Homeschool Week 17: Alta California Gold

Language Arts:

Phi is starting a new book that goes perfectly with her social studies/history lessons. This is a book I have never read before and I am reading along with her. This story is about a young boy named Jack and his butler Praiseworthy. After overhearing that his Aunt will be losing her house Jack is convinced that he can go to California and strike is rich to help his aunt and siblings. Jack and Praiseworthy have their boat tickets stolen and are forced to stowaway on the boat. They turn themselves into the Captain and their sea adventure begins. This book also has a novel study attached with it. This novel study has a lot of great links to websites with video and even music to help pull the lessons together. 

Math: This week we studied composite and prime numbers. Phi did okay, but she STILL has not memorized all her times tables and that makes everything so much more difficult. I finally broke down and will be making her write each multiplication table 100 times. When she first started her multiplication tables I wanted her to do this and she did not want to. So we tried everything else and nothing has really stuck so we are going old school. Phi is not thrilled.

Science: We started Chapter 6 of her e-text book all about earth and the planets. Which of course we covered last year. This week was a review about revolutions, orbits, axis, ellipse. We reviewed why we have seasons complete with a diagram. We even talked about wind patterns and why wind moves in arcs. We did a cool experiment with a spinning cardboard and a marker.

Social Studies: We are at 1849 in California history. The beginning of the gold rush to California. We read about the first pioneer American's who traveled to Alta California. People were convinced they could come to CA and get rich quick! We studied about the 3 different ways people came to the US (Panama, Around the Great Horn and across the Oregon Trail). Her big assignment was to create a poster convincing people to come to Alta California. You know we took it up a notch. We watching some Huell Howser on California Gold for inspiration and then Phi wrote a script for "Alta California Gold". This is probably the best video we have done to date...

We have a planned field trip/off-roading trip to Calico, Ca this weekend to check out an old mining town! 

We had so much fun this week! As always we are looking forward to next week!