Creation to the Greeks, Week 13, Nov. 15-19, 2010

We have completed another week of studies and next week we will be doing a lighter week of school work as we celebrate Thanksgiving and take a break from our full curriculum.  In Week 13 we continued to learn about the 10 Plagues of Egypt, Moses, and the Passover.  We will not celebrate the Passover feast until the spring when it really is time for it in the Jewish calendar.  It was fascinating to me to learn about how God judged the false gods of Egypt through the plagues.  I don't remember ever reading about that before and I read about it last week in my own Bible commentary and the children had a worksheet about it included in our materials for Creation to the Greeks from My Father's World!  They were not just random punishments, but they were showing the power of God over the false gods that could not protect Egypt.

 We learned about the Greek word "phone" (pronounced "fo-nay") and we found lots of derivatives from it: telephone, xylophone, symphony, phonics, etc. It means "sound" so that was an easy one to understand.  We zipped through more math, English, spelling, and reading.  We also began to study the Baroque music composer Johann Sebastian Bach and we will be learning more about him over the next few weeks.

We began reading another Patricia St. John book entitled, Treasures of the Snow. This is the third book of her series for us to read this fall and we have really enjoyed the other stories of children and how they go through difficulties, but learn about Jesus!  We already read aloud The Tanglewoods' Secret and Star of Light.This one is set in snowy Switzerland.

We did some science experiments when we talked about molecules and how all matter is made of them, reading from Genesis for Kids.  We used vinegar to try and clean off some dirty pennies to show a chemical reaction and we used salt to melt ice.  We were supposed to lift the ice cubes on a string that would re-freeze in the ice cubes where they melted from the salt, but it didn't really work.  We may try it again and stick them in the freezer after using the salt this time.

J added the vinegar to the jar of pennies

This shows the pennies after washing them in the vinegar and we could tell that they were cleaner, but this photo was in a shadow.  Oops!  Anyway, we also made a Thanksgiving craft and took a few days to work on it, a little each day.  I will be sharing that in a more Thanksgiving-ish post this week.