Homeschool Discoveries

It’s been a whirlwind of a week for us as we traveled to visit family, celebrated Miss M’s 8th birthday and declared ourselves finished with the 2011-2012 school year.  With nearly 120 pictures in my folder for the past week, it takes three collages to fit it all in.  🙂  First, the special trip and Miss M’s special day:

The kids love going to Grandma’s house (Tony’s mom) and experiencing the wide open space of the Iowa countryside.  The kids played with their cousins, we celebrated a family graduation and Miss M’s birthday.  She is super excited to have her own tennis racket!

Then right on the heels of the trip, we celebrated Miss M’s birthday on Monday:

Miss M wanted a field trip day for her birthday, so after birthday donuts and pastries for breakfast (our family tradition) and a “reveal” of her birthday present (a small trampoline) we headed for a day at the Minnesota Zoo!  We ate Miss M’s birthday dinner of choice and had a fruit tart/pizza for dessert! What a fun day for a wonderful 8 year old!

Here are a few more highlights from the other four days of our week:

1-3: Miss M finished her Early Flight/Famous Aviators lapbook.  This was her primary schoolwork this week. I really wanted her to finish this up before our summer break, because I was pretty sure that if we didn’t get it done this week it might not get done at all!

4-5: Mr. E did at little bit of math at his request, and started a new “reading challenge.”   Mr. E recently saw a sign at a bakery advertising “Angry Birds” Cookies (and we know this boy loves Angry Birds!). I told Mr. E that if he completed a reading goal we decided on together, we could all go to the bakery for cookies.  We decided that he would read all 10 books in the “Now I’m Reading” Level 2 set “Amazing Animals” by Nora Gaydos.   He’s already finished four books from the set!

6.  We discovered Miss M’s new trampoline has a nice side benefit.   Have a crabby baby? Just set him in a spot on the deck to watch the other kids taking turns jumping on the trampoline.  No more crabby baby!

7. We had our last co-op meeting of the year on Thursday morning.  We were supposed to head to the park for a big picnic after co-op…but we got rained out and had an indoor picnic instead.  After the picnic, we met up with my mom for a brief belated celebration of Miss M’s birthday (one of her gifts from Grandma Karen was her very own sewing box!) and a new summer haircut! (Check out the 4 inch difference in length in Miss M’s hair in the earlier pictures to pictures 8 and 9!).

8. We went to see a musical performance of Pippi Longstocking at the children’s theater on Friday morning.  We’ve been looking foward to this for months, and it was indeed a great show!

9. Today (Friday) was our “official” last day of school before a six week summer break.  We’ll start adding subjects back in after the 4th of July.  We celebrated the end of the school year with a family ice cream outing tonight.  Tony asked the kids what their highlights were from this school year.  Mr. K said, “seeing People Longstocking” (as he was calling it all day long).  Mr. E said “learning to read!”  and Miss M said, “Finding a new spelling curriculum.”  (That really surprised me!).

I’m looking forward to a three day weekend filled with projects around the house, BBQs and 50% off sales at the local thrift stores! Enjoy your holiday weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and the Weekly Wrap Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!