It's always a good week when there is a birthday in the house. This week we had two! On Wednesday, Jonah turned 5 and Patrick turned 40. Hooray! Jonah's requests were a "Fancy Santa Birthday" and a "school holiday" so we got out the table linens, the goblets and the candles. I got a set of Christmas dishes that we can use year after year and I hung back up the Santa painting.
 |
We all dressed in red and/or green and it was quite festive. |
Yes, this was the best photo he would give me. *eye roll*
This is my chocolate kid. Chocolate layer cake with chocolate vegan butter cream frosting and vegan chocolate brownie ice cream
Not only do they share a birthday, they also share gifts! Jonah gave the jacket to dad and kept the helmet and badge for himself. We got a good chuckle out of this. Thank you Barb and Levin!
Earlier in the day, Grammy read "T'was the Night Before Christmas" on FaceTime.
It was a lovely day and Jonah was quite happy. I think Patrick had a good day too, although he worked for all of it except birthday lunch. I do have it on good authority that he was pleased with his new dumbbells, even though he has to go pick them up himself. Do you even know how hard it was to find sets of 15# and 30# dumbbells?! Good grief.
Don't mind our off key singing.
But I do love what he says after we finish. Be still my heart.
"Isn't it a Christmas miracle when it's a birthday?" 💓
Moving on to the school news...
For math, Micah has been learning how to accurately measure things. How to line them up to tell which is longer or shorter and using a ruler to measure with units. He is progressing through his Fundations book for 1st grade. We started talking about syllables this week, which he thought was great fun. Lots of clapping and coming up with words that fit the "rules" in his book.
Syllable practice
In science, we talked about bodies of water. We made a "tray shoreline" for the lab and it was fun to go back a bit to talk about previous topics like erosion. He made lots of hypothesis and had fun watching the "waves" he created. We made a big mess and had a lot of fun.
How the waves work on the beach.
We also reaped the reward of the rock candy experiment. 4 of the 6 jars turned out well and so that was cool! Emmett loved it (what's not to love?), Norah took a few licks, and Micah and Jonah were uninterested in actually eating it.
We also got some time outside. Micah always prefers to play football games in the yard by himself but he took a break to play with the favorite dinosaur. This topic has come back up thanks to a Nintendo Switch game and I have a sneaking suspicion that dinosaurs will be a focus for school in the upcoming weeks.
Emmett continues work with geometry and angles. He gets annoyed with me daily as I remind him of the importance of accuracy and neatness in his work. I keep reminding myself that he will hopefully see the value years from now in math classes. Oy. He is using a protractor and straight edge and learning all of the new terms that geometry brings.
In science we finished off last weeks lesson on density with another quick experiment. On the suggestion of Anica, I pulled out 5 liquids, including water, and he poured them equally into glasses. He then poured them into a clear up-cycled water bottle to see if they would mix or layer and in what order. He told me his guesses prior to the experiment and then we checked back to see how close he was. He then wanted to let it sit overnight to see if they would become even more obvious and he was interested to see that they did, in fact.
After settling over night
His next physics lesson was on solar energy and for engineering he was going to build a small s'mores solar oven. We never ended up with a sunny day so that project will have to wait until the following week.
For language arts, we finished up "Finding Langston" and talked more about The Great Migration. He read and copied down a Langston Hughes poem and continues to work on his cursive each day.
Jonah has learned all his letters! He was unimpressed with "Qu, Queen, qu".
"That one is too hard mom."
I got out some word forms for him to try too. He thought those were ok. I had to laugh because I thought that I would get to sit down and do a few with Norah but she didn't need my help. I continue to be amazed at the things that each one of them excels at. She can look into the letter box and pull out exactly the one she needs next. She identifies it with her eyes even if it is upside or backwards. She is able to identify and tell me about half of the letters, especially her favorites. Here's to learning through osmosis. Just crazy to me.
Jonah and I also played some trucks outside. I was the dump truck and he was the digger. I was then banished because I wasn't doing it right. Ahaha. I promised him another try one of these days.
All in all, a lovely birthday week.
Cheers!
Kate
No comments:
Post a Comment