Week 11 - Family photos, woods, erosion, and muffins

And now I think I am caught up (at least for a minute).

This week was a bit unusual for school scheduling but I suppose that is the beauty of homeschool, flexibility. 

Monday we had an appointment with my friend Jamie to take our photos. She is quite talented and somehow always manages to get a Christmas card worthy shot. This is no small feat with 4 young children.  We tried to get a couple of just the two of us but that might have to wait until we can have a babysitter. Anytime Patrick was told to get closer to me there was a pair of arms wanting him to hold her. Ah parenting. School on Monday consisted of just math. 

On Tuesday morning we opted for a saunter in the woods. This week, Micah's science topic happened to be erosion.  The local conservation group has been working on a bank repair project for several years and so we read the signs at the trail. This was not as interesting to the kids as continuing down the path so I quickly let that plan go. It drizzled on us a little, we meandered off the path on accident and I am pretty sure that everyone cried at least once. Sometimes, that just happens. 

We went home and did school work during the afternoon which seemed to work alright. We all did a science lab with Micah that mimicked weathering and erosion. I had them build a tower of sugar cubes and then they used an eyedropper to drop water on it and watch it slowing erode away. 

Wednesday we had to have a discussion about respect and patience and cooperation. The boys were starting to have some trouble with all three of these while we were doing school. We talked about why those things were important, what the other options were if they were really unhappy and what we should do next. They agreed that we should all work a little harder at compromise and the rest of the week went a bit better. 

Emmett continues to work on his poster about the plotting of a story, area problems, and multi step/multi number multiplication. 

Micah is working on his reading and subtraction.

Jonah worked on learning to write his name this week! I'd say this is pretty good. 

He also loves to help me cook and bake. One night he helped me make pumpkin muffins. Norah was all about getting up on the step stool and "bothering" Jonah. It was making him crazy and so I gave her two small bowls, a set of measuring spoons and a couple of scoops of dry oatmeal. She immediately sat down on the floor and poured, stirred, dumped, and scooped to her heart's content. When she was done she helped me sweep up the oatmeal into the dust pan and dump it in the trash can. A quick once over with the vacuum and all was well, muffins were made, and nobody was crying. Win/win/win. 

Norah is also really excited about cutting and scissors so she practiced cutting with Mad Matter Sand, paper, and several new pairs of scissors. 

Week 10 - Reading, Metamorphic Rocks, and Turkey Tag

 Wow, 10 weeks of homeschool in the books. I sort find that hard to believe. 

This was the week that Norah scribbled all over my planning book for the week. 🙈🙈Oops. 

In language arts this week Emmett was supposed to move to the book Echo Mountain by Lauren Wolk. We started reading it but neither of the boys was really into the story. It is set in the time of the Great Depression and although we will be talking about that time in a historic sense it was too scary for the boys in this already anxiety ridden time in the world. They were still interested in Greek mythology and so we decided to call an audible and continue with the Percy Jackson series. We've read the first three books together. Emmett and I then went on to read numbers 4 and 5 separately. He finished WAY before I did. Ha. He will be putting together a poster project on book number 4. He's not thrilled but it is a good way to learn about how stories are plotted. 

Micah continues to work on sight words. He often fights back on his reading while we are "doing school" but he brought me Hop on Pop one night at bedtime. I had put a couple of books on the shelf in his room that I thought he might be able to do himself. He read the entire 64 pages to me! I was so proud of him and more importantly he was so proud of himself. So cool.

Jonah wanted to work on the letters C and G this week. Why you ask? Those are Curious George's letters obviously! We worked on lower case letters and he pin punched several letters to build strength and fine motor control. He also read a whole bunch of Thanksgiving books with me including Curious George's Thanksgiving. 

Emmett has been working on multi numeral multiplication in math. He is using the common core method and I know it's not a popular parent position but I really like it. It makes so much sense. These kids are going to have such good number sense because they will understand how it works. It is really hard to jump into common core halfway through but if you have been with it from the beginning the logic follows all the way through. 

Micah's math is subtraction with 10 frames and 9 groups. He prefers to just do the problem but we've been trying to slow down so that he can write out the picture too. 

Jonah's math this week consisted of measuring Thanksgiving pictures with both a ruler and math cubes. He loves his dad's tape measure so later in the day, he took that outside and measured all the things on his own. 

Science this week was fun! Micah was learning about metamorphic rocks. See the video below for his description of the lab. 

Emmett's physics lesson was about projectiles and satellites. This involved throwing a whole bunch of different things across our yard and figuring out why certain things went farther than others. Ice, pumpkins, pillows, a shoe, a stuffed animal, a rock were all projectiles with mass and velocity. 

His engineering lesson was about Rube Goldberg machines or as Emmett would say, "how to make something easy way harder than necessary". In the end we opted not to build one but watched so many YouTube videos that we might be pros anyway. Emmett's favorite was this one, The Swish Machine: 70 Step Basketball Trickshot (Rube Goldberg Machine)

Our last fun activity on Friday was to make a whole flock of feather turkey's for Turkey Tag! Aren't they cute!?

