Architecture and our Volcano

We are one week into our two week study of Chapter 2 in Unit 1.  While Chapter 1 focused on Cities and General Geology, we are now focusing deeper on Architecture and on more in depth Geology.  We are also studying some about electricity as that plays such a big role in cities and growth as well. 

We started our architecture study off by looking at animal shelters and how even animals were given the ability and skills by God to do some wonderful building.  Landon thinks beavers and their building skills are pretty great so we talked a lot about them and he wrote about them.  Epi thinks the bears are pretty smart because they don't have to do much work on their homes! 

This chapter is supposed to incorporate a lot of field trips which would be nice if the kids still weren't so sick.  While they are doing better, I don't want them out of the house much yet, so we are doing our field trips at home.  Our first field trip was supposed to be us going to our church and drawing it.  I bought the kids sketch journals.  We were unable to find a picture of our church online so we used the library books that we had gotten.  We looked at tons of pictures of Cathedrals and talked about how in the Middle Ages the kings and noblemen built the large Cathedrals out of guilt for their war crimes in an effort to have God forgive them many times.  We looked online at the Cathedral in Denver and tried to look for the one in Lubbock but didn't have luck.  Epi chose to draw one of the Cathedrals we saw in a book and Landon chose to draw Our Lady of the Pines in Conifer, CO as we found a great picture of that one online.  Here is Landon's.

We have also started to look a bit at castles and they each drew a picture of a castle as well.  We will look at more of those this coming week.  Of course being boys their pictures included dragons and trapped princesses but what are you going to do, haha.   Here is Epi's.

Our biggest project this week was for science.  We studied all about volcanoes and how they worked.  We read about Mt. Saint Helens and we looked at tons of pictures from it as well.  Then we built our own volcano and made it erupt!  It was a lot of fun. 

In Language Arts this week Landon worked a lot on paragraph structure and Epi worked on sentence structure.  Their writing is already getting a bit better and they are excited to enter a home school essay contest in our state focusing on inventions.  We will start working on their essays over the next month and they are due the beginning of November. 

Math this week was the last few lessons in the first few chapters so we had the first math test for each of them.  While I love our math curriculum there are no tests included so I made the tests myself using the workbook and text book as my guide.  Unfortunately my printer was out of ink so I wrote the tests out by hand.  While Epi wasn't too impressed with many of my drawings, I think they were perfect......  They both did well on their tests though and both ended up with an A.