We did very little in the way of official school last week. Adam got back from a missions trip to Nigeria and promptly came down with an illness that ended up being caused by campylobacter. He was out of commission all last week, even needing to go the ER to get fluids and antibiotics through an I.V. Thankfully he is feeling much better (still taking two different antibiotics, though) and was able to go back to work today.
As far as unofficial school, Adam educated us all about Nigeria: the people, the land, the work of him and the rest of the team, etc. Plus he had over 600 pictures and some video to show us.
One day a fellow homeschooling mom told us about a website that has a streaming video of a bald eagle's nest. Her son became fascinated with it and wanted to learn as much as he could about eagles. They decided to build an eagle's nest in their backyard and needed to gather sticks. They invited us on their stick-collecting outing at a local park. The boys certainly had fun in the woods picking up the best sticks and branches they could find. :)
Friday Jude made a bald eagle lapbook using print-outs and ideas from this website. He absolutely loved this project! I think we'll be doing more lapbooks in the future. It's a great way to quick off a unit study on a subject or reinforce something we already learned. Jude is very much into animals right now so I think I'll find another animal-related lapbook we can do (just as soon as I get more ink for our printer!).
Yesterday (Sunday) was one of those amazing weather days. After church we went to my parents' for lunch and spent the afternoon with them then came home and continued soaking up the warm air and beautiful sunshine. It go windier and windier throughout the day and night, and by this morning thick dark clouds had rolled in, foretelling rain. Thankfully, the temperature was still in the 70s early this morning AND Jude and Audrey got up before 7:30 a.m. so we were able to get outside to enjoy the last bit of warm air before the rain and cold.
After breakfast and playing outside, Jude did one page of addition in this math book and one page of handwriting. We continued reading about Martin Luther, learning that he was hidden in a castle as protection from those in the Roman Church that wanted to kill him. Our project for the rest of the morning was making castles out of cereal boxes wrapped in a aluminum foil with construction paper doors, windows, flags, etc. They turned out really well! I actually didn't think they would. :)
Part of our afternoon consisted of building a big tent in the living room - a pretty great rainy day activity, if you ask me. :)
