Who Owns the Sun?

The last week of school in December before I flew away to Florida we studied the book Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky. I was not sure if Zoey would be ready for the topic of this book or not. It is about slavery. This book was written by a 14-year-old girl, Stacy Chbosky. It is a simple book but very well written. I decided to go ahead with this story for the book of the week since the history lesson in it is very valuable and one that will continue to be built on throughout Zoey's schooling.

The week started off with the obvious discussion of slavery. I kept it as simple as I could and answered any questions Zoey had. She didn't have too many but she agreed that it was wrong. I found so many picture books at the library to go along with this theme that we are still reading some of them now, almost a month later. We also discussed family relationships, how we show people we care about them. Then we placed our story disk in south eastern US.

We learned new vocabulary words on the second day and learned about the question mark. Zoey now uses it from time to time when writing the words for the people in her drawings. Our last discussion for this day was poetic prose. I think it went over her head, it kind of did mine. lol

The next day was art. We looked at the pictures in the book and noted how the illustrator used watercolors. She used bright light and shadows to help with the emotion of the story. This led to a discussion of shadows and using them in our artwork. Now Zoey is noticing shadows everywhere! We painted with watercolors. Sierra joined in on the fun with this and both girls painted many, many pictures. Sierra always surprises me. She is very particular about her artwork. She doesn't just pile stuff on until the page is full. I have examples of this for my review of The Snow Day, which will be next.

For applied math we counted the stars on one page and the pickets in a fence on another. Zoey can count very well from 1 to 12 and 16 to 40 but 13, 14, and 15 are not always all there. Sierra can count to 12 and I haven't even been trying to teach her numbers.

The last day was science and we never got to this because I got busy packing. I am sure we will pick it up again at another time.

Now this has nothing to do with our school work but when we were at the library the girls got to decorate a gingerbread house together. Isn't it cute?