Letters To Africa

The homeschooling blog is still awaiting the grand merge. I hate that. But I thought I'd share something the children and I worked on this week through the inspiration of our church.

A number of months ago, after our pastor and a group of others from the church had visited Africa, our church was inspired to sponsor an entire village of children who have been affected by the AIDS/HIV epidemic in Kenya. Through WorldVision's HopeChild program, hundreds of children's folders lay on the tables in the foyer of the church awaiting a sponsor. What an overwhelming experience. You just wanted to scoop up an arm full of children and take them home with you.

Ken and I decided to sponsor one child for each of our three children. When we got home, we taped their pictures and information sheets to our fridge as a reminder to pray for our three little ones on the other side of the world, and to keep their needs in our thoughts. We chose two boys, Daniel and Pelengus, and one girl, Chepkemoi. All three were similar in age to Jack and Grace.

In the months that followed, I was very impressed with the information packets we received from WorldVision regarding each of the children, and the follow up phone calls. Last month, we received our first greeting cards that we were to fill out for each of the children. Jack and Grace used their copywork time during schooling, to fill out the cards with their names, add their location of residence, create a little bio about themselves, and then paste a picture of our family on the back of the card. Permitted to send flat gifts, the kids hand selected an array of stickers to include for each child.

The children are excited to have "pen pals" in Africa. What a learning opportunity it will be as they grow up together on either side of the world, exchanging bits and pieces of their culture! If you are interested in sponsoring a HopeChild you can visit WorldVision's web site online, and select a child from the hundreds available.

"Whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me."
Matthew 18:5

Where In The World Is Faith Knucker Hatch?

That's right folks...take a good look at 2012's next National Geography Bee champion. Again...another homeschooler. (The kids were playing with our new globe and it orbited into Faith's territory. I couldn't pass up the picture.)

The globe has been an interesting addition. I purposely waited. I'm not sure why exactly. I wanted the children to learn the continents on a flat map first. It was amusing to watch them translate how the continents appeared on a flat map to the continents on a globe. It took some adjusting, but they were really interested in getting reaquainted with the continents. Ok...that...and seeing how fast they could spin the globe. I'm patting myself on the back now for going with the cheaper globe.

Only two more weeks to get organized before we hit the books again...ACH!!!

Surfing The Globe For Continents

In an earlier post, I mentioned that we ditched Marco Polo this term as I couldn't get my act together. I've been wanting to tie map work in with Columbus and our Vikings study, but, truthfully, it felt like I was putting the cart before the horse. Working with both a four and a six year old, I have my little guy who doesn't have a clue what continents are, and Grace, who used to know when she was at Montessori school two years ago, but needed a brush up.

I'll be brutally honest. Sometimes the computer is the best tutor. Yes, it would be nice to have beautiful maps the children have done by hand, in calligraphy, with elevations (tongue in cheek), but that seems like busy work at this age, and a lot of hair getting pulled at the roots. Really a book or two that cover the basics and a repetitive computer game is all we need.

So I located a very brief book at the library that cover the basics (sentence per page), and went online to find a game. Thought I'd share, as this technique has worked well for us, and we are almost ready to dive into states. We've been doing two different online continent games that can be done quickly, but with lots of fun:

National Geographic for Kids GeoSpy, which is great of tons of geography work, has a continent game. We also spend some time looking over animals in the Creature Features and finding out what continents the animals live on. (All of this takes less than 15 minutes for both kids to play the game two times and look up some animals.)

PlayKidsGames.com also has some great continent games that one can do in the form of puzzles.

We have printed out a world map in the National Geographic Atlas section, but I figured I didn't want them labelling the map until they felt confident in their continent skills and we could use it more for copywork that focused on geography.

Grace has also been enjoying math worksheets we found at GoogolPower.com that incorporates addition and subtraction problems with state geography.

If anything, all of this geography work makes me feel good, since the line I had in my Excel spreadsheet for our schedule, had nothing filled in under Geography. The "accomplisher" in me, finds satisfaction in filling that box in with purple now.