Homeschool Discoveries

Is it Friday already? This past week has just flown by! Last Friday, we visited Historic Ft. Snelling.  This living history site recreates what the fort was like when it was first built around 1820:

We enjoyed talking to the “soldiers”, learning about washing, school days, the blacksmith’s shop and more.  Miss M’s favorite area of the fort was learning about children’s games of the 1820s.  The boys’ favorite was the infantry drill and seeing the “soldiers” shoot their guns (it was loud, as you can see in the middle picture!).  The boys also joined the soldiers for a march around the quad.  After our visit to Fort Snelling in the morning, we stopped by Ikea for lunch (as you can see in the bottom right corner picture of the kids with the Ikea Snoopy house).

We rounded out our busy day with a stop on the way home at a discount store we rarely visit (that would be the one whose initials are W.M.) for a couldn’t-pass-it-up deal of glue sticks for ten cents each.  I bought 50 — hopefully I don’t wish I had bought 100 before the next year is up!  We use a lot of glue around here!

And then of course on Friday night, we started doing what almost everyone else in the world is doing this week…watching the Olympics:

We let the kids stay up super late on Friday night to see the whole opening ceremonies.  I made up special “Olympic Packets” for the kids with bingo games, coloring sheets and other activities to use while watching the opening ceremonies and other sports over the two weeks of the games!

We’ve probably watched 1-2+ hours of Olympics each day — very different from our normal TV habits!  But since it only comes around once every two years to have some kind of Olympics to watch, it seems worth it.   Miss M’s favorites so far are rowing and gymnastics.  The boys like fencing, shooting, whitewater canoeing and archery.  For some odd reason, everyone also really liked water polo.  🙂  We are all looking forward to track and field, and Miss M can’t wait for equestrian jumping.

We did do a little bit of school this week (but no pictures made it to the collage!)…I tried to keep spelling fun and we started a new history read aloud.  I’ll have posts coming (I hope) next week about what we’ve read so far in our first three-ish weeks of US History and the ideas I thought of to keep review and practice fun with Logic of English.

It wouldn’t be the Hill family getting interesting in something without spontaneous crafts and activities.  😉  Miss M made some nice Olympic rings to hang up.  Mr. E gets the creativity gold medal this week for his picture of a sport he created (“A guy stands on a really high bar with a really heavy weight in one hand and bombs in the other hand.  That’s a really hard sport, mom!”).  He also started the kids on a “Duplo Olympics” by setting up Duplo Synchronized Diving.  Miss M followed this up with Duplo Gymnastics (each aparatus was represented!).  The kids also did regular diving, archery, shooting and airplane tricks (Mr. E’s other suggested addition to the Olympic line-up).

Mr. K finally had some success in the potty department this week (after four not-so-successful months, we took the last two months or so off).  Miss M dressed in a rather unusual costume to present Mr. K with a gold medal for his efforts (and Mr. E followed up by presenting him with a bronze medal as well).

Miss M gets the family gold medal for swimming and diving! After much hard work she passed her swim test at the pool (25 yards of the front crawl) to be able to use the diving area for the first time! Yea!

Finally, Baby J gets the gold medal for “Most improved at Locomotion”.  🙂  We wished Baby J a happy Nine Months Old on Monday.  While he isn’t crawling yet, he certainly qualifies as “mobile.”  This week he became proficient enough at scooting on his bottom to move from room to room, pull books off the book shelves, attempt to chew on cords, and discover the joy of pulling plastic bowls out of the drawer.   Let the selective baby-proofing and teaching-of-“no touch” begin!

Linking up with…Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap-Up

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