25 September 2011

Our Castle and Knights Week

In our home school, we have lots of workbooks to do. Some days, I like it, others I think, that it's a bit much. So I figured, we gonna make each week a little more fun. So this past week, we had castle and knights week. It was a big hit with Coqui - he loved it. And he wore the knight's costume that I made him almost every day to school this week.

I got lots of ideas from other bloggers or homeschooling moms, but I also came up with a few on my own. I printed out a floor plan of a castle with directions to name each room. He had to follow those instructions in order to learn north and south, east and west. So it was geography mixed with art. But really, especially in a homeschooling setting, I need to get away from trying to label our subjects - the beauty of it all should be that we can mix it. That we can do one full day just art, or just geography.

We also learned about the different parts of a castle in German and English, reading the book from the picture. So he learned some new vocabulary, in both languages, such as moat and breastplate and drawbridge. We also read other books about knights.
We learned what makes a knight and what he needs to wear to protect himself (armor). We tied that to bible studies learning the bible verse from Ephesians 6:11 "Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes." I did not really said 'devil' but used the term 'bad guys'. I didn't want to scare him too much.
Then we translated the parts of the armor to God's armor, like the shield is faith and the shoes are peace.

There were other worksheets, like finding the difference or opposites. It was harder to tie it to Math and numbers. But I did find this super-duper cool preschool set from this homeschooling lady Jolanthe - here is the link to the Knight Preschool Pack.  She even came up with a girls' version, in case you don't have a knight but a princess at home. It is a preschool pack, so I only printed a few things that made our day more fun, rather than educational. One of that was a picture 'color-by-number', here it is:
At the end of the week, after being very cooperative with school, even though grandma had arrived in the middle of the week, he got to see a knights movie: "The Backyardigans: The Tale of the Mighty Knights" - he had really earned it.

Today, he made a crown (all by himself) and also got started on a castle. He is getting so crafty.... I got to watch out, soon my house will be filled with arts and crafts and I don't know where to put it!

He also made other crafts with grandma, like a house for Jesus:
Next week is suppose to be our building week where we learn all about different kinds of buildings - you know from one-story houses to skyscrapers. I got a ton of books from the library that I will use (also in order to safe some paper from all this worksheet printing!).

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