Weekly update for the week of 12/6/2010

This week seemed to fly by. N. continued in CTC and started some new books so that is always fun. In Science he started "Birds of the Air". He really, really likes this book. I wasn't sure what he would think since it doesn't have a lot of colorful pictures. He reads his pages and then does a good job orally narrating or answering questions about the reading. We have several bird feeders that he can see from our dining room/school room window and he is having a great time identifying the birds he sees. We found an app for his Ipod that has various birds and bird sounds on it. They are realistic enough to get the cats excited when he turns it on. We have a dear friend who loves birds and just moved to Kansas so he is going through and finding birds that she has that we don't.
In Geography of the Bible lands he just started learning about Egypt. He learned about the Sinai peninsula this week.
In storytime we finished God King and are now reading through the book of Jonah. He loves this book of the bible. In his independent history reading he continues to read about the Assyrians. For his history project we made a prayer box. I say we because he just couldn't figure out how to fold it and honestly either could I. This is the first history project that I almost gave up on, but finally we figured it out. Once it was made he did enjoy learning about A.C.T.S. prayer and spending some quiet time praying using the A.C.T.S. pattern. Also for history this week he started the Draw and Write through history. He did one of these last year and he enjoyed it, but there was no way with his shaky hands that he could draw the pictures, instead he would trace them. This weeks assignment was to draw the Hanging gardens of Babylon. He determined that with his mechanical pencil he could follow the directions and do it. I know beyond a shadow of a fact that God honored his determination, because he drew something that is far beyond anything he has ever been able to draw before. I had to walk out of the room and shed some tears.


One other fun thing we did this week that tied in with our studies was to go to a "Night in Bethlehem" that a local church was doing. They have their entire church decorated as a Jewish marketplace. You put on biblical clothing when you enter and then the market place had things like the pottery shop, the stone mason, the metal shop, hebrew school etc where they had activities for the kids. Of course the Roman guards and the tax collectors are there also. The shepherds then came into the city to tell what the angels told them and we followed them out to hear the angel choir and then to the nativity scene with live animals. N. loved all of this because it brought all his history from this year to life. I couldn't have planned a better activity for him.