Adventures in MFW - week 1

I've been trying to figure out how to blog these first few weeks of MFW since we actually did them during the last school year and then reviewed them last week. After much deliberation (sort of) I decided to blog them all separately so my MFW blogroll buddies will have an easier time searching for whatever week they may be interested in locating. Enjoy...I know we did!

So here's week 1 of Adventures

Bible ~ We spent a great deal of time this week discussing names and their meanings because this year we'll be focusing on all the names of Jesus (Light of the World, Bread of Life, Lamb of God, etc). To drive the point home, B and I wrote each of the girls a letter explaining how we chose their names and what their names mean. We also made "name" necklaces to remind them that they are special to God.

History and Geography ~ This year we are studying US history, so what better place to start than the Pledge of Allegiance? MFW recommended a great book called I Pledge Allegiance by Francis Bellamy with commentary by Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson. The book was fabulous because it defined what each word meant, line by line.

We also constructed our time line, learned how to read maps, labeled continets and oceans on a world map and read about Vikings and Leif Ericsson...and we watched the Veggie Tales movie Lyle, the Kindly Viking - because we can't resist a VT movie when it ties in so nicely!

I think the girls' favorite part of their first week was getting to dive into the Book Basket. The idea is to get 5-10 books from the library relating to the topics you are studying for the week and then let the kids look through them at their leisure. We do have a scheduled 15 minute "Book Basket" time in our day, but the kids definitely spend more time rummaging through the books than that. Sydney read all the Viking books on the first day and Delaney loved looking at all the pictures. As you can see, even Sadey had a good time.

We also did math, science, handwriting, spelling and art - but that's not nearly as fun to talk about.