How to be a Princess (character traits)

Between sickness, wisdom teeth and a teething baby, life’s been a bit tough just lately. However, we have managed to continue learning most days – character traits being at the top of my agenda (you can guess why, can’t you? Something to do with the behaviour of my girls lately, probably due to all the turmoil).

We started with making a crown each because every little princess needs a crown, right? Miss 6 is practising her courtesy.

I found a great list on the web called ‘HOW TO BE A PRINCESS’ and we have roughly followed this with me adding in my own ideas.

We also watched some Youtube videos of Princess Mary and Princess Diana to see how graceful, modest and charitable they were.

First on the list was GROOMING and dressing MODESTLY. Here’s the girls are learning how to care for their nails and they also learned about wearing clean clothes and brushing their hair.

We found some photos and made a scrapbook page story of the first 4 rules we learned.

We are up to the part of being CHARITABLE. The girls went onto the World Vision Australia website & watched the movie about the ETICA free trade dolls & we decided to sponsor a child – the girls can contribute an amount of their pocket money to help).  We choose a little girl who was also 7. The girls also donated a chicken to a family for just $3 each – very charitable. They were thrilled to get their little keyring dolls in the mail.

Next the girls made cards to send to others while learning to be THOUGHTFUL – they only needed to make one but ended up making about 7, which I will post off this week.

Earth’s atmosphere

Continuing with our weather unit, the space shuttle was a hot topic due to recent events, so I took advantage of it as we had been discussing what the atmosphere may have been like in the days of Noah.  A paper written by my father on Noah and the flood included some fascinating verses quoted from the Bible helping us understand where ALL THAT WATER CAME FROM? We discovered that the atmosphere prior to the flood was quite different and full of moisture – fascinating.

Here the girls are drawing the Earth’s surface and above, in each different shade of blue, they are naming the different atmospheric layers.

Don’t you love Miss 7’s airplane. She drew this to demonstrate that this is the layer that pilots prefer to fly in  – the stratosphere, because it is usually smooth sailing above the clouds – the storms are mostly below. (The toilet roll space shuttle flies up the string through the different atmospheres.

An evolving bird study

No.. the birds aren’t evolving (lol), the study is though.  Miss 7 has taken quite an interest in the different types of birds around our property and bugged her parents to take her on a bush walk to see more last weekend.

So here we are bushwalking on our property on a lovely winter morning.

Here is the little bird watcher sitting on a rock. She spent about 15 minutes just quietly searching for the illusive Spinebill – its very flighty.

FLOODS

After watching the news the night before with all the floods featured, Miss 7 made a brochure to tell people what to do in a flood (this is the inside alongside her Noah minibook from DLTK). The reverse side had a title page and some emergency phone numbers written on it.

We read a newspaper article and measured how highthe floodwaters came into people’s houses – she got a shock how high it was.

We completed some worksheets for kids from the SES website and then we pulled out our old Emergency kit and checked what was in it. We decided to re-pack it because the clothes we had put in, they had outgrown.

The next thing to think about was where did all the EXTRA water come from to make a flood big enough to cover the whole earth when Noah was alive?  Stayed tuned.

Noah’s Ark – is it a true story?

As you may know, we have started a study unit on WEATHER, which became topical when parts of Australia were enduring heavy rains & floods (namely Queensland and northern NSW).  The perfect time to introduce NOAH.

We began, of course, by reading the story – the girls made up their own little booklets available from http://www.dltk-bible.com/genesis/noahbook/index.htm then we made a cardboard box ark and incorporated the 2 times tables, counting the plastic animals in pairs as they boarded the ark (thankfully we also had a plastic Noah & wife).

Miss 7 thought of using the beanbag as Mt. Ararat, which we discovered was in Turkey.  Then we set about proving that the story was true – as I think it brings the story to life when we start delving into the possibilities.

We read some accounts from eye witnesses ( http://www.arkonararat.com/) focusing on one written by a young boy (now an adult) – the girls eyes lit with excitement. I also read this article beforehand http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/library/noahsark.htm, which was for my own information & was fascinating.

So…next thing is to help the girls unravel the mysteries, and we started with FLOODS.