Fun Ditties

I don't love Sesamie Street, but they do have some very cute clips for letters and numbers. Dragon has been showing interest, so we watched a couple of favorites tonight.

Planning History

I'm still working out what exactly I'm going to do with History. We've been taking our time, followed some interests, and lingered in both China and Egypt. It's been very pleasant, but now I'm at th point of needing to decide some things. I'd like to finish the Ancients by the end of September, which leaves me 23 weeks (or so), and 28 lessons, plus some things from Old Testament history that my husband and I have agreed are important and ought to be covered as well. Hence the large lapbook that we are working on as we cover Moses this week and probably next week too.

But, if we are to finish the year in an organized fashion, rather than haphazardly, I need to make some kind of plan.

Week 1: Moses Lapbook part 2 (40 Years' Wandering/Entering the Promised Land)

• Old Testament Story Book
• The Bible and Book of Mormon
• lapbook resources both found and created
• Book of Centuries entry
• Museum visit with my sister & her husband (primarily Egyptian exhibits)

Week 2: Israelite History/The Phoenicians

• SOTW ch 15 w/staind "glass" projects & possibly pita bread
• OT Stories: Ruth, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, & the Temple
• OT Stories: Elijah & Elisha
• Book of Centuries entry

Week 3: The Return of Assyria

• SOTW ch 16
• Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor
• OT Stories: Jonah; The Divided Kingdom
• Jonah  craft from my Pinterest collection
• 2 Kings 17 (the Assyrian captivity & repopulation of Samiria)
• Book of Centuries entry

Week 4: Babylon

• 2 Kings 22-23. Josiah
•  SOTW ch 17: Babylon Takes Over Again!
• 2 Kings 24-25. Zedekiah
• Book of Mormon Stories: Lehi Leaves Jerusalem; Crossing the Sea
• OT Stories: Daniel
• Book of Centuries entry

Week 5: Crete and Greece

• SOTW ch 18: Life in Early Crete
• Atlantis: the Lost City
• The Hero and the Minotaur 
• SOTW ch 19: The Early Greeks
• D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
• BoM Stories: Enos
• Book of Centires entry

Week 6: Greece

• SOTW ch 20: Greece Gets Civilized Again
• The Librarian Who Measured the Earth
• Black Ships before Troy?
• D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
• Book of Centuries entry

Week 7: Medes & Persians

• SOTW 21: The Medes & the Persians
• King Midas and the Golden Touch
• The Persian Cinderella
• Cookie map of Mesopotamia from Pinterest
• OT Stories: Esther
• Book of Centuries entry

Week 8: Greece

• SOTW ch 22: Sparta & Athens
• D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
• SOTW ch 23: The Greek Gods
• An Ancient Greeke Temple
• The Gods & Goddesses of Olympus

Obviously, there is more to plan, but this is all I can get done right now.
 

Making Memories

When Monkey was a baby and I first read The Well-Trained Mind, I loved Bauer's suggestion that talking to your child will help them to aquire language faster, and thus to read sooner and more easily. Plus, I like talking to my kids, and it was a great excuese to go through the day telling them what's going on. Turns out that sort of parenting probably also helps them develop their memories, and kids that get talked to a lot - especially about the past - remember earlier and more than other kids. Who'da thunk?
 

Old Testament History: Moses

Seeing as the Old Testament is such a huge part of the gospel, and so much refers back to it, we want to make sure that we do a good job of teaching Old Testament history as we're teaching, which is of particular interest this year while we're covering ancient history. It's important, but it's not simple. Not even close. Dates are a huge headache. Because there's a whole lot of disagreement on basic things like how old the earth is (4 billion years to only a couple thousand), and how long man have been on it (evolution vs creation), and it all gets more interesting from there. Frankly, I don't find the topic of the exact age of the earth all that interesting, but the perfectionist in me NEEDS a date at the top of my timeline.

More to the point, I want to somewhat coordinate the Old Testament stories with the materials in Story of the World 1. So I'm having a look at SOTW, and at the Old Testament chronology in the Bible Dictionary, and at this website that  one of the Moms at the Hive helpfully pointed out. We are currently working on chapter 14: Moses and the Exodus.

