Activities Galore

 

Hi all. It's been 3 weeks since I last posted? Well, our last book of the 6 Weeks was a lovely one, but only offered a pretty light week of school. We read Miss Rumphius about a lady who grows up to travel the world and finally settles in a house by the see where she spends the rest of her life fulfilling a promise to her grandfather- to make the world more beautiful. She plants lupines all over town. 

The kids painted pictures of lupines using their thumbprints. We painted on cloth since the illustrations use that as a canvas. We also examined seeds in some of the fruits we had at home. They made little seed packets and stored their seeds. Apologies for my computer being stubborn and refusing to rotate this picture. 

 

At the end of the book, Miss Rumphius' niece makes the same promise to her- leaving that part of the story open. Hannah and Chloe wrote their own continuations. Hannah named the niece Zidya- she always prefers made up names to real ones.

 

She followed the plot of the original story and had Zidya travel the world. She had to choose 2 countries we've studied so far. She picked India and had Zidya dance with belly dancers. : )  Then she traveled to Japan and wore a kimono. Eventually Zidya settled by the sea and made the world more beautiful by raking everyone's leaves.

We read several books about plants and a few fiction books that involved children doing something good in their lives.

Our homeschool co-op has decided to focus more on outings, service projects, and general play rather than the planned group lessons. Already I'm sensing this is a great change. Our first field trip was to the local roller skating rink. This was the first time for our kids. Hannah was super determined to do it, but had the roughest time since she has the longest limbs! Chloe figured it out soon and liked her independence. Colin used a trainer the whole time even though I caught him successfully scooting along without it several times.

                       The next week we gathered to sing for a Retirement Home. Each family had practiced selections from The Sound of Music on their. We met for a quick rehearsal and headed over. I was quite impressed with the kids. They really projected and sang the songs quite well. One boy even brought his tin whistle and played Do a Dear. We chatted with the seniors for quite awhile, and I met one particular man named Lenny who kept making me laugh with his dry sense of humor.
The next week we simply had play time after Thursday Liturgy. We'll head to the Planetarium in a few weeks. I'm looking forward to that!  In other news, Hannah has begun lessons with a new piano teacher. We love her and Hannah is advancing well, but it's quite a day of driving long distances between that and Chloe's school. When Chloe is out for the summer, she'll begin piano too, but I went ahead and got her started on Hannah's old books. She's pleased to have mastered quarter and half notes. She's a great little student and very eager.

 

 The next week we had completely off. My dad came into town to attend Lone Star Wind Orchestra's rehearsals and meet the visiting composer. We had a great time that weekend, and I was also thrilled to spend time with one of my best friends who came into town to join the horn section. It was a wonderful concert! I wish I had a picture of Hannah and myself at the concert- it was her first time to see me on stage and she was excited to be there! It was difficult to plan much school for the next week since I was so busy. So we kept things extremely light. By Wednesday, I felt the kids were driving me a bit crazy and I put them in charge of themselves (if you read Facebook, you'll know). So I basically took care of what I wanted and they fended for themselves with a list of things they needed to take care of. Hannah was so sweet and decided to work with Colin in a workbook he loves. I heard her helping him in the most patient and enthusiastic way!

Taking baths and bathing Colin was on their list for the evening, but they get it done at about 9am. He was pretty pleased with all that attention.

They made themselves lunch at 10:30 and included vegetables! Way to go! 

Doing all of laundry was a main element to their list, complete with detailed instructions. I heard plenty of discussion amongst them about how to do this or that, but they got it all done! Here's Chloe's opinion on laundry.

Colin being resourceful. : ) Other things they took care of were general cleaning and reading. But they also had a lot of fun playing together. All in all, it was a great day!! It made me realize that perhaps they are a bit micromanaged sometimes and can really do a lot more than we give them credit for. Of course there's a fine line between that and them ruling the roost, which they certainly try regularly. This experiment was to give me a break but to also help them realize they don't need my help and attention for every tiny thing. And that if you're bored, bugging Mommy is less fun than coming up with something new to do.

