OUR WEEK IN REVIEW......

Today, we'll be wrapping up our four-day Charlotte Mason-UNsChooLing unit on the Tropical Rain Forest by Jean Craighead George that I "homemade!" I am very happy to be finishing this up.. it was a fun adventure- where we tapped into new and unexplored areas! But, I am more excited about our next unit....stay tuned!

If you're interested in some of the topics or ideas or websites, that I used this past week.. take a peek:

I only gave .25 cents for this book...so I decided to use it as a "living workbook!" A cheap living workbook at that! One in which I wrote notes and required Tommie to circle 5 prepositional phrases on various page numbers, etc.

SPELLING: I pre-read the book and pulled out 45 spelling words that I knew he didn't know how to spell! I didn't give him all 45 at once, I broke them down into different days and used them the Spelling Power way. Today, he'll have a test on all 45 words. I also had him write them in sentences, add suffixes, prefixes, plural and talked about the parts of speech. This seems like a great accomplishment...45 words in one week... it is in fact, but let me remind you he is behind in spelling...so this is helping out tremendously with playing catch up!

READING COMP: I required him to use narration.

HANDWRITING, LANGUAGE ARTS and SPELLING: I did dictation with him...and I made mental notes of which words he struggled with.

GEOGRAPHY: Map of Venezuela, flag, Orinico River, review of Tropic of Capricorn and Cancer, longitude/latitude and read about products grown in Venezuela.

SCIENCE: Learned about several different animals: sloths, flying fox bats, mccaws, termites...and the worlds largest flower- it only has 5 petals!

I made a homemade scavenger hunt, I call this "internet research" (on paper) using this site and today we'll wrap things up by learning about the bibliography in the back of the book I made a scavenger hunt up for that as well. And, he'll be visiting this site to pretend he works in eco-tourism!

The thing I love about the CM method is not only does it reinforce the story, spelling words, science and geography, it frees up a lot of time to explore other things in life.... or math! (which is long division...and tons of it! and is way to time-consuming) ugh!

I have plans for us to make banana creme cookies, today as well! But, with 4 inches of fresh wet snow...I may be the one baking them while my boy rolls around in the snow! smile-wink-nod!