Good-bye September!

Another week is done!  Let's see what I remember.  I am not doing great at getting the camera out--too busy, I guess.  

Geography: We were in Israel this year.  Unfortunately, our souvenir didn't work out at all but the meal was the biggest hit we've had since the Chinese take-out.  :)  I made falafel and it was surprisingly good! 

Science: It was volcano week and that's always a hit.  Brian was up at 6am to dig holes in the garden for our volcano set up.  :)  Notice Lily is exploding her volcano with her ring pop on!  :)

Art: We are studying Van Gogh now and the kids picked an art piece to try their hand at.  Lily picked Sein with child on lap, which is a black chalk piece so very dark!  Hunter picked Wheatfield with Crows.  They enjoy painting so they love the days we do this assignment.  I'm not sure what Nathan was working on here.  Samuel was sick this day (his 1st sick day!) so he didn't join in.

English: A tough week as we move into a chapter on writing.  We worked on writing a paragraph to give game directions.  Lily chose Hide-n-Seek and Hunter chose Tag.  We got rough drafts done so far!

Bible/Cursive/Poetry/Read Aloud all uneventful subjects this week.  We are almost done with Pollyanna {finally!!} and we are excited to enjoy the movie next week.

Kindergarten: Samuel finished Part 1 of his All About Reading and still going strong.  Math has been pretty easy and he enjoys counting on his Lego counting chart.  His new handwriting came in the mail so we'll start that next week.

Hunter and Lily's Reading/Math/Spelling has all been going well.  Lily enjoys her Teaching Textbooks a lot and CLE Math is a great fit for Hunter.  

One last note: This school year started out with us running to therapy 4x week.  Samuel had speech on Mondays, Hunter had OT on Tuesday/Thursday/Friday and Nathan had speech once a month at home.  I was anxious at first how I was going to fit all of school in but it did work.  Well, now Samuel is done with speech (according to insurance) and Hunter is done with OT (again, according to insurance) so our week has opened up.  I'm excited to have less running around and more time to just get out and do fun things for school.  It's just crazy how it all worked out.  And, the boys will do well without therapy so I'm not worried. Nathan will get speech for another few months but he's talking more and more, anyway!

Some pictures of Hunter hard at work:

Camille, his last OT, gave me some great papers on how to help in the classroom so I'm excited to try some new things to help Hunter learn in the way that makes sense to him.

Time flies!

This week flew by!  We had plenty of home-time this week and accomplished a lot--A LOT--of school to make up for last week's busy week.  We had full days!  On Monday, we wrapped up our Picasso unit for art and I gave the kids a puzzle to put together of one of his paintings.  I don't know how much they liked it but I loved this--it was hilarious.  We started Van Gogh today but his story was a bit of a downer.  

 Samuel is looking thrilled.  He's been so/so about doing school.  He still loves that sticker chart, which surprises me.  Otherwise, he doesn't care for coloring, cutting, gluing or writing.  Ha!  We get through it--mostly with positive attitudes.  I did order a new handwriting thing this week (Handwriting Without Tears) because he is easily frustrated when he "can't" write a letter/number.  I have flashbacks of helping the twins with their handwriting homework in kindergarten (they were at a school then).  It was painful--in fact, it's one reason we wondered how homeschooling would work out.  For some reason, homeschooling is tons better than helping with homework.  I don't know why.  Anyway, I'm afraid of handwriting so I ordered this curriculum to help us out.

His reading curriculum has him figuring out syllables, which I think is kind of strange.  We're going through it but I'm struggling to find the point.  We're flying through this pre-level 1, though, so we'll be ready to get into learning to read in plenty of time {I hope}.

We were in India this week for geography.  A definite highlight is the animal wall each week.  We pretend we're sightseeing and see what animals we find.  They love it.

For Bible this week, we made brownies.  It was in the curriculum!!  It was fun--I actually never tried one (yay me!) but it was an intense process.  The point was that brownies can't make themselves and neither did the Earth.  

Look who was happy to join school on brownie day!!  I do think one of his greatest joys is being allowed to dump ingredients in the mixer.  He loves helping!

Back to India...we finished up our week with jeweled clay.  Admittedly, I only had colored clay so it wasn't really accurate but it was fun.  

Oh yes, we did plenty this week and even got some outside time in now that the weather is my kind of weather (fall is here!).  I'm off to plan next week!

