Our week: May 4-10th

I know it's a new week today, it being Monday and all, but I'm not going to worry about that!  Our last week was busy, like usual.  I got sick for part of it, and that never helps.   I still feel like I'm trying to get rid of  the sickness.  Oh well, onto last week...

On Sunday (the 4th) we took a family walk in between rain storms at Mission state park.  We learned that it is home to the nations largest Cottonwood tree.  Here are the kids standing by it.  It's huge!  It's fun to discover cool things close by, especially when we've come to this park so many times before.  But we just have never been to this part of the park.

We made a homemade paper bag pinata on Monday for Cinco de Mayo.  I found the idea at Enchanted Learning.  The boys liked making this with me.  I loved that it was simple, but very festive looking.  Unfortunately we don't have any trees in our backyard, so we had to use our old pool ladder.

Oh well!  It works, right?  They had so much fun breaking it open.  We didn't get to break it until Tuesday because we had to wait for it to dry.  Here's Alex getting ready to hit it!

For preschool this week we worked on a lot of Itty bitty bookworm activities that go with The Grouchy Ladybug.  Here Alex is matching the paper plate clock to each card in turn.  He did super awesome with this, and even wanted to do it again.  I was impressed.  I expected him to have no interest in this at all because he's so young.  But, he got it after I showed him the first few times.  He was able to match, and he was able to tell me "it's 8 o'clock." Or, whatever the number was that the short hand was pointing at.

I got my first ever completely flat tire on Tuesday while driving April to her play rehearsal down in Salem.  I tried to straddle what looked like cardboard at first.  Well, it turned out to be metal, and it had a flap that was sticking up that caught onto something, and made it fling over into my right back tire.  Cut all the way through the outer wall.  I never go over anything questionable, but I couldn't really go around that thing.  It was a long afternoon.  I called Hubby, and he came from work to save us.  This picture is after the tire was changed (as you can see it's not flat anymore), but I was still stuck because the battery had died!  So, Michele had to go back home again and pick up a battery charger.  Thanks to Hubby's who come to the rescue!  So glad I didn't have to end up changing that tire (he did that too)!

Since we didn't do much for May the 4th (star wars day), Wednesday we made some mini light sabers, and Aaron made this origami yoda.  I thought the 2 went together pretty good.

We read quite a few ladybug books.  Alex really likes this book, Ten little ladybugs.

While we were at the dollar store we found these excavation kits, so I got one for each of the boys, and they dug either a dinosaur or a mummy out.  They were pretty fun for a dollar!

A picture of the wrapper in case you want to find them.

I made this alphabet outdoor scavenber hunt for Alex's preschool.  He liked it, but wasn't thrilled about it.  I hid all the blocks around, and had to get him interested in it.  We said the letters as he found each one, but that was it.  He had no interest in putting them in order.  I think it had a lot to do with the nice weather outside.  He just wanted to go drive his car around.  Once he started noticing them around the yard though, he was pretty excited about finding them.

 I started All about spelling level 7 with April this week. I have been looking for a spelling program for her for a while, and each time I was at Exodus books this one jumped out at me.  I've seen a lot of great reviews of this program on various blogs, so I thought I'd give it a try.  We've only done one lesson, and it was an ok challenge for her.

This is our "All about spelling" board.  These are the same tiles I use for Aric's All about reading, so I love that it has the same set up.  When I had this board out and was working with April, Aaron saw it and said he wanted to do it too.  I'm considering this program at a lower level for Aaron too for next year.  I think we need a bigger board though!  We'll see how this goes.

On Friday I had Aaron make some cookies mostly by himself.  I guided him with directions, but he did most of the measuring, and mixing.  I need to get him in the kitchen more, he sure loves it.

That's about it for last week!  Now we are knee deep into our marathon week before the play.
How was your week?

Desiree