May wrap-up

We had a busy month!  Didn't mean for it to get so busy, but it did.  Between chicken coop building, camping, Aaron's birthday, 4-H stuff, and lots of yard and gardening work it was a squeeze school in when we can kind of month.  So, we did a lot of puzzles, and random things.  Here's a sampling.  I was lazy and didn't take a lot of pictures of all the things we did!

The boys did this ocean puzzle.  I helped them too.  I love getting down and doing puzzles with them.  They laid down to show how big the puzzle was.
 

We did a lot of puzzles.  Here's one of the many geopuzzles the kids did.  This one was Africa and the Middle East.  These puzzles are wonderful!

April was pointing to Egypt.  She thought that was fun since we are learning about Egypt {still} in Story of the world.



Wrap-ups.  These are very handy.  I think this is going to help Aaron a lot.  He can do the +1 and +2 pretty good.  He loves this.  We have a multiplication one too for April.

 

playing games has been a fun thing this month.  Here April joined Aaron in his Graphing, and they made a game out of it.

 

 I usually don't let the kids do the Wii during the day or for school time, but since we were doing a little baseball mini unit I let them try out the baseball on Wii sports.  Aric is demonstrating his Wii hitting skills.

 

April marched with her 4-H horse club in the local pet parade.  That was pretty fun to watch, we even saw chickens in the parade.

A baseball spelling page that Aaron worked on.




This was a fun tot school activity I pulled together while camping over Memorial day weekend to occupy little Alex.  Marbles and these ice cube trays.  He liked putting them into the holes.  He loved the marbles, but I had to watch him closely with them so he didn't get to play with them as long as he'd liked.

We are still working through our Articles of faith.  They like these puzzles to help them to learn the words. It is going to be busy here for a little bit longer, but we do plan to school through the summer, at least part time as much as we can!

Desiree

busy!

Well, here's another weekend that I didn't get to the homeschool journal, and a few other posts I'd like to.  It seems like most of my life is being spent in the garden and outside right now.  Thankfully, the chicken coop is done!  You can see the progress about that here.

Hope to have some new posts soon.  Until then, hope you have a great week!

Desiree

sharks!

Aaron became slightly obsessed with sharks after watching the movie Soul Surfer one day(very good movie by the way).  He was asking tons of questions, and then afterwards he kept asking more.  So, we decided to jump into a little shark unit study.  I found a great lapbook on homeschool share all about sharks, and we dug out some of our shark books (which thankfully we already had).  We were surprised to come across the story of Bethany (same girl from the movie soul surfer) in one of the books.  It was fun to see that, and of course Aaron wanted me to read that page to him several times.
We managed to squeeze in one little shark craft. A toilet paper tube shark.  Here's Aric painting his.  He's my little craft boy.
Here's the finished product hanging in our dining room.
We came across this book, Shark Wars by EJ Altbacker, at Costco, so we picked it up for a read aloud.  Aaron has liked it so far.  We are only about 4 chapters into it.  Read alouds go pretty slow with him, but he asks to read it pretty often.  It has a few shark facts interwoven into the story so that has been helpful too.
 

Here is the finished lapbook.  We used that Usborne book about Sharks for most of it.  I sure love Usborne books!  It was very helpful.  This lapbook covered a lot of shark information.  I did some of the filling in, and Aaron did some with me.  We did Shark safety together, and we thought it was interesting that one rule listed for shark safety was not to pull on a sharks tail.  Apparently some divers like to do that, and sharks don't like that.  You think? 

The other side of the lapbook.  I also printed up a shark coloring book (on the left).  It has some facts and pictures of sharks to color.  Aaron didn't have much interest in coloring though.
I think Aaron learned a lot, and his fears have been lessened a little.  He thinks that sharks are pretty cool actually, but I don't think he's ready to come face to face with one yet.   

Desiree

Tot school: Batman!

 Aric is 46 months old (3.5 years old)

Alex is 16 months old

Wow, I think it has been a while since I've posted a tot school!  I sure do miss posting about it.  We are always doing tot school around here, I just don't always get around to posting.  We had some awesome batman school that Aric loved.  I used the Batman preschool pack at 1+1+1=1, and we made it into a lapbook because that works best for us.  He loved his lapbook!  We also gathered all the batman things that we have, a few books, his batman and robin motorcycle, and his batman shirt.  He also put together a lego set that he picked from the store.

Here is the front flap of part of his lapbook.  He still has yet to trace the Bb's.  I figure he will eventually.  He isn't writing letters yet.

This is the inside of one folder.  The whole preschool pack ended up fitting in 2 folders taped together.
I think it's so cute how he matched his batman figure with the batman figure on the playdough mat.
For the first time, he liked the playdough mats.  We might start doing more of these.
B is for batman!
R is for Robin!
Counting Batman numbers.

We traced to catch the bad guys... That's all that I got pictures of for Batman school.  Now onto...

Alex!
He tried out playdough for the first time.  He mostly just picked at it.  He's not too big into touching new things that are different.
He played with my cell phone of course... This was my most favorite activity of all though.  I got the balls out, and we put them in this empty apple container from Costco.  He liked putting a ball in each spot.
 He had lots of balls and lots of spots.  He thought it was fun to reach to the farthest ones.  (Please ignore the marker spots on his ear.  It really is just marker :-)

Then he was very proud of himself after he was done. He liked closing it up too, and afterwards we bounced the balls on the little table, to see which ones would bounce.  He thought that was great fun.

Mom's favorites:

Alex having fun at the tulip fields with the ducky races!  He loved this.
 
He just wanted to catch all the ducky's racing down. This is Aric at Great Wolf lodge just after he had his penny squished in that penny squishing machine.  I love how excited he is in this picture.  We had a lot of fun at Great Wolf Lodge last weekend.
 
 To see what other's have done for Tot school head over to 1+1+1=1.
 Desiree

Spring splendor

Among the tulips,

the quiet moments,

of spring splendor.

Enough said.

~   Desiree