History Fair...

Our local homeschool group has a history fair. We decided to choose one of the countries we've been studying in Galloping the Globe to present. They decided they wanted to do Korea. We had the best time getting ready. We used one of the MANY diaper boxes sitting around and transformed it into a dragon head for a parade.
We got pictures and stories from my dad about when my grandfather was serving in Korea during the Korean War. I think that was their favorite thing they learned. They loved having pictures of him on their display board. We also typed up our favorite facts we leaned and included pictures of things we had done at home.

Then the night before they decided they wanted to dress up. By the grace of God, I was able to throw something together with items from the dollar aisle in Target. Jackson's Korean warrior armor is a knight's costume he had with two placemats tied together over it! Ashton's is a dress up dress she had, her Cleopatra shawl tied around her in Korean fashion. We put two chopsticks in her hair. Her purse was from Target dollar section and her very Asian silk belt was actually a headband- it's good to be skinny! 

I probably say this all the time, but this was one of the most amazing homeschool moments ever. The other moms and I sat back and watched in amazement as the kids spent over 2 hours teaching each other about about their countries. And I mean really teaching. They weren't just hanging out and chatting about their favorite TV show. They went table to table and genuinely asked questions and taught each other. It was truly priceless.

I almost felt sorry for the some of the adults that came by their table because they talked their ears off!!! They told them every single thing we learned, and I learned that they have truly been paying attention!
Yea Mommy!

I can't express enough how wonderful this day was. I'm so happy to see that my children are learning, remembering what they learned, and most importantly loving learning. As a great bonus, today they made some homeschool friends and I did too!

Galloping the Globe Notebook...

As we gallop the globe we needed a notebook to record our travels. I printed this cover off the Galloping the Globe Yahoo group.

We spent so much time on China we made a lapbook of all we learned. I used several resources from Homeschool Share. We won't do this for every country. My goal is to make 1 lapbook per continent. I simply punched holes through the file folder in order to put it in the binder. We did mini books on several topics like Mt. Everest,counting to 10 in Chinese, Chinese picture book summaries, the Great Wall, emperors, and basic facts about China.
I also googled images of the money and printed a few on cardstock.

The cover has their name in Chinese, the flag, and a paper doll dressed in Chinese fashion from Making Friends.

Here's the boy version :)

The back cover also has their Draw, Write Now pages and summaries they did after reading The Story of Ping. Behind the lapbook we included our notebooking pages. We use the great country info and Children Just Like Me notebooking pages from Jolanthe.

This is Ashton's version where she writes "he goot a sackne" translation: he got a spanking!

That is our 1st country in. We will add other countries in behind and divide them with tabbed dividers. We're enjoying our trips so far!

We've got the Whole Globe in Our Hands...

These first posts are pretty late, but the first two weeks have been so busy that I have had no time to blog!

Since we began homeschooling with the logical place of creation, we talked about Pangaea (Who knew there were Bible verses to support the scientific theory of a supercontinent? I didn't. I learned it from our Tapestry of Grace curriculum.)

They are very eager to make a video of their completed creation pizza books. I am awful about putting videos on my blog, but I have to get better because they both love making them and do a really good job. These books were really neat and I don't think they will forget the 7 days of creation anytime soon!

I wish I had thought to take a picture of them with their inflatable globe. Santa really knew what he was doing when he brought us that because we have really used it. We are learning the continents and oceans.

I found a great song on a website that helped a lot. It is sung to the tune of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands":

We've got the whole globe in our hands,
We've got the whole globe in our hands,
We've got the whole globe in our hands,
The whole globe in our hands.

We've got Europe, Asia, Africa in our hands,
We've got North and South America in our hands,
We've got Australia and Antarctica in our hands,
We've got the whole globe in our hands.

We passed it around with each verse. Whoever was holding it when we got to the verse with the continents had to point to all of them as we sang it. They really loved it and remembered it really well.

I haven't found a song for oceans, but at least there are only 4 of them! We did learn about how the earth is 70% water by tossing the globe to each other. Everyone had to look at where their left thumb was and tell if it was on water or land. We kept tally marks. It worked out perfectly that it landed on water 70% of the time!

This was a fun first week, and it didn't stop there. Stay tuned...