After a very long hiatus, we're back and hopefully will be posting regularly again.  This week we started another year of homeschooling.  Gavin is in fourth grade this year and Austin is in first grade.  It's the first year of having two full time kids at home but this week went much easier than I expected.  I really thought it would take a few weeks to settle into a routine but we were off and running fairly smoothly. 

 

We are still using Tapestry of Grace for history.  The first four or five weeks of this year we are going to spend learning about Native Americans because I felt like TOG didn't include enough about the different tribes and the kids love learning about them.  In science this semester Gavin is using Apologia Anatomy and Physiology while Austin is reading corresponding books about the human body.  Both boys are using Abeka for Math and Language.

 

Now that we are done with all that, it's time for some pictures from the first day of school!

Gavin was going for the brooding, serious look this year.

This week we focused on the Northeast Indian tribes, specifically, the Iroquois Nation tribes.  We made wampum belts (ours were much shorter than a belt though).  I drew several patterns on graph paper and let the boys choose what pattern they liked best and colors they wanted to use.  Then I redrew their pattern with the colors they chose so they could just follow along.  Gavin's is a little longer than Austin's but they both were more patient with it than I thought they would be and we spent two days on this project.  The wampum turned out great and the boys are really proud of them.  Adelaide also did a wampum but she strung her beads (pink naturally) on a pipe cleaner.

Austin's is the top one and Gavin's is the bottom one.

 

 

I got the idea for this craft and the directions on how to do it here: http://plbrown.blogspot.com/2011/01/wampum-weaving-how-to-do-it.html

 

In Gavin's science book, each chapter focuses on a different system of the body.  In the first chapter he learned a little about the history of anatomy and about cells.  Austin and I read a general book about the human body and then a book about cells.  For our science project we made a model of a cell.

It's hard to see but we added and labeled the organelles. 

I got this idea from this website: http://katherinemaries.com/blog/archives/12047.  They were doing an animal cell so our is a little different since we were making a human cell.  It was fun to hear a six year old say endoplasmic reticulum!  I was surprised at how quickly they remembered each organelles job.

 

 

As we go through the chapters of our science book the boys will add each system to their personal person.  This week we got our persons/people ready by taping a picture of their head to a body template from their science book.

 

 

I thought I would also post a few pictures from our summer (okay, it's a few more than a few).