So much for my "plans" for Friday

Baby has his first cold....There's another reason not to do a Parent Partnership Program I guess!! My poor wittle baby. And he was cranky.

But while bouncing him in my arms, I could still have the girls do their work and read certain things to me. They finished their Language Arts for the week, and we chose Story of the World for our unit study. But we weren't at the castles yet, I had forgotten we were supposed to review "The Rise of Islam". So we did that instead. We made review cards, The Five Pillars of Islam and ran out of time to recreate a little Hajj (Pilgrimage). I meant to do that in the afternoon after math but someone really wanted to do art and finish that Kadinsky inspired painting. So I let her. It took up all afternoon! Daddy came home late, and we still needed a few groceries (I wasn't taking cranky baby anywhere) so dinner didn't get put on the table until almost 9. Having just discussed Ramadan earlier in the day, about 8:00 I told the kids we were waiting for it to be dark so we could feast. So just drink water while you're waiting. They thought that was pretty funny. So we feasted at 9 and the kids told Daddy all about the Five Pillars and what they knew Ramadan. We took a few pictures for our Homeschool Scrapbook.
We had worked on this last year but instead used What In the World's Going On Here/Romans Reformers and Revolutionaries for the primary source and just used SOW as extra read-aloud. We didn't retain very much. We are so not auditory learners. As we went through the review cards I decided we needed to spend some time on a few key topics, so here we are. I think next week we review the Islamic Invasion, then Charlemagne, spend some time with our library books about castles and then maybe we'll be caught up to the Knights and Samurai chapter? We're going to take 3 weeks there. I bought the coolest Usborne books about knights and castles!! Look at this website to see what I mean: www.ubah.com/h2549. There's even a program called Ten Terrific Weeks that you could use as your curriculum for it. I might buy it for more in depth study- it's really inexpensive and it might give us a little more variety during those 3 weeks we have set aside. You can buy it with the books or without- I'll have to see which books I already have. I've thumbed through it and liked it, but then again I'm a curriculum junkie. We have way more options than I think we'll probably go through completely. It's kind of like having a bunch of cookbooks though....I'll have to ponder that and get back to you with those thoughts.