Today, I went in the opposite direction and filled the day with activities. I was curious about the difference in peacefulness throughout the day. Since we weren't doing a Five in a Row project this week, I also took advantage of the countless Pinterest pins I had under education. While Hannah practiced piano, Chloe went through word tiles and organized which words she could read and which ones were too hard. This gave me a good idea of her progress, which was much improved.

I tried to keep them each busy at all times- a lot of work!  Colin worked on counting and identifying numbers with his favorite snack. Eating it was the bonus.

While Chloe worked on piano, Hannah completed a sticker story. She draws stickers out of a bag and has to write her story based on the images. I almost wanted to try this myself.

The kids are beginning a program I'm really excited about. It's part of the Flower Girl program (much like Girl Scouts) but it's separate for homeschoolers and doesn't include joining any kind of troop. The students just follow certain guidelines to earn patches and awards called Quest Club. I'll order them vests and when they complete requirements, I'll order their badges to be pinned on. At least one other friend will participate in this with us so far. Hannah's chose the Horse Badge as her first. I felt like the Level 1 requirements could be a little tougher for her, so I added a couple of steps. She has to learn about safety around horses. Read a non-fiction book and fiction book. She also wrote horse facts she learned from the book and drew a horse bubble chart. She did a great job remembering facts and really understanding the animal. In a few weeks she'll visit a stable and take a horsemanship class with her friends where she'll learn a lot more. They each picked out notebooks at the store and we're filling them with their work! 

Chloe chose to earn a butterfly badge. She's learned all about its life stages and drew them all.

She'll have to learn to identify 3 different butterflies and she also drew a bubble chart. We also read a fiction and non-fiction book. I'll probably also have her watch a video. Colin hasn't chosen a badge yet, but most likely it will be the Pizza Badge. : )

 

While the girls worked on that, Colin completed a shape puzzle I drew with objects from around the house. It took me longer to draw it than for him to complete it, but he had fun.

 I've been meaning to do this project with them for awhile and originally it was slated to be a co-op lesson. Before we started we read Something Beautiful about an inner city girl surrounded by so much negative she was on the lookout for something beautiful and ended up cleaning the trash and graffiti out of her littered courtyard and learning from friends what they found to be beautiful. This originally went with Miss Rumphius, but also went well with charity and making the world a better place.  IOCC (International Orthodox Christian Charities) has need of school kits. We went through each item for each child's bag and talked about what it represented- Notebooks (God allows us to write our own lives) Pencil Sharpeners (we sharpen our minds and hearts by praying and learning about the Saints and reading the Gospel) Scissors and erasers (We cut sin from our lives and erase the bad and replace it with good choices and ask for forgiveness). Rulers (God' love cannot be measured) Crayons (We color our lives by being kind and helpful selfless and by loving those around us). We completed 5 bags to donate. Now if I can do my part and add the velcro without procrastinating too much, they'll be on their way.

 Along with a few other activities that will be completed another time, I made an obstacle course in the backyard for them today since the temperatures felt like spring! They went through once and then again timed. Chloe won first place with her efficient ball dribbling : )

 Finally we did some marshmallow painting. Hannah had a very hard time dipping hers in paint since she would have much rather eaten them. They each got to eat one and were pleased with that : ) Their goal was to create a rainbow but I only gave them primary colors to work with. They remembered the term secondary colors and did a good job remembering the mixes. I even heard Chloe talk through her decision to use too much red in her orange and how that didn't work so well. Of course that girl talks about everything. I wouldn't change it at all!

Next week we'll get back on track with Another Celebrated Dancing Bear. I'm really interested to see what the kids will do for a certain project I have in mind.

Moons and More

 This week we continued Owl Moon and explored the animals and moon more in depth. We read a book called Where Are All the Night Animals? We learned the words nocturnal and diurnal as well as echolocation. To talk about that more, we tried an experiment I'd read about in several places. Place rice grains on a stretched piece of plastic across a bowl and loudly hit a pan over it to see how sound waves can move objects. It totally didn't work- and we tried many variations. Here are the kids yelling at it!
 (please forgive my blurry iphone pictures this time around)

Then I remembered that often when I practice, my horn sends all sorts of things into vibration mode in the house. So we tried that.

