Week 15

Starting our Christmas Around the World unit!  We visited New York, Canada and Mexico this week.  It's been a fun break.

We are doing a Christmas-themed science experiment unit.  We did cookie cutter explosions:

 We also made cranberries dance:

On Thursday, we headed to Dubuque for a field trip.  It turns out the field trip was Friday but we made the most of our day and had a great time!

We ate out at a very popular A&W in a gas station:

We visited the garden and botanical center but it was very cold!!

We stopped at a mall and hid from Santa the whole time:

We walked a few minutes on the riverfront but, again, it was so cold!!

Finally, we ended up at the water park!  It was hard to get too many pictures because I was going on slides, too!!

It was a fun week and we are down to 8 days of school and counting.......................

Week 14

I don't have a lot of great pics of school this week.  Our tree is up so we do all of our school in the living room and it's just not as easy to snap pictures.  We had a fun week of review in history so we'll be starting a Christmas-based unit next.  

Family game night because church canceled due to a blizzard that never came:

Christmas baking:

We are counting down the days until Christmas break.  We are continuing to work on the most important things (math, reading/literature, grammar and writing) but enjoying some holiday fun in the other subjects.  

Week 13

We had a 2 day school week and I planned Thanksgiving-based activities for almost everything:

Playing Bingo in Spanish to review numbers, colors and basic phrases.

Art project...hiding a turkey.  Hunter disguised his as a bush.

Lily made a zombie turkey

Nathan disguised his as Santa (couldn't find a red marker)

Samuel made his camouflage.

 The twins did Grammar together, as well.  It was a spin and color the noun/verb/adjective.

Watching mythbusters talk about turkey and tryptophan.

Roll, add and color a turkey:

The end of the regular week, before Thanksgiving, we got pizza and picnicked in front of the tree:

Decorating:

Week 12

Another week of school has flown by.  Hunter started his 3rd "I Survived..." audiobook.  He has done the San Francisco earthquake, 9/11 and is on Hurricane Katrina.  We finished our read aloud so we're done with that until after Thanksgiving break.  We were able to watch a short video about the Great London Fire of 1666, which really showed what the book dealt with.  It was very interesting!

Art time--making scratch art.

Tuesday was a day off for the twins' 15th (!!!!) birthday:

Back to school Wednesday.  We had some fun in history learning about the Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson.  I like this history because it has so many methods of learning.  We listened to an audio dramatization, did room-to-room activities and filled out information on our worksheets.

We officially finished our Fall portion of the nature journal!  We took a chilly walk and checked off the fall items we were able to find.

Next week is only 2 days of school so I've planned some fun things to keep us busy!!

Week 11

School on our new blanket storage solution (an empty beanbag, stuffed with blankets!):

Nature journaling in the backyard this week because it was freezing!!!  I took pics and went back inside.  Ha!  They are almost done with their fall portion of the journal.

Proof of the cold: 

We had a busy week but not a lot of pictures.  It's hard to take pictures and do all the stuff, too.  :)  Friday, the kids all had independent work only--no work with me.  That was actually kinda crazier but it was good for everyone to do work on their own.

The biggest win so far has been audio books for Hunter.  He is flying through them and really enjoying it!!  It makes me so happy!! 

Week 10

Map work in History:

Coloring in Spanish (learning Spanish names for colors):

Art time:

We took Halloween off from school!  We went to see Goosebumps 2:

We also dressed up!

The next day, we had a late start to recover.  We ended our Science unit on Energy with one more round of the Energy game:

We only have a couple weeks of school until Thanksgiving break so it's exciting to finish things up to get ready for holiday breaks!