CC Cycle 3 Week 19

I just noticed I wrote but never posted this!! Better late than never!!

History Sentence: Tell Me About NATO
Well, we couldn't talk about communism without talking about the cow explanations of politics.  Of course, to make it more kid-friendly, we did a review of our memory work with cookies as the reward.  Then, at the end, I re-assigned the M&Ms so that everyone had the same number despite their performance, keeping several for myself.  Everyone cried and then we talked about the free market economy and I wished my kids were old enough to watch Freakonomics.  We also used the CIA World Factbook to compare some standard of living items in a communist versus a democratic country.

This, of course, greatly confused Riley, who was extremely upset about the fact that aborted babies aren't counted in infant mortality rates, that art lessons each month cost more than 2.5% of the Chinese population makes in a year, and that the United States owes China money when China is a communist country.

Sorry, buddy, I can't explain that one to your satisfaction, either. On a side note, Wikipedia has a neat map that shows the number of countries that were communist during the Cold War with the number now.  We also visited the NATO website. We also might have played a game of civilization on our phone.  It's not educational at all, but each civilization starts with different knowledge and you can change to a new form of government and gain or lose abilities, plus I'm a huge dork and love it :)

Latin: John 1:5
More sign language!! Whoohoo!  This week they memorized fairly easily because it was short :)

English: The Predicate
Right.  Mad Libs.  (Kind of Mad Libs, anyway).  We took turns giving a subject, verb (from our review list!) and a predicate.  The next day, we changed it up and I provided silly sentences on the white board and the kids identified the parts.  Riley also had some worksheets to complete from his English Grammar book.

Science: What do the Heavens Declare
Psalm 19:1 worked out rather conveniently for us as Grandma is currently taking an astronomy class! Hooray for fun books and information from her!! Nothing wrong with a guest teacher :) We did this as our copy work and on Friday I'm planning to do some watercolor sky paintings in my quest to be better about craftiness.

Math: Feet in a Mile
We did the numbers with our fingers and then printed a foot picture and wrote 5,280 inside it.  The boys make lovely toenail designs and may have a future as manicurists.

Trails:
Hello Oregon Trail online!! Okay, fine, so it's not the same, but it's similar and free!! We did word association for this one, so a cucumber (Cumberland), santa hat (Santa Fe), a bunch of men (Mormon), a Gila Monster (Gila), a cane (Old Spanish), a surf board (California), and a stagecoach (Oregon).

Tomorrow is CC so I hope we're ready!! Friday is a spelling and math test day :)