Homeschool Discoveries

This week marked a bit of a transition in our summer.  It was still a week full of summer fun, but we added in some “summer school” as well.  The kids and I aren’t ready to say we are “back to school” yet.   But everyone was okay with the idea of adding a bit of more formal learning back into our routine.

Here are a few highlights of our week:

1. We started our week with a trip to the Minnesota Children’s Museum on Monday. One of my friends from high school had the day off work and joined us at the museum!   The kids had a blast (pun intended!), and they were happy to see the Curious George exhibit they had been eagerly anticipating.

2. We kicked off “summer school” on Tuesday by beginning our American History journey for the year.   We also dusted off our Logic of English materials and reviewed the lesson we stopped on (and didn’t quite finish) back in May.  For the month of July, History and Spelling will be our two formally planned subjects (besides Mr. E continuing 10-15 minutes a day of reading practice).  We’ll most likely add in Math in August, and then have our “official” back-to-school either the last week in August or the 1st week in September.

3. One of my goals for the summer is to teach the kids new skills around the house.  This week Mr. E (age 5) folded and put away all his own laundry for the first time, while Miss M taught Mr. K how to sort the towel/napkin laundry and then fold the washcloths.

4. We fit in two pool trips this week.  Mr. E spent about 48 hours at Grandma’s house (each kid gets 2 or 3 days of 1 on 1 time with my mom each summer).  While he was gone, we went swimming.  Mr. K tells me he is pretending to be a mummy as he drys off after swimming.  😉

5. Always lots of arts and crafts and messes around here.  You would never know we had desks and tables in our school room for the volume of work the boys do on the floor!

6. And there’s always plenty of time for play, as my firefighter-super hero-pirate shows.

7. and 8.  We had some unplanned/spontaneous science this week.   Among other things, we investigated a really large caterpillar in our back yard, and we tried to figure out why pop cans explode/burst in the freezer.  I’ll post more about our science endeavors sometime in the next day or two!

9. I went to a local homeschool mom’s book sale.  It was at least her second effort to get rid of books and they were priced to sell — 25 cents each!  Here are a few finds I was particularly excited about   I came out with 28 books, including lots of history, science and living math titles.

Then today, we had a big family outing:

We did an interest-led unit study on the History of Aviation and Early Aviators back in May.  I did a little research and found out that an air show/expo of historic planes would be in the metro area over the summer.   Today was the day!  We spent a couple hours at a small airport in the suburbs seeing authentic WWII era planes and replicas of even older planes.  Some of the planes did flights while we were there.  No stunts at this air show, but some of the fighter planes did fly in formation.  It was hot and tiring but fun for all — but as you can see in the last picture, Baby J was really ready to call it a day by the time we were done.

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