Follow the Drinking Gourd

today, we finished up our two week row of the book "Follow the Drinking Gourd" by Jeanette Winter. This was a fabulous book, easy to find in our library, and had great themes throughout that we could rabbit trail!

our first day we introduced slavery as a general topic, discussing the Israelites as slaves in Egypt as a tie in. Bonobo jumped right on it and said he wanted to run really fast to Egypt and free any slaves still there! we also looked at a map of the Underground Railroad and talked about the virtual railroad stops and conductors and passengers along the way.

next we focused on language arts and compound words. we had a great resource from homeschoolshare.com and both boys had fun mixing and matching words to see what made sense and what didn't. we also found a snowman compound word file folder game at filefolderfun.com and TicTac was able to complete all of them, whereas Bonobo (since he couldn't read) was a bit more frustrated but really wanted to play the game. i made some goofs while making the folder game (like using contact paper on both sides of the snowman bodies and then trying to glue them into the folder...just left me frustrated and got lots of wrinkles in the folder). but, live and learn!

next we read a go along book called "The Drinking Gourd" by F.N.Monjo. also readily available at the library. we broke out the dry erase board and focused on the similarities between the stories with the dangers and modes of transportation used to escape the plantations.

the 18th was MLK, Jr day, and daddy joined in the schooling fun to talk with them about his role in history. it was neat getting daddy involved!

i was hoping to delve into cotton plantations, but we never got time for that.

co-op was at our house, and first we read the story. then we all gathered in the kitchen to make 8.5 x 11 replicas of the Big Dipper and talked about some very interesting facts about the constellation. then we gathered in the living room to work on a timeline of Harriet Tubman's life in correlation with happenings in the US. all the moms had lots of good information to contribute about the book as well as Harriet Tubman's life. what an amazing woman she was!

i would love to provide links for all the games, etc we found on-line to give credit where it is due, but those links are saved on the other computer, and it is having issues as of late. when i can access them, i will edit this post.

this book was a wonderful study of slavery and history.

as for school these last two weeks, Tic Tac has been doing his math workbook with a less than exuberant attitude, but it is getting done. whoever knew that counting by 2's was torture?

his writing is being put to the test with his CBS bible study through Luke. and he continues to work in his HWT book.

Bonobo has been super excited about his Explode the Code books! he begs me to do pages every day!! what a switch from the beginning of our year. he is even getting excited about his Kinder-Math book that we started at the beginning of january. we are spending the off days reinforcing his letters and phonics with programs like Starfall online and a few other preschool workbooks we had around.

Stinkerbell is even getting her own schooling done in the mornings. we have lots of fun working with lacing blocks and buttons. i am trying to get her to focus on sorting by color, shape, etc, but she is more into the sheer mechanics of lacing. we are also working on her word/picture recognition.

all in all, a good two weeks! i hope to post more regularly so it isn't such a long summary at the end of the unit :)

happy schooling!