O...Octopus

Another week of My Father's World complete.

This week was O...Octopus.

Our phrase was "Even the Octopus gives praise to God".

Our Bible verse was Psalm 69:34 Let Heaven and Earth praise him, the seas and all that move in them.

Although our letter was suppose to stand for Octopus, we talked more about the ocean.  I borrowed every single library book on the ocean and ocean dwelling creatures (not really...but I did have about 20 books).  Our favorites were Hello Ocean (which has an awesome Lapbook here.  I did this lapbook with Nicole last summer.  And, it tied in nicely with our five sense from last week.), Follow me (a mother octopus leading her 8 little ones around a reef), and several others about sharks, eels and whales.  I found a great series that had one sentence per page and Nicole actually read the book to me (well, I helped with words like "throughout", but she did a great job!)

We painted an ocean mural on a large sheet of paper and when the girls got "bored" throughout the week, they could color another sea animal and add it to the mural.  I was hoping ours would look really pretty like this one....but instead, I got a bunch of rainbow colored animals that were hastily glued to the paper.  However...not all was lost, they did learn a lot about the different animals and can name several now that they couldn't name before (manta ray and sea anemone for instance).

Wednesday we were going to go to the beach...but were greeted with extremely heavy smoke from a large fire burning in the Everglades.  The winds just pushed the smoke into our town and it was pretty bad.  Poor Hannah girl could hardly contain herself.  She was a puffy eyes, snotty, sneezy, coughing mess.  There was no way we could sit on the beach that morning.  So, instead we opted for second best (well...first to me), we watched Finding Nemo at my mom's house.  I did have to fast forward through a few parts (the sharks freaked the girls out).

But, all in all, I think they enjoyed the movie.  They loved naming off animals they saw and we later talked about Nemo's choices and the  consequences he suffered for his disobedience to his dad.

Later in the week, we also watched Oceans, a film by Disney (via Netflix instant watch feature).  It had beautiful cinematography...however there was rubbish in there about how life forms started in the sea and yada yada yada.  When I sensed those times were coming, I would start asking the girls questions so they would be focused on me at that moment, or a couple of times, I just flat out told them that what that man just said is wrong and introduced the idea that not everyone believes God created them.  Other than those couple of moments, which I know the girls don't remember...it was a fascinating film.  Both Hannah and Nicole were very "into" the stories of the animals.  They were captivated by the whales breaching, the thousands of crabs that covered the sea floor, the beautiful lion fish and ugly...I forget that fishes name...but it was ugly!  They really enjoyed the video.

Finally, for lunch today, we had Octopus and seaweed (hotdogs and tinted ramen noodles).

Let me say that this is the first time I have ever cooked a hotdog for my children.  They have eaten them before, but not because I cooked them because I am disgusted by them.  However, it was a quick and easy (and fun) lunch.  They really enjoyed eating their octopus and Nate liked playing with his seaweed.  I got the idea from here.

Yay for another fun week of homeschooling.