 As you can see from the video, it worked great. They had a lot of fun watching individual rice grains turn while others stayed still. They also saw that the higher in pitch I played, more grains danced.

 Since it's been cold and rainy here lately, there's not much chance for outdoor play. Dax and I are participating in an online fitness group, which motivated me to find these videos on YouTube for the kids. Cosmic Kids Yoga- They loved it and I was entertained the whole time, too.

 We learned that bats eat about 1/4 of their weight in food each night. I thought this was a good opportunity for math since Hannah has been learning simple fractions. It backfired a bit since their weights had to be rounded down for even numbers and the tally marks I tried to use to find the right numbers totally lost their attention-  and not a lot of food would fit on that scale at a time. They still loved getting to raid the pantry and fridge. Here, we came up with what they would have to consume in a day to equal 1/4 of their weight.

 This guy weighs more than Chloe now. And his default outfit is indeed a velvet vest and plaid pants Nana made him for his fancy Christmas outfit. I often find him in it when I wake up.

 Hannah also filled out a worksheet about nocturnal animals and did some cut and paste work after we learned about categorizing mammals, amphibians, and reptiles.

One of my favorite things we did was find audio files of all the nocturnal animals in their book. We tried copying the sounds and assigned each other animals- then depicted a forest night when we all howled, hooted, and chirped at once. : )

 Another fun idea I found online was to study moon phases with cookies. This again was less productive than I imagined. We read a great book about the moon, watched the moon landing, and watched tides pulled by the moon's gravity. But as soon as the oreos came out, all was lost! haha It was quite difficult to get them to only eat half or one-quarter of the icing. And the results were much gooier than the fancy photos I saw. In any case, they liked comparing the phases and when we saw the bright moon out this afternoon, they immediately applied everything they learned and made guesses on the phase it was in!

 We also tried the classic ball and lamp experiment to see the moon's phases. Looks like Barbie had a late night back there.

 We shined the light against blocks to check out the varied length in shadows and how that causes the craters to look so dark on the moon. Hannah had the hardest time remembering the word craters! I heard all sorts of crazy variations.

 We tried this fun experiment with plaster of paris. We flattened a few cups of it in a bowl and dropped small and large pebbles from different heights to create craters. We sprayed it with water and waited for it to dry.

After an hour, it wasn't quite ready so they took it upon themselves to speed up the process. :)

 

Of course it broke when we took it out of the bowl, but we just called them quarter and crescent moons. They painted their moons gray....and now I'm not sure what to do with them...

 Today, I tried to get Hannah out of her math book and into more thinking skills, so I asked her to write ME a math test. Boy was she excited. She used her book for reference but wasn't allowed to copy any of the problems exactly. She had me solving word problems, telling time, doing subtraction, fractions, and matching words to numbers. I thought she did a great job and was very thorough. I earned a smiley face for my 100% : )

 This was our final art project. I saw it on Pinterest and knew it was a great opportunity to talk about color mixed with white and black as well as the use of light and dark to create a glow. Here's mine above. It's the moon in the night sky.

Colin did not participate as he spent the whole time stubbornly not finishing his lunch :/
The girls did a nice job. I got onto Hannah a little for working so hard on her moon and then nearly covering it up, but it actually works quite nicely the way it glows through the tree, so what do I know?!

For our last week of the 6 weeks, we'll read a beautiful book called Miss Rumphius.

Life's a Hoot

 Over Christmas break we were able to visit with lots of family in Tennessee and made a trip to the Discovery Park of America. The Kirkland family (as in Kirklands stores in the mall) made this possible in Union City- not a large place, and the museum looks like it's in the middle of nowhere. The great thing is this family was thinking about all the kids who don't live in big cities and don't get the opportunity to have such nice places available for education. It was wonderful. It was too cold to visit the outdoor areas, but they looked very large and like a lot of fun so hopefully we'll visit again in spring.

