Homeschooling Week 14: Lap Books, The Water Planet, Abigail Adams and Lots of Penguins

After a few weeks off for the Thanksgiving holiday we are back at it! And despite how busy we are it's been fun. The class has started reading a new book...

We were given this great assignment to go along with this book. The teacher calls it a "lapbook" and it is basically a spiral notebook and there are different assignments for each chapter. There is vocabulary words, comprehension questions, journal writing, geography lessons as well as math and science. It is a great way to use one book and hit all the CORE requirements. Phi has been reading the book out loud to the whole family. I am hoping that this will help with her comprehension.

Here is her lapbook and some of the fun assignments we have done. I love this idea because we can be as creative we want. Each assignment is not extremely time consuming and everything is contained in one notebook!

Here are just a few of the things we did in the lapbook this week.

Left top: Mr. Popper is an explorer at heart. The task was to make a flyer for a place that would make Mr. Popper want to visit. Phi picked Santa Barbara and her flyer made me want to get in the car and visit!
Left middle: to make vocab a little more exciting we add pictures. Funny pictures if we can.
Bottom left: for a creative writing assignment Phi wrote about wanted to me a veterinarian when she grows up and why.

For math we have taken a little step back, which I appreciate, to learn about the principles of multiplication. They made another cute lapbook with properties, strategies and factors of multiplication as well as leaning about prime and composite numbers. This was a quick cut and paste project, but a great resource.

For history we were are studying the colonial era. This week we were assigned a famous woman from this era (girl power!). Phi was assigned Abigail Adams. Her assignment was to make a Biography Card. So we did research one day. Then the next day we made the card. On the front we did a photo and a drawing. Phi totally nailed it! On the back she wrote all the facts about Mrs. Adams and what she did to show her love her her country. Did you know that besides Barbara Bush she is the only first lady to have been married to a president and the mother of a president! 

We also started a new science unit all about the solar system. First up is Earth. This was just an intro worksheet so I am sure we will be diving into it more this week!

Phi is really excited about reading more about Mr. Popper and his penguins. We also have a field trip coming up soon!