Wrapping Up Week #3

It's hard to believe we have completed three weeks of school already! Is it just me, or is this entire year just flying by? This has been the best start to a new school year I can ever remember and I give all the glory to God. He has been working on my heart a lot in a discipleship course I have been taking called Self- Confrontation, A Manual for In-Depth Biblical Discipleship. If you ever get the chance to take the course, you need to. It is tough, but God wants to clean us up so He can be most glorified in our lives. Also, a new chore system we've implemented has helped keep things nice and orderly around here and that always makes me feel more peaceful.

This year we are studying part 2 of American History using an older version of a Sonlight core I purchased used a few years ago. So far, we have learned about the California Gold Rush and we are beginning to learn about the slave trade through reading a biography about William Wilberforce and the children have just begun reading Scott O'Dell's Sing Down the Moon, which is about a Navajo girl's encounter with Spanish slavers. We are getting real close to reading and learning about our own nation's history of slavery and the Civil War.

We haven't dug into our science lessons in Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day yet, but have had some pretty cool nature studies (which is science) around here lately. My daughter harvested a watermelon too early. Since we couldn't eat it, we placed it out in our yard thinking the squirrels and ground hogs would like it. That unripe watermelon has been covered by dark female eastern tiger swallowtails. We found a wounded one in our yard and then it flew away and got stuck in a spider web, so the girls rescued it and put it in our butterfly habitat. The next day Sugar Plum (yes the girls named the butterfly) was dead, so of course they buried the poor thing and even made a tombstone with the name "Sugarplum" on it.  I hope you can see the tombstone and Sugar Plum's final resting place in the picture below, because the pictures aren't the best quality.

The highlight of our week was a field trip to Ellis and Liberty Islands. We drove about three hours to Jersey City, NJ and then got some tickets to hop on a boat that would take us to Ellis Island and then over to Liberty Island. All the children said this would be a day they would never forget. We truly thought Liberty Island would be our favorite part of our trip, but the museum at Ellis Island was incredible and kind of emotional when you thought about everything people went through in order to get to America and the process they went through once they arrived at Ellis Island. Learning about people's stories is so powerful. 

How about you? How's your school year going? You can head over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and read more Weekly Wrap-Up posts.