 They had a huge display of classic cards from the original Fords to military vehicles and even racecars. The kids looked so tiny in the helicopter. They had wonderful dinosaur skeletons in a beautiful sunlit area.

 One of their features was "The Tower."  We rode the elevator to the top and walked around on all sorts of see-through panels. It definitely made my knees weak, but the kids had no problem at all.

 Amongst other exhibits, connecting two levels was a steel baseball player. Kids walked through his globe? and slid down his body, through his leg. We all had a great time there.

 While at home, Chloe got her first mini flute lesson from her aunt Melody. She's talked about this forever. She's still to young to get any real sound out, but she caught onto the position pretty well, at least on piccolo. : )

 Back home, we started Owl Moon. I mentioned before I wasn't a fan so much as a kid, but my kids loved it and this time around I did too. There's so much sensory verses action, it's a nice break actually. We talked about the special experience the daughter and father had on their late night outing.
We played a game I found online and made it ourselves. I find the kids enjoy that as much as the activity sometimes. I could print many things out, but why not just add making it into the learning process? This one is called Fly By Night and the girls practiced their directions. They put their marker in the center and drew prewritten directions from the jar- "2 blocks East"  etc. The first owl to fly into the night won. They loved it and played several times.

 

 We checked out the wingspan of the Great Gray owl and learned all sorts of owl facts Hannah recorded on a sheet.  We read a couple of other really sweet fiction books featuring owls and had great chats together about the characters. Our cozy reading sessions and discussions on the couch will be my favorite memories with them I'm sure.

They both completed directions on coloring particular types of owls.

They also wrote mini-books with an owl as the main character. Chloe drew pictures for her story, which honestly was way too complicated to relay here! haha  It was something about an owl tricking some people who had come out into the snow on Christmas. I think it stole their stockings : )

We recognized that Owl Moon did not have the typical conflict as part of the plot but simply described a girl's experience. So Hannah wrote about an owl who really wanted to be married, found his owl wife, and by the end had owl grandchildren.

As you can see, some days are pajama days. The kids learned more about features of owls and 

tried picking up objects with their "talons." 

There were so many possible art projects for this book, I decided to pick several instead of just one. 

Again it was easier to just freehand rather than print off copies- and more original that way : ) Here they practiced line patterns.

 Only Hannah was interested in making this owl out of torn paper. I gave her no instruction and just a picture as a guide to see what she would do.  I think it's pretty cute.

One project I found on line had the kids create owls with secondary colors. I thought it would be good if they each did two, one with primary and one with secondary. They did a great job talking out which colors they would use and reminding themselves of which ones were in which categories.

I love how they turned out. 

(As usual, Colin did participate and made his owls all blue : )

I surprised them with this lunch one day.  It's kind of a copy, but I added some personal touches like the beef stick- Pirouette branches with blackberries and wheat thin wings. I usually see those kind of things on Pinterest and think "What mom has that kind of time on her hands?" but this one was definitely worth it- and easy. And hearing your kids laugh is always a good time.

 Next week we'll continue the same book because there are so many great lessons. We'll learn more about nocturnal animals, categorizing animals, and of course.. the moon. I'm looking forward to lots of activities.

 

 In the meantime, Colin is learning how to do "manly" things like use a screwdriver. We bought a bookshelf for the girls' bedroom and he got to work. He did a great job and got several in by himself.

 We also got a Cracker Barrel checkers set- it's pretty fun to have sitting out on the coffee table for a game anytime.

 I've had a few of my own projects- I got to be sub principal horn in a nearby orchestra for their extremely belated Christmas concert and played Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf for the first time. It's so craftily written and has many very beautiful parts. I'll love sharing it with the kids someday. Lone Star Wind Orchestra has a concert coming up soon with loads of horn parts to work on. I'm very much hoping Hannah will be able to go as she's been waiting to get to see her mom on stage.: ) Since she's handled two other long concerts very well, I think she'll really like this one.

Lastly Dax and I are starting a fitness program this month together, so wish us luck!