Week 9-23-13 of School

Can you believe that September is almost over? Holy cow! It seems as if it just started. All the stores have their Halloween decoration and some even have started to put their Christmas decorations out. UUGGHH! This is going Waaaaaay too fast for me. Anyhow, this week was a hard week for us for school. We did not accomplish nearly as much as we usually do.

First on Monday night I had a hard night with pain that I was up the majority of the evening walking around trying to get the shooting pain to stop. Therefore on Tuesday I was tired and cranky! That does not make for a good school day. So we got a few things done and then I called it quits because I was losing my patience and snapping at the kiddos. And yes, I apologized to them for snapping. The really did nothing wrong.

Wed, was a great day. We went to the LA County fair for our free school days field trip. What a blast. I will post some of those pictures separately from this post. We do this every year and we always have a blast. We never go on rides and rarely spend money on food. I always bring food and we spend all our time at the farm or in the learning buildings. This year, we met up with some friends and had even more fun with them. Oh and I got licked by the cutest baby cow ever!!!!

Well onto school. For History this week we are reading about The Rise of Islam and the Muslin religion. I debated about teaching about the religion and even my husband asked why I had books of being muslin. But I decided it would be better to learn about what the other religions believe in and maybe it would help strengthen their own beliefs. We also read about Muhammad and his 5 Pillars of Islam and how the Koran came to be. Quite interesting stuff. The one thing I will say about some of the Eastern religions is that they are VERY strict unlike us out here in the USA. We are very willy nilly with our beliefs!

Our History project this week was to paint on a tile the 5 Pillars of Islam. Tiles were painted back in these days and fired and used as decorations. However, because of our religious beliefs I decided to have the kids paint something on a tile that would represent our own faith. As you can see by the pictures, they really turned out very beautiful!

Our apologetics is really making sense to the kiddos. I am so glad. I keep saying every week how surprised I am that they are really picking up on this, especially my daughter (8). Again this week we are really just narrowing down on what is truth and what is not and how we can tell the difference between them. We looked at advertisements as well as some ideas that people have about being a Christian among other examples. We are really learning that even if you do not believe in God or in the words of the Bible that God has given us his truth in the creation around us. That things like a tree do not spring up out of the ground by chance. Either  the wind, animal or person had to plant it there. The world could not have just sprung up out of nothing. If there was something there to collide and make a big boom them how did those thing come to be. You cannot make brownies out of nothing. You have to have the ingredients to make them. As with creation, it is not a chance thing. There had to have been something there at one time and that something (planets or whatever) had to be created before a big bang (as evolutionist believe) could have happened.

For science we are just touching on the carnivorous animals now.  Of course we had a refresher course in what a mammal is and how to tell a mammal from a, let’s say, lizard. We talked about how teeth are not always a good way to tell is an animal is carnivorous or not. The Panda bear is a great example of that. Since they have very large and sharp canine teeth, which are for tearing at bamboo not flesh! Next week I am sure we will have more to talk about in science.

English was one of the subjects we barely touched this week. Basically we are still working on the same stuff as last week. I promise this coming week will be better. I will have to think about taking some Tylenol before bed this week to see if that will help with the evening pain. If not I will have to just drink more coffee in the am to get rid of the tired impatience. Oh great now I will be all gitttttttery! LOL!

Anyway, I hope you all have a great weekend and we’ll catch you next Fri.