Homeschool Discoveries

This was a short week of school for us.  Tony had the day off on Monday for President’s Day, and he took a vacation on Tuesday so I could take baby J to an all-afternoon appointment without the other three kids in tow.  Here’s a few highlights from our week:

1.  Here’s two things Mr E is proud of this week — His “Giant Monster” duplo creation and reading the book Stop Pop (nearly) all by himself!  The flip-a-word series of books is a great phonics-based series of books. (we find them at the library) — it’s too bad they are out of print!

2. It snowed on Tuesday, producing great excitement in our household.  Have I mentioned lately that I live in Minnesota?!?  Normally, we should be groaning and complaining about snow by the end of February, but not this year! I think this is only about the second time we’ve had enough snow to need a shovel or be able to send sleds down a hill.  While James and I were at his appointment, Tony took the kids sledding at the neighborhood park and out for hot drinks and treats and the nearby coffee shop

3. We were back in the swing of things on Wednesday.  More math drawing lessons for Miss M!  I think we’re almost through the geometry/drawing lessons in Right Start Math level C.

4. We’ve been working on lesson D-7 in our science book, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, for the last couple Family Science Nights.  We talked about orbit this week — I didn’t know until recently that orbit is caused by a perfect balance between the forces of gravity and inertia.  Here, Mr. E is “orbiting” the “earth” (aka tape on the floor) and learning this concept.  We also listened to a really interesting portion of a Radio Lab program talking about Newton’s theories about orbit.

5. Monday holidays generally mean 50% of sales at our nearby thrift store.  Often the sale is just on clothes and textiles, but this time it was on everything! So, Miss M and I spent some of our President’s Day holiday perusing the book section, and picked out…18 books! Miss M was excited to add more Boxcar Children titles to her shelf, and I was excited about several Newberry award/honor books and titles to fit in with future history studies.

6. We started a new “whole family” read aloud — Prince Caspian, the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.  Mr. E took this picture of daddy reading to everyone.  We haven’t done whole family read alouds very often yet,  but I am sure it is something we’ll do much more of as the boys get older.

7. Just in case you ever think that things are peachy and perfect all the time around here, I thought I better share a picture like this from a couple days ago. The school room looked like a disaster after the boys spread leftover valentines and miscellaneous art supplies around the room.  Then Mr K dumped the crayon bin on the floor.  On purpose.  After several refusals to clean up (complete with consequences after each refusal), he finally cleaned up.  Needless to say, school was interrupted while all this happened.  Then this morning I went upstairs for less than five minutes, the boys decided to make a huge mess by dumping a bunch of tiny stuff (legos, cars, etc) behind the couch.  Life is not always smooth sailing as we homeschool, but we try and learn through it all (including me, as I learn to keep my cool through it all!!!).

8.  Not really related to homeschooling, but I was so happy that I was able to get baby J on my back in my mei tai carrier without help.  After a couple nearly disastrous tries when Mr. E was a baby, I never even tried with Mr. K and assumed I would need to use a buckle carrier (I have a toddler patapum) to carry my babies on my back.  But apparently lots of practice with a buckle carrier prepared me to now be able to safely do it with the mei tai. Yeah!

9. Miss M “caught reading” at the table.  She decided to go back and re-read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for herself (we read it outloud as a family several months ago).  She is enjoying it so much that she’s been reading it every spare minute and will finish in record time.

Have a happy weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!