Ten More Weeks of School!

We have ten weeks of school left before summer. We figured out how many pages of math to do each day in order to get through the entire book before Memorial weekend. I think it can be done, if we don't get sidetracked along the way. Speaking of math....

Friday was Pi Day. Did you celebrate? If not, there is always next year. March 14th...my friend Rapunzel is such a math freak, not only did she go into accounting, she got married on Pi day. Talk about dedication to numbers!

How did we celebrate? Well, I read this book to the Royal Students. We had fun measuring the circumference and diameter of any circle we could find. At first they didn't understand, but after reading the book and doing a few measurements, it finally clicked. The circumference of a circle divided by the diameter is 3-1/7. Or, the distance around a circle is 3-1/7 times the distance across. Pi is explained in the book as, "the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, usually expressed as a decimal number 3.14159....the part to the right of the decimal is about a seventh."


Then we had meat and potato pie for supper. (Hey Chris, remember this...my mom used to make it for you every time you would sleep over. She only made it because you told her it was so good. But the truth was that you didn't like it at all, you were only being polite. I laugh at that memory every time I serve it to my family.)


I also spent hours baking Kuchen, all in the name of math. (Circular shaped.) I used my husband's grandmother's recipe. I makes TWELVE kuchen! Four each of plain, rhubarb, blueberry and peach. (That was a good multiplication lesson too.)



Scribe was so impressed with the book we read that he had to read the other books in the series. If you have never heard of the Sir Cumference books by Cindy Neuschwander, I highly recommend them. I wish I would have had books like this read to me as a child. Maybe I would have understood some mathematical concepts a little better.


For History/Geography we are learning about South America. We are working on learning all of the countries and their locations. When we did North America, the fastest way they boys learned the countries and locations was through a game we made and played. I am in the process of making a game for South America too.

We read a book about Nate Saint, one of the five missionaries killed in Ecuador by the Auca's in 1956. The boys were mesmerized by Nate and his story. They were very sad to find out at that he was killed by the very people he wanted to introduce to the Gospel.

The biggest impact on the boys was that the missionaries were all killed because of a lie that one of the members of the tribe told to the others. He told a story to cover up the fact that he, an unmarried man, had spent the night alone with an unmarried woman. Many times after reading the book, the boys talked about what would have happened if the lie had never been told. We had a very good talk about how many people could be affected by a lie...in this case, all the families, children, parents, grandparents, and friends of the deceased. I don't think lying will be very easy for either one of them after this lesson.

We rented End of the Spear for the boys to watch. They told me they were happy I had read the book to them first so they knew what was happening. I had forgotten about all the subtitles in the movie, but they both seemed to keep up with it.

The next two NetFlix movies we have coming are the documentaries, Through the Gates of Splendor and Beyond the Gates of Splendor. Both the boys are extremely interested in the story of Nate Saint, as well as the other four missionaries, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming. They requested the documentaries to finish up their study of Nate Saint.

I overhead them talking with another homeschool friend of theirs. He was telling them that he had learned about Greek Gods in school. One of my boys proudly piped up and said, "Our mom reads us stories about missionaries for our school." I didn't realize they liked this year's approach to History/Geography until that moment. Yeah!


The King is also reading Bruchko to the boys. This is the story of Bruce Olson, a missionary to a murderous tribe of South American Indians. This is a fantastic book. It is not uncommon to hear the boys plead, "Please, just one more chapter dad." (And me, I'm begging right along with them.) Once we finish Bruchko, and get a handle on the locations of South American countries, we will then begin to study Europe.

If you have any good books pertaining to missionaries in Europe, let me know.

Blessings!