Running Around

 Finally getting to blog about our 4th week of school.  This week was insanely busy and I can't wait for things to calm down!  On Monday, we went to Samuel's speech appointment, home for lunch and then off to the apple orchard for a field trip.  It was fun.  Miss Granny Smith and Miss Sweet 16 were great tour guides and the kids enjoyed it.  They did split up the group by age so the twins weren't with the rest of us.  I think Samuel may have participated more if Hunter was with him but he did all right.  Don't you love the picture I got of them?

Samuel patiently waiting for the twins' tour to end.  Miss Granny Smith came and sat by him on the swing when I walked away and he actually answered her questions!  I was amazed because he doesn't care to talk to most people.

On Tuesday, we had a chance to get school work done before my afternoon dentist appointment.  Wednesday, Lily had her monthly book club and it's across town so the boys and I decided to spend our wait trying out a couple parks.  The boys were thrilled and Lily had a great time spending an hour and a half with just girls!  :)

Thursday, the speech people that work with young ones for free came to the house to check on Nathan.  He amazed me by waiting for them at the door and then running in to sit down when they walked in.  He's usually not so enthusiastic!  He did great and I see improvement in his speech.  We then had a full day at home, which was so needed.  Especially because Thursday nights are our busiest!

Friday, we did school in the morning and then headed to see my parents who were back from a trip.  We ended up spending most the day there so we didn't get the rest of our school done until Brian got home from work.  But it got done and we had a fun day!

Our Bible curriculum was talking about "belief glasses" this week and the kids had just gotten these from a kid's meal.  It was perfect timing--very useful to make the point!  

We talked about plate tectonics this week and used eggs to demonstrate.  That meant we had to be make deviled eggs (Hunter's favorite food!).  Lily's shirt is the one she made at book club, fyi.  :)

We were in Japan this week for geography.  We enjoyed our {pretend} stay.  The origami was a huge hit and I think I may have found my gift.  Ha!  The twins each chose a project to showcase.  Here's Hunter's penguin:

And Lily's pigeon:

Saturday brought more busyness, which is why this blog hasn't been done yet.  Brian and Hunter participated in a parade with some Scouts.  It was a lot of fun--a nice day, kids got lots of candy and it was jsut something different to do.  

After this, my Mom and I took all the kids shoe shopping for the cooler temps we'll be getting next week.  Ugh, we don't do that again soon.  Here's a random pic of Nathan because he was so darn cute wearing this {empty} backpack to my parents' house.  :)

Field Trip Fun

This week was a little different but it felt just as long and full as a regular week!  Monday was Labor Day and Brian worked so the rest of us hung out at my parents' house all day.  It was an important day to the kids because it was the last day to swim in my parents' pool!  

On Tuesday, Brian was off work so I planned our week to account for that.  Samuel got to do his work with his Daddy {his most favorite person ever} so that was exciting for him!!  We did the basics and then filled in our afternoon with a fun field trip.  1st up, the library (which we just don't go to enough).  Nathan enjoyed being able to sit at computers:

Samuel found some Little Critter books (he's really into those right now).

We then headed to the Science Station because I just bought a family membership--good timing!  Samuel dug up some dinosaur bones:

The twins played in front of the funny mirrors for the longest time.  I'm posing here with Lily:

Nathan found cars (made of legos) and that was his main focus.  He could have played here forever!

This is Hunter with the police puppet (hmmm, maybe this is where his sudden desire to be a policeman came from?) but all 3 of the "big kids" put on puppet show after puppet show for me.  :)

Wednesday was then disrupted because I had a doctor appointment in the morning.  My Dad watched the kids but my Grandma was visiting so she got her fill of them!   

We did get {mostly} everything done that I had planned for this week.  Hunter and Lily made collage clowns, just like Picasso did.   

They also made crowns as their souvenir from South Korea.  Admittedly, I have no idea why crowns??  But, we went with it.  They really enjoy the study of different countries, especially when we read about the children's lives there.  Our food was a Korean beef recipe I found and it was pretty good--kids weren't too impressed but they are picky!

Samuel is still going strong with his All About Reading lessons--he is very motivated by the sticker chart!  He rhymes constantly now and we've actually moved on from rhymes but he still tries to rhyme everything I say. Ha!  We finished his 2nd chapter in math and are working on counting but we did a game of shape bingo just to review (it's more fun than a workbook!).