Week 8 In Review

Well we had a really fun week this week!!  :-)  Here are photo highlights from the week.

Not really school related (well...it is life school) but I was fixing supper one evening and looked out the window and saw Seth trying to fix the rail on our back steps.

 

 After supper Daddy got out there and helped them fix it.  :-)

We are doing Pizza Hut's Book It! Program and the boys earned their first pizza!!  So Wednesday night we wen to Pizza Hut!  They were so happy with themselves.  :-)

For Cub Scouts we were given requirements to help Seth earn one more belt loop for the awards presentation this coming Monday (it will be our first one and Seth will earn 5 achievements!!  WHOO HOO!)  Anyways - these were requirements to earn the weather belt loop.  

One of the requirements was to measure either temperature, evaporation, rainfall etc...so we set up a jar of water to measure evaporation.  This first picture is cute...but you can't see the jar behind them.  LOL! 

There's the jar!  We also set out a jar to collect rainfall.

We had to make a poster of the water cycle.  So we talked about the water cycle as I drew it out on the board.

 

 And here is our finished poster of it!

We also had to watch a weather forcast on tv.  And we are also noting the temp each day.  This has been a good week to do that with the cold front that came in this week!!  We were measuring about the same time every day - and there was a 23 degree difference (cooler) from Thursday to Friday!  WOW!!

We also had one more requirement to finish for an art skills achievement (since we missed one meeting due to Seth being sick).  We had to draw a picture using 6 art elements.  We decided to pull out our Draw Write Now book and do the turkey! :-)  We added some specks of grain on the ground for food (to get in the dots element) and we added a pattern to the back feathers (to get in the patterns element!)

Here is my turkey...

 Here is Seth's turkey.

 Here is Aaron's turkey!

 And here is Alyssa's.

 We finished 'The Courage of Sarah Noble' this week!!  I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when we started that their busy activity to help them listen was making paper quilts.  I printed a bunch of shapes onto construction paper and they spent the first two weeks of readings cutting out their shapes.  And then this week they worked on gluing them to another piece of paper to make their quilts.  They actually finished this in one day on Monday!  On Tuesday we decided to do our reading during lunch.  We were getting to the end of the book and it was getting exciting and they wanted me to keep reading so we finished the last three chapters during lunch that day!

Here they are working on gluing their shapes.

 

Here is Seth's quilt.  He actually had at least twice that many shapes cut out.  He was planning on making another picture with them during another reading but since we finished it the next day during lunch he never did get to that other picture.

Here's Aaron's picture.  He also had a bunch more shapes and was going to continue this...but once again we finished the book...

 

Here is Alyssa's.  She tore paper instead of cutting.  You can see her bag of paper tearings above her picture.

Aaron wanted me to get a picture of his dot-to-dot ark.  He was proud of his colorful door!  :-)

On Thursday we had lunch and a play date at the park with a bunch of our friends from our homeschool group!  The kids had a grand time! Afterwards we made a trip to the library and then I went and early voted!!  The kids each brought in one of their library books and while I was voting they sat up under the table and read.  They were so quiet and so good!!

On Friday we had another science day with our friends!  This time we were doing the Magic School Bus space lab!!  It was a very fun day!!!   (oh and ignore the blankets on the windows in these pics - we put them over the windows for the projects where we needed it to be very dark!)

Here are the kids painting their planets for our solar system model.

Here is our finished model.  We hung it on the ceiling!

 

Here are Seth and Caleb looking through their telescopes.

We also had this constellation box that the boys looked through to try to guess constellations that they were looking at (little cards that came with it).  We then pulled out the constellation lamp and turned out the light and looked at constellations on the ceiling.  We also had earth and sun models and we turned out the lights and used a flashlight for our sun to see how the sun is reflected on the moon and the different moon phases.

After we finished our space projects we thought it would be fun to knock out some requirements on our fitness achievement for cub scouts!

Here are the kids doing their elephant walk.

Here is Aaron trying to do a front roll.  (thankfully there were no pictures of mommy demonstrating the front roll for everyone!)

Here are the kids doing some frog leaps.

We didn't get pics of them doing their blast-off jump (seeing how high they could jump while still landing on two feet).  They also did a crab walk and they jogged in place for 5 minutes.  (you would have thought that would have worn them out good...but oh no...not this bunch!)

After that we had a space lunch!!  I made rockets out of cheese snacks.

We had star shaped sandwiches as well.  We also did apple slices (that look like half moons) with caramel sauce and pretzels!

