Homeschool Chronicles: Weeks 11-14
The last day of school for the girls was on June 24th, it was definitely a mix of sadness and a bit of relief. We have enjoyed some aspects of the online learning, but others have been challenging and the girls are already missing seeing their friends and teachers regularly.
We will still do some fun learning this summer with activities from the girls' previous lessons and also working in some typing lessons and other col stuff, but this week we are taking a much-needed break to rest and relax.
As the girls returned from the week-long Eid break, the twins continued in their art unit. They had to choose either a still life or landscape and make a final art piece. Over the course of a couple days the girl's sketched their chosen piece and then painted it. Evelyn choose to setup a still life of her own with toys and Olivia asked for the Doha skyline so we looked through pictures and she selected the one she wanted. They also did a self-portrait drawing as well.
The girls also started touching on weight and did some experiments with which is heavier. They also worked on patterns and talked about symmetry. They looked for symmetry in the house, on faces, and made their own symmetry artwork. They also learned about double drawing and had to make a tutorial for their class on tracing their hand and turning it into something else (Evelyn chose a flower, Olivia chose a starfish.)
Another neat activity that we did was to make skin color paints using spices and then decide which we felt matched our own skin and make a drawing. We have spoken with the girls before about melanin (the pigment in our body that determines our skin color) and this was another great way to have the discussion of skin color and celebrating how everyone is different. We also made salt fossils and painted them and Evelyn spent a couple weeks making a pearlier bead cross as part of her passion project time.
Madison started a new unit for the last few weeks of school called "How We Express Ourselves". They focused on learning terms like "character, trait, setting, plot, and problem/solution". They looked at stories and identified characters and then worked over the weeks to create characters, construct a setting, develop a storyline, and then record their story for the class. Madison loved it and you'll see there were quite a few videos for her work that unit!
Madi titled her story "Princess and the Bear". She created a setting out of magazines, acted out the story, folded a paper into a book with 8 pages and wrote down her story before reading it to her class. 😊
They also reviewed skip counting and then did an introduction to multiplication.
In Madi's Performing Arts class they've been practicing being a newscaster and conducting interviews. Then they worked on picking news stories and putting together a Good News Segment. Madi decided what she wanted to discuss, recorded herself doing each clip, and then helped me to edit the video. Enjoy Madison's Good News Report! 😊
It's been a long last term over the past 14 weeks of online learning and we are thankful for the summer break and relaxed schedule for awhile. You can click on the links to see what we covered in Weeks 1-5 and Weeks 6-10 of online learning.