SOTW 14: The Israelites Leave Egypt.
Most of our reading from this will actually come from the Old Testament Stories book the church puts out, and the boys like the movie version, so we'll probably watch that too. There are quite a few "chapters" about Moses, but they're short and Monkey loves them, so it's not a problem. We're also still reading miscellaneous bits about Egypt.

We're doing  a lapbook for Moses, because his story is so important and turns up so often. I have several different sites I'm pulling from, saved on Pinterest. I couldn't find anything I liked for some of the events, so I made these. If you use it in your lapbook, I'd love to see a link to a picture in the comments!

Cut along the lines, then attach with a brad at the circles.

Cut on the lines, the connect the pages with a brad.

Glue tabs to make a pocket, then write plagues on the pages.

 

Vaccuming

Pondering Food

A friend posted an interesting article on Facebook the other day, about some of the differences between American and French attitudes toward food. It's made me rethink some of the things I do with our food. There's a number of "thinkers" in there.

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French parents teach their children to eat like we teach our kids to read: with love, patience and firm persistence they expose their children to a wide variety of tastes, flavors and textures that are the building blocks of a varied, healthy diet. Pediatrician-recommended first foods for French babies are leek soup, endive, spinach and beets (not bland rice cereal — have you ever tasted that stuff)? They teach their children that “good for you foods” taste good (broccoli – yum!), whereas we often do the opposite.

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Differences in first foods, I'm realizing, are substantial around the globe. My pediatrician mentioned a while back that in India, where they have a lot of peanut-based foods, peanuts are often among the first things a baby is given. He said that the recent research he'd been reading is finding that giving foods sooner offers some protection against allergies, rather than the previous thinking. (Though he wasn't comfortable with giving peanuts to little ones here.) I hadn't really considered it beyond that. But the idea that first foods might influence pickyness is an interesting one. And makes some sense. The "simple" foods, the "kid-friendly" foods are often not very flavorful, and if that's what's familiar, then it's seems logical that rejecting strong flavors would follow.

Here's another interesting idea: variety.

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 To introduce kids to a wide variety of foods, no dish can be repeated more than once per month. Food for thought.

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I realize that this is a good idea, but I'm realizing that our variety has shrunk down to the point that it hardly qualifies. So, I'm having a look at my recipe collection, and looking for new recipes. Ones that use the familiar ingredients and also some that use some less familiar foods. It'll be good for us all. Maybe I'll have a look at my Japanese cookbook again and see if I can come up with some foods from there. It also occurs to me that I make a 2 week menu, and I can pretty easily make sure that meals from the old menu are not repeated on the new one when I make them. That would give me about a month rotation on my meals. I'll need some more recipes to do that, but that's OK: I like looking at food. Pinterest is a great place for doing that!

I'm not sure that I'm ready to give up snacking yet, but more and more I think that may be key to the weightloss I've been struggling to make happen. I'm thinking about it. But I think I'll make the other changes first and then ponder snacking more seriously.

Here are some of the new recipes that look tasty this afternoon. What are some of your favorites?

Dinner in a Skillet (TONS of variations)
Italian Sausage Skillet Dinner (new ingredient = italian sausage)
Chicken Skillet Dinner (unusual ingredient = mushrooms)

Cozy

Book Review: Be the People

So, I heard about BookSneeze a while back - quite a while, actually, and I thought, "Free books for reviews?! I can do that!" So I sent away for my first book. I chose this one:

Be the People is broken into two parts:  Part one lays out some of the threats to freedom, as well as some of the quiet losses of freedom we face in America today. Part two is a call to action in several different areas.

I'd have to say that my feelings about the book are decidedly mixed. For much of the book, I was right there, agreeing with the author, but her chapter on race really turned me off. So much so that I put the book down and didn't want to return and finish. Had I not given my word to read it completely before writing my review, I would not have finished it. However, the first two-thirds of the book have a lot to recommend them. I agree wholeheartedly with the author's call for America to return to her roots, and to invite our people to return to patriotic virtue and personal responsibility. I just think that when she started talking about race she started talking out of both sides of her mouth, which made that portion of the book a very difficult read. The book also has a number of appendices, which is always useful. She's included the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Having them right there, rather than hunting through my messy desk to find them was very convenient.