Homeschool Week 7/27 - 8/5

Here are a few of the things that the girls completed during the last week and a half before Anna arrived...


In history, Maria read about some English and French explorers of North America. Here are a couple of narrations that she wrote about them:

Here are some notes that Maria took as she learned about heat transfer.

In history, Cati learned about the beginning of monasteries and their role in the preservation of written books. Here is a narration she wrote about Sts. Benedict and Scholastica.

Here is a page that she "illuminated" like handwritten books used to be.

Cati learned about "The Reasons for the Seasons" in science. I don't have a picture of her doing the experiment, but here is the written work for the lesson.

We will be a taking a nice 3 week break from school while Anna is here, so no more homeschool posts for a while :) But, I'll try to post about the other fun things we'll be doing!!

Cute little ones :)

Here is Elena patiently waiting for us to finish a school lesson last week.


Chiara's in the middle of a hairtie rebellion. But, she's still cute :)

Welcome, Zia Anna!

Dany's sister, Anna, arrived yesterday evening from Italy! We get to enjoy her company for 3 weeks!

Chiara was a bit stand-offish last night, but she's quickly warming up this morning.

Here is a glance of some of the fun so far this morning!!

The floor is going around!

Here's a video of Chiara's first experience with dizziness, followed by a little running.

Homeschool Week #2 (7/20-7/24)

Yeah! We've made it through 2 weeks of school!! We had a good week. Here's a glimpse of some of the things the kids studied last week...

Maria is studying U.S. History. This week, she finished reading "Pedro's Journal" in history, which is about Columbus' 1st voyage to the New World. Here is Maria's paragraph about their return voyage to Spain.

Then, we moved onto Cortez and the Aztecs.

Here is Maria's quiz on her 1st two weeks of Latin.

Here is Maria's lab write up about one of her science experiments this week.

Here's a picture. You can see a video of the experiment at the bottom of this post.

After a morning of school work, Maria loves to continue reading through lunch - a book of her choice, of course :)

Cati learned about early Britain this week. Here is her narration about the Angles and Saxons coming to England (in my handwriting).

In our house, literature generally follows history studies, so Cati read a children's version of one of the earliest English stories, Beowulf. She loved this book and read it several times during the week. I'm working on her writing her own narrations this year. So, for literature, I give her a piece of paper and ask her to draw something from the story and write at least one sentence about it. Here is the one she did for Beowulf.

In science, Cati continued to learn about the weather. Once a week, I have her read library books related to her science study. One of the books that she read this week was "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" which is very loosely connected to weather :) She loved it and decided to paint a picture about it.

Here's a picture of a weather vane that she made.

Here is a picture of Matteo and Cati enjoying some time with their water colors.

Matteo continued to enjoy "The Pokey Little Puppy" this week, but he did let me read some different stories, too! He enjoys our afternoon reading time the best because he reads me a story and then I read one to him! He's doing very well with his own reading!

He also loves doing math. He's a page from one lesson this week:

Here's a video of Matteo during a phonics lesson!

Here's the video of Maria's science experiment...

And, I almost forgot Cati's 1st poem that she memorized this year, "Animal Crackers."

3-months-old!

Elena is 3-months-old today, which means its time for baby pictures of all the kids at that age!



Maria...

Cati...

Matteo...

Chiara...

And the star of the post, Elena...

I love doing these baby picture posts, except that I end up spending way too much time looking at old pictures and videos with the kids (they love it, too!). I found a great video of Maria at 3-years-old that I'm saving for a birthday blog post in September!!

A beautiful sight!

What a joyous day when your children become old enough to help with the vacuuming!