Joan of Arc and Saint Valentine

Last week we continued our block on Saints with Joan of Arc and Saint Valentine. 

On Monday, we started off our week with "clay day".  This will be the last in our series of modeling for awhile.  Grant modeled a cube with the fingertips of his right hand behind his back.  Next week, we will be doing a different exercise on Mondays. 
 We also did the penny whistle lesson and reviewed time telling on our clock.  For math review, we did a new game called "lots of boxes" out of our "Math Games" book.  Grant rolled his dice once to find the number of squares along the bottom of his box (on grid paper), and then rolled the dice a second time to find how many squares tall his box would be.  Once you have these first two lines you can complete the box and then use an addition equation, or a multiplication equation, to write out the number of boxes.

Once we were done with all that fun stuff, I read Grant a story from our "Stories of the Saints" book about Joan of Arc.  And no, the story does not include anything about her burning at the stake. She really did have a very interesting life, but she sure did get a bad deal at the end!  Proper laws and procedures were not followed during her trial, and that bad part was she couldn't even read any of the documents they had her signing. It is amazing what one, poor peasant girl was able to do for the country of France!

After I read the story, we drew our pictures in our main lesson books.

Mom's Drawing

Grant's Drawing

On Tuesday, we started with jump roping, and reviewed skip counting with bean bag tosses.  Afterward, I had Grant retell me Joan's story, and then we summarized it, and he copied it into his lesson book. We did some LA exercises on the board with the summary.  This time I misspelled some words and Grant had to figure them out and spell them correctly. 

We also read this book for a fun review of nouns:

I also read the kids this book:

The kids also started making their valentines on Tuesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, I started teaching Grant a new string game and he requested the "lots of boxes" for math review.  After that I read Grant this book about Saint Valentine.  There are a lot of different stories out there about him, but this one took place in Rome when the Christians were being persecuted.  Valentine was a physician and a priest.  He was known for his abilities to heal, and help those in need. He was arrested for being a Christian and put in prison where he would write notes signed, "Love Your Valentine".  He was also executed, but one again we didn't get into that.

After reading the book, Grant and I drew our pictures:

Mom's Drawing

Grant's Drawing

We finished out the week with Grant re-telling me the story of Saint Valentine, summarizing, and copying.

We also finished making valentines, and made some boxes for the kids to hold their valentines they got from the party with the local home school group.

I couldn't believe some of the valentine boxes at that party! Check these out:

The play center where they had the party, had an indoor skating rink.  Julia liked to stand right on the line and watch the kids skate by.

They also had a big indoor playground, and "arcade" games that the kids enjoyed playing.

They were most excited to come home with all the Valentine cards!

On Friday afternoon, I read the kids another fun Valentine's Day book:

Finally, on Sunday we ate heart-shaped waffles for breakfast (since Dad won't be home Monday morning)on our heart-shaped plates, and made these yummy Valentine's Day cookies.



They are jam-filled peanut butter cookies, but Johanna is not a big fan of the peanut butter and jelly combo, so we made a few chocolate ones for her.

Next week we will spend the whole week on Saint Francis.

January Verse

Here are the kids reciting the verse they memorized over the month of January during circle time.  Enjoy!

Now Those Are Some Serious Icicles!

More Snow!

Saint Brigid and Saint Columba

Last week we started up a new LA block using stories of the Saints.  The first Saint we covered was the Irish Saint Brigid.

The dandelion lights its spark

Lest Brigid find the wayside dark.

And Brother Wind comes rollicking

For joy that she has brought the spring.

Young lambs and little furry folk

Seek shelter underneath her cloak.

Winifred Mary Letts (1882 - 1972)

I don't know where to start with her!  She has pagan origins that have been blended into Christian beliefs and stories, as well as being associated with the celebration of Candlemas on February 2nd.  February is the month of Brigid.

Jen at Ancient Hearth did a great blog post here about Saint Brigid if you are interested in reading more about her.

