Week 2: our second week of 6th grade homeschool

The highlight of week 2 was the world cake:

The world cake activity from MFW was a nice combination of home-ec and geography. I was a bit nervous about it, but Lindsey had fun and it turned out great :) We didn't use a cake mix. Instead this was Lindsey's first cake made from scratch all by herself. (I did help pour the batter into the pans & put them in the oven.) She used a yellow cake recipe and a vanilla frosting recipe from my Betty Crocker cookbook.

In order to fit the two cakes on my foil covered cookie sheet, I trimmed a piece out of one cake using the cake pan as a guide. Then I fit the two cakes together to make one cake. Lindsey used a toothpick to draw outlines of the continents on the cake before frosting it. Then she outlined the continents with green and piped some icing to fill them in. Next she piped on the blue and added white for Antarctica last. We used the back of a spoon to smooth and fill in the icing and it ended up with a nice texture.

It was delicious and looked great! This activity was a great success. She's already asked if she can make another one sometime. This was a fun way to wrap up the introduction, next we study North America beginning with the United States.

Edible Babylonian Clay Maps

On Monday for our Mapping The World With Art activity we made Babylonian "clay" maps using a modified cookie dough recipe. It calls for a wedge shaped stamp to make cuneiform markings and something to scratch lines with, we used corn holders because it's what we had on hand. It worked well and added some texture. This activity tied in nicely with our geography symbols lesson while adding a bit of history and home-ec.

Grammar

We added grammar this week with All-In-One English Series. So far we've only used the beginning assessment test. It looks to be a very straight forward book so it should work well for us. It doesn't contain extra fluff, just learn the skill and move on to the next. When we add writing we will be using Writing Strands. I think the combination of these in conjunction with MFW should cover all the bases for English.

Read-aloud

We started reading Kingdom Tales and Dad has been reading most of them while we snuggle up on the bed or sofa as a family. My daughter enjoys them and can't wait to read the next story. The discussion questions at the end are helpful in looking at the symbolism and deeper meaning of the stories. I called them Kingdom Stories by mistake one night and was quickly corrected that they are Kingdom Tales. Kids love it when they can catch us making a mistake don't they? LOL

Week 2 Surprises:

The cake turned out much better than I expected :) Another surprise to me, there are now five oceans! There were only four when I was in school. It seems the Southern Ocean around Antarctica was added in 2000.

Lindsey is getting quite skilled at drawing maps. She drew a map of our neighborhood complete with the alligator that lives behind our neighbors house across the street. We looked at Google Maps for reference.