The Rain (Ice) in Spain

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving and now have the house ready for Christmas.

We also began our 3rd 6 weeks.

 First we added the Psalm we are trying to memorize.

We began Mary's Star Path, an advent calendar suggested by Garden of the Theotokos. 

We sing a song after prayers each morning and the special helper gets to movie Mary along 1 golden star. The star she has passed get put on the sky behind her. She'll reach the stable on Christmas and the kids will find baby Jesus in the manger that morning, the sky full of stars.

Last week we read The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. Our Social Studies focused on Spain since the story takes place in Madrid. We watched a bit of Rick Steves in Madrid and Barcelona during lunch.

 The kids made character study books, first with Ferdinand, and then pages including several other characters we've read about, and finally including themselves.

 

 They wanted to pose in a goofy way, goofy kids.

 For reading, they worked on word groupings with cards.

 They made a list together of their word groupings.

 Hannah worked on categorizing her nouns from the story. We have

a little more work to do there. Plenty of opportunities come with every book, so we'll make this a regular exercise.

 

Hannah did some copywork- then learned it's okay to move a whole word down

a line rather than split it up. As an adult, I often forget we have such details until

they're there to be taught.

 For math, Ferdiand stood by a tree that had been marked with his height each year. Before we did that, we reviewed inches and introduced measuring feet. I also wanted to add in estimating. This was a fun page I found online and the kids had fun gathering the objects and making their guesses.

 

 Then Hannah and Chloe got their own sheets. They chose 5 objects in the house and estimated their lengths. Hannah was sure our school cabinet was 59 feet tall. It must seem that way when you're small! We did the actual measurements together and she was pleased she was pretty close on a couple. Chloe wasn't exactly sure what she was writing down, but she sure was businesslike about it.

 

Finally we marked their heights and the date on an extra fence slat we had. Dax hung it in a little corner of the hallway. The kids are excited to check back in a few months. Chloe was convinced she had grown the very next day.

 

 For art, we took note of the illustrations in the book and how near and far Ferdinand was in each drawing. They especially love the distanced pictures of Ferdinand under his cork tree happy to smell the flowers. I showed them near and far elements of a series of picture I drew for them a long time ago. I never did anything with the pictures, but they're fun to look at every once in a while.

Hannah practiced drawing items large for near and small for far- a little hard to see here.

We also read a folktale about 3 Spanish brothers and 3 oranges. The story was a little above their heads, but they did get some good messages about how to be a responsible and caring sibling rather than selfish and careless.

 We read a book about a girl's aunt believing she was a Flamenco dancer. We looked up several good videos and the kids got dolled up and danced away.

At first I was going to put their makeup on, but I thought it would be more fun to see what they did on their own. They felt like they were true professionals and complimented each other on their skills. They went pretty nuts with the eye shadow as you can see!

This weekend we've been iced in. They spent a couple of days relaxing at Nana's. Today back at home they did tons of worksheets and were very excited about it. I took it as an opportunity to review some skills- such as following oral directions, working together to complete a sheet, and math skills. We have a couple of Ferdinand activities I'll catch up on soon- such as dramatizing the story and watching Seth Rogan (believe it or not) read the story with a string group playing incidental music behind him. This coming week we will venture to the prairie lands! I'm looking forward to it.