Week in Review - Castles, Garbled Marbles and Play-Doh Language

I was determined to end strong before our Christmas break - and I think we accomplished that this week!  Wowsa - we did a LOT!!   During our language arts time, the clip we were to read was about the layers of the earth.... which reminded us of this book that we like so much.  How to Dig a Whole to the Other Side of the World.  One of the things I love about homeschooling - we can get off on a tangent and explore as long as we want!!

History this week was very exciting! We studied about the birth of the English language.  After the Normans poured into Englad - they changed everything about the way they lived and even spoke!  Our modern English is a mix of several different languages.   We learned about how English can be compared to a greedy friend who keeps taking your toys!! :)

We used different colors of play-doh to symbolize lots of different languages...

We learned a scripture verse in Welsh - the Celtic language spoken in Wales - which is where my family heritage is from.....

"Yn y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair; yr oedd y Gair gyda Duw, a Duw oedd y Gair."  This is a Welsh translation of the first line in the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

We "mixed up" all the languages and then we made English!!

Isn't English pretty????  Who knew?  Actually, English is very confusing....

On Monday evening, our church youth group met at our house  - how many people can you squish into one family room???? 

In science we had some fun with our garbled marbles kit - nothing like so good ol fun with superabsorbent polymers!

We invested some time into our homemaking skills making jello jigglers, a gingerbread house, and Banana even whipped up another batch of peppermint bark, some brownies, and some Christmas cupcakes for dad to take to work!

We attended "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" at our school....

The girls even were able to perform all the things they have been working on in their Public Speaking/Drama homeschool class.   Here are two little clips - they did several more pieces.  The quality and the sound of the video is terrible, but you can get the picture - the first clip is an improv moment with Boo.... and the second is some of their memory work.

Banana worked on her spelling words on the white board - it's so much more fun than a workbook - but much harder to prove to the school system that spelling actually gets accomplished!   My - it looks like we need more work on handwriting....

Banana working on her math with her "thinking cap" on - yes, she did give me permission to take this picture...


and apparently Boo reached her tolerance level with the four-legged-friends...  :)

Another favorite part of our history this week - we FINALLY begin our studies of the castles in the medieval times!! We have been waiting and waiting on this!  We have lots of fun castle projects coming up - stay tuned for lots of fun castle pictures.  Banana was inspired just listening to our history reading about castles, and started drawing one on her own...

Time and time again, I get a giggle out of the way God has orchestrated our curriculum and woven it together.  I really did some serious praying over all of our curriculum for the year, I pieced it all together, subject by subject - and I get so many little reminders that God has his hand interwoven in our plans.....  this picture above is from Banana's Daily Grams workbook - a completely separate workbook, just simply about grammar.    Check out that sentence that lined up so perfectly with our history studies this week!!   How awesome.... and it happens All. The. Time.  I love it.

We finally got some measurable snow to play in on Thursday!! Just in time for our annual Christmas Caroling with Enchanted Warrior!  It was a bone chilling 19 degrees out as we spread our Christmas cheer while caroling, or as Boo said "caroline-ing".

Stay tuned for some castles, knights, lords and ladies, peasants, serfs and more!