and introducing square numbers (R).
I made a small version of the knotted rope used in the story, and M worked at using it to make right triangles, then later was able to determine the length of the long side of a right triangle using the formula he'd learned.
R worked at using pattern blocks to make squares, and then learned a little about square numbers. (I didn't notice until I posted these pictures, that R changed clothes between sewing and math.... I wonder why she did that?)
It was beautiful outside...
... and we were warm and cozy inside... it ended up being a great afternoon.
