Jesus is the Rock, Benjamin Franklin & Composition of the Earth

This week has been so much fun!  Our Bible verse is "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock." Matthew 7:24.  I made sure that the girls were familiar with the hymns "Rock of Ages" and "On Christ the Solid Rock".  We also sang, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock".

We talked a lot about Benjamin Franklin.  We watched the following Benjamin Franklin Video, and learned about what a fascinating individual he was.  SnowCone (3 year old) asked me today if we were going to get to watch the "Venjamin Franklin" video again.  She says she likes to watch it in "no school time, too".  I guess that's a good sign that they liked it ;o)  We also made our very own Poor Richard's Almanack and enjoyed reading so many of Franklin's famous quotes.  They are so inspiring.  I love this process of learning right along with them.  Franklin was a man that didn't like to waste time or money...sounds delightful ;o)

We were having some issues in math.  I found that Mango was not very good at her math facts as the curriculum that they had used in public school didn't require students to learn them.  A very sweet teacher friend of mine told me about a math game called Reflex Math.   Let me just tell you, I thank God for her weekly as we do our math facts drills via this computer game.  It is AMAZING.  Mango BEGS to do it every morning.  This is quite a different picture than when the flashcards would come out of the drawer & her head would immediately fall to the table in frustration.  She's begging to do it, and she is learning so much.  This is a true reminder that angels do exist...in the form of people.  There is a free trial on their website, and it seems to be well worth the $35 per year!

We also changed our pace in Spanish.  Previously, we were doing Speekee Spanish.  It was fun, cute & education.  However, you can only take so much of a spanish version of Elmo.  It was wearing on my nerves.  We still have Speekee until December so I may still let SnowCone review it on occasion.  We were having trouble with it freezing up or not receiving a proper connection.  Between the poor connection problems and the puppet voice, we just had to pull away.  I ordered Rosetta Stone Spanish, and it is really neat.  There is a free demo on their website so we were able to play with it before ordering it.  It is really user friendly so that my husband and I can both enjoy learning Spanish as well.  It comes with headphones so it is a listening and speaking course.  I can already tell that it was a good change of pace.