Before we started our main lesson, and our story about Saint Brigid, Grant modeled a cube behind his back using only the fingertips of his left hand, and then we did some math review with bean bag tosses while skip counting, and using his wooden math dice to do some equations.  After that, we reviewed telling time when I gave him some times to show me on our handmade clock.  After that we did our penny whistle lesson, and then I told him a story about Saint Brigid.

Before we drew the pictures of Saint Brigid in our main lesson book, Grant practiced the form drawing for the week on his chalkboard.

Here are our drawings of Saint Brigid (We will be back to using only our blue, red and yellow block crayons for all of our Saint drawings):

Mom's Drawing

Grant's Drawing

On Tuesday, the kids had some indoor morning playtime as we were having "blizzard like" conditions outside.  Once we were in the school room, Grant jump-roped, and Johanna tried it to for the first time.  She was a little reluctant at first, but once she jumped over the rope once, she was excited to try again.  She got a few good jumps in.  After that, we review math by playing the game, "Sum Swamp". 

After we finished playing the game, we did our penny whistle lesson and then I read the kids this book for the upcoming Groundhog's Day:

 After I read the book, we had a snack of Saint Brigid's oatcakes. 

After snack, Grant retold me a part of our story about Saint Brigid.  His favorite story was about her and the wolf.  We summarized that story, and he copied it into his lesson book:

I copied the summary onto the chalkboard, writing the nouns in blue and the verbs in red.  After we talked about nouns and verbs, I read this book to Grant:

It was a fun review for him.

The kids spent a lot of time playing outside Wednesday morning in the 12 inches of snow we got the day before. 

Plowing with Dad.

(Yeah, I know. I went a little crazy with the hair.)

Since we spent a little more time outside, we left out the string game and shortened up our penny whistle lesson a little.  We review math with bean bag toss, and then I read Grant some stories about Saint Columba from this book:

If you are interested, you can find more information about Saint Columba here.

After that, we drew pictures of Saint Columba in our lesson book.

Mom's Drawing

Grant's Drawing

Since today was Candlemas/Groundhog's Day I read this book:

The kids found it was pretty funny that there was an "official" Groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil, and that Groundhog's Day was such a huge event there in Pennsylvania.  They enjoyed this book as well as playing with their little wooden groundhog (from Mama Roots) who has been on our nature table the past couple weeks.

On Thursday, we did a lot of "zoo-robics" when we got into the school room since the temperature started out below zero that morning and we stayed in.

We had all kinds of silly animals visiting our school room.  Elephants, creepy-crawling caterpillar, inchworms, funny fish and cats.

Here we have some caterpillars:

Here we have a caterpillar going under a cat:

Here we have a funny fish flopping around (with Mia looking on).  She didn't know what to think about everyone
flopping around on the floor!

After all the fun, we moved onto math review with the game "star count" and penny whistle lesson. Once we were done with that I had Grant re-tell me the story about Saint Columba, and then we came up with a summary which he copied into his main lesson book:

I also copied the summary onto the chalkboard so we could do a LA exercise with it, and Grant was very excited because he was able to finish copying in his book before I finished copying on the board.  I didn't point out that he had about a 10 minute head start.  :)

Once he was done with his copy work, he read the summary out loud, and then I erased some of the words off the board and he had to figure out what the words were and re-write them.

When Grant finished his lesson, we did some fun shadow portraits.  I traced the kid's shadows on a piece of paper and then they colored them in however they wanted. The kids really had fun with these!  It was pretty funny to see the finished products, too! We started out with just profile shadow portraits, but they wanted to do straight-on shadow portraits, as well.

Candlemas gets it name from the blessing of the candles for use in the church.  It is also a celebration of the presentation of Jesus in the temple.

"At the beginning of February, when the infant light of spring is greeted thankfully by the hoary winter earth, it seems fitting we should celebrate a candle Festival to remember that moment when the Light of the World was received into the Temple, when the old yielded to the new "   -All Year Round

Since Candlemas is all about candles, I read a candlemas verse from the Little Acorn Learning February Enrichment Guide and we decorated some beeswax candles.  I also read a story from the Little Acorn Guide about a snowdrop flower, also known as a candlemas bell.

Johanna and her candle.

Grant's Candle