November 7-8
Today’s Thankfuls:
Zander: For having a place to live
Emanuel: All the animals in the zoo
Gavin: Mommy letting us do crafts
Trinity: My home
We also started our very own Gratitude Turkey today. Same idea as telling me something they are thankful for but we are doing one thing a day and each child gets a chance to take a day. Emanuel started the feathers going. You can find our inspiration for this craft HERE. I lucked out and Ken was willing to do the template and creating of our base turkey and feathers! I love it when he puts in a helping hand on a project, especially with the kids!
Gratitude Turkey
We also made good use of some of our Activity Village worksheets and continued our thankful theme with some more Pilgrims and thoughtful sentences.
Thankful for…
Today’s dinosaur had less information than usual (well with no skull found I can’t really blame them) but we persevered… and of course worked on Thanksgiving some more. Sadly we had a 3 to 2 ratio on bad moods to good learners so by lunch time it was VERY clear that Echo, Trinity AND Zander ALL needed naps. Of course this had the added bonus of letting Gavin have some extra one on one time with me to get all his little bits done and assignments wrapped up. He did our Thanksgiving mini poster for the school corner. I love the creatively coloured turkey! Check out Education.com and this link HERE for the ones I am using.
Our sign
Getting some one on one time with Daddy on the iPad too!
We started our work on a page suggested to me by a fellow homeschooler. We have started our investigation with the Wampanoag Indians, learning about their culture and life style. What amazes me about Thanksgiving and the date it is supposed to represent in 1621 is there there is only ONE piece of source material… a letter from a Pilgrim to a friend back home, no oral record etc! What seems to be the deciding factor is the inclusion of the chief’s name… but still WOW! You can follow along with our learning and exploring by checking out this amazing website HERE.
Their favourite facts
Thursday’s Thankful Things are:
Trinity: For my play area
Emanuel: Everybody
Gavin: My Mom and Dad
Zander: For having Nana and Baba
Gavin’s turn with the Gratitude Turkey
And now for me… I am thankful (today and often) for amazing friends like Bree (and Karyn over the internets)… Thursday marked a special afternoon for me with my amazing pregnant friend. She treated us both to full out spa pedicures at nearby store. They were swamped so first we went to Target to window shop and then we went back for the pedicures. We got to soak for FOREVER as they were still busy which THEY apologized for and WE loved. We picked out nail polish and enjoyed massages, wax treatments and in the end – SPARKLY TOES!
Sparkly
But before all that grown up fun we had to get through our educational portion of the day! Today we learned about the Pilgrims on our VERY helpful webpage HERE. Their rather bare bones existence was interesting to read about as was the fact that they did not in fact celebrate Christmas (that one boggled the kids’ minds!). I found it very interesting that really we only know that MEN and the CHIEF came to this celebration and that the women and children (Pilgrim wise) would have been hard at work and probably kept from the native peoples. In fact, there were over 90 Native Americans there to the mere 30 Pilgrims in the very small village! AND that this was a ONE TIME THING! A whole tradition based on ONE written source record of an event that only happened (for sure) ONE time!
Pilgrim facts
Zander had a bit of trouble with the words eight and each on his spelling test but we will take another week and add those 2 to his new 5. Due to a link that a friend brought to my attention on Facebook Monday will be our first REALLY non dinosaur day with the woolly mammoth!!!
Emanuel and his imagination!
Seriously, when asked what it was he told me it was his imagination