Year 1: Week 4

Gemma helped me bake chocolate chip banana bread muffins. Gemma, who eats nothing, ate two of them while they were still warm, so they must be good. 😉

This recipe makes 12 muffins.

3 speckled bananas (mashed)

1 1/2 c Flour

1 stick unsalted butter (melted)

3/4 c Brown sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp Salt

1 tsp Baking soda

3/4 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Vanilla extract

1 c. Semi-sweet chocolate chips

Stir it together in a bowl, and spoon into cupcake liners. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

Really, these muffins are amazing. How could they not be? They're essentially chocolate chips held together with bananas and brown sugar.

Baking totally counts as handicrafts.

(This "week" or module actually took 9 days.)

One of this week's history lessons from On the Shores of the Great Sea was about Moses and the Exodus. Of the Egyptians pursuing the Israelites into the Red Sea, Gemma narrated, "They got perished." This is Gemma's drawing of Pharaoh. Note the beard.

We also read Hillyer's A Child's History of Art - the chapter titled "What's Wrong With This Picture?" about Egyptian paintings. Here is Gemma's drawing of an Egyptian woman (profile of face, front view of shoulders and torso, and side view of feet). Since Hillyer wrote that the Egyptians only used red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, and brown, I limited her color choices to those colors. Hillyer also wrote that Egyptians sometimes painted people red or green, so Gemma made her person red with green hair.

She also enjoyed the impossibility of trying to pose like a person in an Egyptian painting.

We also read On the Shore of the Great Sea chapter 8, in which the Israelites reach the Promised Land.

For geography, in addition to reviewing places like Africa, Asia, Egypt, Nile River, Mediterranean Sea, etc., we also continued reading The World By the Fireside (by Mary Kirby) about the Frozen Zone, seals, and snow houses.

We spent a day at Temescal Canyon.

We saw jays and heard woodpeckers, and at one point, I saw the most beautiful yellow bird fly overhead. I'm not sure what it was, but it may have been a hooded oriole...?

They made drawbots - drawing robots. Robotics counts as handicrafts, right?

Our Aesop's Fable this week was "The Oak and the Reed." In math, Gemma did chapter 5 of Life of Fred: Kidneys. She started the summer reading program at the library and checked out several paperback "mysteries," wrote 3 thank you notes, went to dance class, continued feeding her tadpole bits of algae tablets (and asking, "When is she going to do her cycle?" translation - "turn into a frog"), continued learning this term's recitation passages, listened to Moonlight Sonata, revisited Degas' The Singer in Green, and continued working on Boogie Woogie Goose on piano (among other songs).

Something I didn't expect my 6 year old to ask me: Gemma was independently reading The Magic Tree House book about Abraham Lincoln, and asked, "Mom, what does a-s-s-a-s-s-i-n-a-t-e-d spell?"

We read several Stevenson poems, and Gemma continued practicing "Good and Bad Children." While practicing, she accidentally composed a couplet, "I had a little tiny look. I took a peek at the book."

Gemma chose Rapunzel as our fairy tale. After I read the story (for her narration), she drew a picture and told me about it.

For Natural History, we read the James Herriot story "Bonny's Big Day," (and as a free read, reread "Only One Woof." We also read The Burgess Seashore Book ("A Meeting with Crabs"). We watched videos of a ghost crab, a lady crab, a blue crab molting, and one about how the green crab is an invasive species brought to North America from Europe in the 1800s. We also listened to the birdsongs of the Yellowlegs (tattler), because that was in last week's chapter.

Our primary Bible reading was Joseph's dreams. I explained why God changed Jacob's name to Israel, showed her a "sheaf" of wheat, and explained what "obeisance" means.

We also read The Twelve Dancing Princesses, as a free-read, twice. One of the things that has always struck me about that story is the way the princesses don't care that the princes are put to death.

We sang our hymn and foreign language songs, and watched a Children of the Open Air video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Nz10GYdyo

Two resources we have also been using, which I have completely forgotten to mention are Wee Sing Around the World and Cedarmont Kids: Songs of America. We listen to these CDs in the car, and Gemma hums and sings the songs everywhere.