That afternoon the kids got reallly quiet and we were trying to find out.  Come to find out they had removed one of the drawers from Seth's bed and were all 4 under Seth's bed!!!  I don't see how they all fit!  I was able to get some pictures of them crawling out!

They had so much fun with this that Daddy told them today that if they get their room and their closet clean and find a new place for their shoes in the closet...he would cut out the wall in the compartment where they were keeping their shoes so that they would have access to get under their bed (you can see the door to the right of the area they are crawling out - that is where they keep their shoes...but now will be a door to their hideaway!!) I mean every kid needs a secret hideaway, right?!?!  They are so excited about this!

Well I think that is all I have for now.  We are going to our church carnival tonight so I will have pics to post of the kids in their costumes soon from that!  :-)  We have a super busy week coming up that you will also hear about soon!

For now though, have a great weekend!

Until next time,
Kellie

Week 7 in Review

Ok - well after all the many pictures to share about last week...not as many for this week but this is ok.  :-)

We had a pretty good week this week.  Well, if you don't count the fact that Seth had a stomach virus on Monday so we didn't have any school that day.  :-(   The good news about that is that he woke up feeling much better Tuesday and no one else in the house has gotten it!!!  (I guess keeping Lysol wipes with me all day, wiping everything he touched, and keeping him isolated from everyone else paid off!! LOL!!)

But we were able to have a good 3 days of school this week - YAY!!  And we were able to make up for most that we lost on Monday too!!

Of course I have been in busy planning mode with Aaron - he is really fast-tracking through K.  He is doing so well and is so eager to learn that I we have begun the 'Before We Read' Pathways workbook and have also gone ahead and ordered the 'Learning Through Sounds 1' workbook from Pathways, just waiting on it to get here.  I have a feeling we may be in that first reader in Pathways by 1st of next year!  :-)!!  Go Aaron!!  We are still going through the Rod and Staff Kindergarten books...but at a much faster pace than I first thought we would!  I love those workbooks because they involve a lot of cutting and gluing, which Aaron loves!  He thinks they are fun so we will keep at it...just adding in some other stuff to get him to start reading as well!

Here are a few pics I got - all from today LOL!!  At least we got some pics this week!

Here is Aaron working on writing his letters on his white board.

I found Alyssa some stickers at the Dollar Store yesterday so she had fun making a sticker page.

We had a history activity today - making canoes.  We were talking about the settlers that came from France and how the indians taught them how to make canoes.   Here are the kids lacing their canoes.

Here are a couple of pictures of our finished canoes.

We have another fun day of co-op tomorrow!!  :-)

Until next time,
Kellie

Fall Break!

This past week we took a Fall Break from school!!!  :-)  We have been in school full time for 6 weeks so I figured we all deserved a good break!!  On Monday and Tuesday we stayed around the house.  I did some school planning and then got things packed and ready for our camping trip at the end of the week.  But before we went camping we went to the State Fair on Wednesday with Granny, PaPa and Uncle Adam!!  Then Thursday we went camping!!!!  It was our first time camping since the first of the summer and kids were super excited!  We had a fun fun time too!!

Here are picture highlights of our week.  (I will warn you - there are a bunch - since the ultimate goal of this blog is to create a photo book of our year!! )


I want to start out first with pictures of Seth (and Aaron's) first cub scouts project.  They were little wooden models that they put together and painted.  On Sunday PaPa and Daddy helped the boys put together the models.

Seth in his cub scout uniform!!  He looks way too grown up for me!!

They painted their models during the cub scout meeting on Monday night.

Seth's completed space shuttle.

 Aaron's painted helicopter!  (I think it has personality! )

  Here are some pics from the State Fair on Wednesday.

 They had a cute little fish pond where the kids could fish.  Here is Alyssa's catfish she caught.

 Seth bringing in his catfish!

 Seth's catch!!

Aaron's catch!!

 Aaron kissing the fish!   I didn't get the picture quick enough!

 We rode the ferris wheel!!

My favorite pic of the day - Seth and Alyssa on the ferris wheel!!!

My big cheeses in the big cheese!

 Seth throwing a baseball!

 My diva found a pink car!!  :-)

 Alyssa found a friend!!!  I think she would have stayed all day in the petting zoo if I would have let her!

On Thursday morning we left for camping!!

 We did get in some school - we got caught up on our microcsope experiments (that I didn't get pictures of - PHOOY!) and we talked about stars and constellations and played with our constellation projector!

To see the rest of the camping pictures though you need to go over to our RV blog and see them there.

The link to that post is  http://watsonrvjournal.blogspot.com/2012/10/cedar-hill-state-park-10-11-to-10-13.html

Until next time,
Kellie