Tapestry of Grace Year 3: Weeks 17-18

We finally completed the last two weeks of this first semester!  I'm so thrilled to have gotten halfway through the year!  These two weeks were full of fun, learning about the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush!  I've got lots of pictures from this week, making up for the past few weeks!

I just love the kids illustrations of each week!  Here's Luke's notebook page about the Oregon Trail, along with the vocabulary words we dictated this week.

For Tapestry literature this week, the kids read The 18 Penny Goose.  I've been having them read the literature selections independently, which has been a good challenge for them, and reduced my read aloud time.  Everybody wins! I really loved this worksheet, having the kids make a "quilt" of illustrations telling the story.  

We played a game with beans that kids on the trail played.

In Song School Latin this week, we learned some animal names!  

 In Week 18, we studied the California Gold Rush.  Below are their notebook pages:

One quick and easy activity this week was to make a gold brick.  

Levin enjoyed helping. 

A brick this size would have weighed a TON!  Today it would be worth over $600,000!

Here's Luke pretending it's extremely heavy!

We also learned about how people traveled to California, and which way was fastest.  We talked about which way we would have chosen to travel!

We read a book about Emily Dickinson, and I loved Luke's answer to this last question about the book. "What do you think of when you read poetry?" Luke: I feel confused when I read poetry.  Me too, buddy. Me too!

Luke is really moving along in Classical Writing! I am loving this program.  He's getting a lot of practice rearranging sentences, understanding parts of speech, direct and indirect quotes, and in the coming weeks, he'll be learning about adding a bit of style to his writing with noun modifiers and descriptive words.  

Halfway there!  Hopefully we can finish the second half before June! In case you noticed in one of the pictures, yes, Levi is nearly bald.  It about broke my heart!  We've been struggling with *cough* lice for several weeks.  We know where we picked it up, and it has made the rounds in the house.  I became the lice nazi the other day when I realized it had spread to the boys, and we spent all day emptying out linens, washing, and drying on hot, coconut oiling everyone's heads and sitting with shower caps for hours.  Those lice were going to die!  Just to be safe, the boys both got buzz cuts.  This was the first time we had cut Levi's hair, and I almost cried when Paul brought him home!  But, it had to be done, and it will grow out.  I just hope it will be as soft as it was before!