Vikings - MFW 2nd Grade- Week 1 - NSPA Homeschooling Hub

This has been our first week in Adventures in U.S. History for my oldest and the first week of Learning God's Story by My Father's World curriculum. The first week is always an introduction. The have both of them practice writing ever letter of the alphabet to work on their handwriting. Most of the lessons where short and we discussed what would be expected of them in each subject.

Since i have already taught the 1st grade curriculum with my oldest i was able to jump in and be more in depth this first week 'Things Close to the Ground' with her.

They started learning the Pledge of Allegiance which they want us to start our school days reciting.

Also this week we had to revise our worm homes from last week. My idea for a home wasn't working so i hopped onto Pinterest and found a better worm observation home. This works SOOO much better, especially since i covered the bottles. So when we want to watch them we just slip the cover off and so far every time we have seen a worm (most of the time several) up against the plastic.

I LOVE that other home school moms blog about their days! They have given me so many wonderful ideas. Starting out my Adventures journey i have been referring a lot to Home with us for ideas. She is such a fun, crafty home school teacher! So you will probably see us doing many of the same things.

I have always adored maps. Even as a little girl my mom always trusted me to guild her on long trips. So when we set up the school room one of my first buys was a big wall map. With kindergarten i started making tiny images of the animals we learned about and put them where they go on the map.

This year with history we are going to continue that idea and expand it to mark voyages, where Indians lived, land marks ect. Since this week we read about the Vikings and they voyages and discovery of new lands, we marked them on the map. I hope this gives them a visual and helps instill it into them. I made a different viking picture for each Viking and put their name by it so that would help us remember the story. So we have Eric the Red traveling from Norway to Iceland, Iceland to Greenland. Then Leif the Lucky (his son) traveling from Greenland to Newfoundland Canada aka 'Vinland' the Vikings called it. I probably should add another ship in between Norway and Iceland lol.

(Anabel helping me cut the pieces out)

For our project/craft/art time this week i had the girls color and and cut out a Viking family. You can find the paper dolls and plans for the ship HERE. We also put together this Viking ship. a couple of the pieces are not included in the ship plans, like the dragon head and tail, oars ect, but they are easy to slap your own together.

The kids have had so much fun playing with these again today.

Also our "Big Book of History" came in the mail yesterday. I decided to buy a time line instead of make my own. This one starts at Creation and goes as far as 2008 and President Obama. It based off of AIG's study of the history of the bible and the young earth. It is an awesome time line in my view. I LOVE how it's in a book. I can flip the pages as if it's a book or unfold the time line which spreads out 15 feet. I decided to buy this and cut out the time each week to make my own time line pages, which frankly i don't have the time for with a 2yr ad 6m old interrupting our school days.