 

Gobble Gobble! Have a great week. 

Week 9 - Gratitude trees, Science, and November beach days

 Hi all! It's been a lovely fall week in CT. We are coming back to the classroom after a fun Halloween. The pumpkins and ghosts have been put away and the turkeys and cornucopias have made their entrance. Okay, maybe not so much the cornucopias but the Thanksgiving stories are abundant. 

In this house, we have always chosen to focus on both sides of the history of the United States. Patrick is passionate about the native people who lived here long before the pilgrims sailed onto the shores. He believes that their story is both beautiful and tragic and, without a doubt, needs to continue to have a voice and a place in the history books. Yet another beautiful thing about homeschooling is adding in more details to something that often is stereotyped and/or overlooked. Back home in Nebraska, Patrick did multiple mission trips to Pine Ridge Reservation and fell in love with the Lakota culture, heritage, and people. The kids were young and so they haven't had a chance to learn as much about the Lakota yet but we read stories given to us by our friend, Steve and talk about it at regular intervals. 

Here in Connecticut, we have a new view. In 1620, the Puritans landed at Cape Cod, Massachusetts about 200 miles up the coast from where we live now. They had been at sea for 66 days. They then sailed up the coast to Plymouth and started to build their town where the Wampanoag people had been living. (We love that Wampanoag means People of the First Light.) This has been interesting to the kids because New England was settled so long before the Midwest. In addition, the tribes of people living here had a different history and way of life than the plains tribes. More to come in the next couple of weeks on the Siwanoy tribe that lived on the land we live on today. 

In other news, I made a grateful tree. Grandma Barb made the leaves with her Cricut and mailed them to us and they turned out beautiful! We don't do it every single day but if the kids or I think of something we want to add, we write a gratitude on a leaf and hang it on the tree. We love the ones that grandma and grandpa sent and hung those up first. 

Saturday afternoon we had two friendly visitors! Our friends Jamie and Tricia were kind enough to let the boys play with Rosie and Scout! We had a great time and the kids played with them outside for almost 5 hours!

Monday it was cold and windy! After school I had to dig out the winter coats and grammy hats and mittens! 

SCIENCE - Micah was studying igneous rocks this week. We read about them and then made some! Bits of crayons in different colors represented different minerals. They were put together in a muffin tin and put in the oven to represent heat. They were then whisked into the fridge which acted as the rapid cooling process. 

Emmett's engineering science included studying domes, tunnels and towers. His lab was to see how many cups of water 4 eggs could hold without breaking. Eggs are dome shaped and they are one of the strongest building shapes. Do you want to know the number of cups the eggs held? Spoiler alert - it was A LOT more than we thought. In fact, we switched to a large bucket that held baseballs and 34 cups of water later the eggs were still intact. Whoa! That's strong. 

Wednesday evening I set out all the items for a quick fall painting activity. These trees were so fun and simple. I printed the trunk template out here and then cut broccoli florets to use as brushes/sponges.  Patrick even got in on the action. Apparently he is motivated by broccoli? 

Thursday was warm and sunny. The boys created an excavation site in the backyard and found all sorts of big flat rocks that they slowly dug out. They also found a piece of glass that likely dates back to the early to mid 1800s (based on it's shape and per a friend who is very knowledgable in this area). 

We went to the beach on Thursday morning after morning basket and math work. Jonah found a lobster claw. It was a rare, gorgeous, 70 degree day in November. 

Norah is ready for 4th grade math!

We hope you had a lovely week. 

Bye Soon.

The Halloween of 2020

 What a different year. 

The kids have been so good about everything. We got all excited about doing something new and fun for Halloween this year and they went right along with it! We opted out of trick or treating this year. I thought about it for a bit because I kept thinking, "it's outdoors, we could just stop at houses that have candy placed out" but in the end I decided that if our family got sick because of trick or treating, it just wouldn't be worth it. So... this was our day...

We started out the day by making mini pumpkin catapults! That was super fun and the kids had a good time flinging candy pumpkins around the dining room floor. 

Later in the day we took the pumpkins outside and carved them with Patrick. I did Jonah's, Patrick did Micah's and Emmett did his own this year! It was chilly scooping the glup out. 

Micah's Spider

Emmett's Mask-O-Lantern

Jonah's Bat

We watched the boys eat donuts off of a string without using their hands. I think that I had more fun than they did with this. I hadn't laughed so hard for months. 

After that we bobbed for apples. This was a first for all of us except Patrick. He had to show us how it was done. 

Later that evening Patrick hid candy and small toys in the yard and turned on the fog machine. The kids dressed in their costumes and had a great time searching for all the goodies. Emmett and Micah collected fog in their buckets and brought it over to us. 

We went inside for a warm dinner of three bean chili and semmels (our annual halloween meal). 

At the end of the day I asked Emmett (10) what he thought about the day and he said, "I got all the candy and I didn't have to walk that far." Ha. That's one way to look at it. 

Happy November everyone.