elfie

elfie, a photo by xan&ali on Flickr.

Ready, set, write

Getting ready!  Both kids will be writing this year!  I will be sort of participating in my own way.  I'm hoping to get all the writing done for my Master Hand Knitter Level 2 program :)

Spelling & Phonics

http://instagr.am/p/PPQr6Pt3qb/
She did two sets of words. Yay! Good job!

Unschool!

Here is unschooling at its finest! A wanted to learn about what kinds of things eat flies. So we bought a Venus fly trap (we are also studying plants, hence the tie in!) She drew all sorts of things that eat flies. Do you see the spider & web? How about the frog? And of course the fly trap :) LOVE it!

Dino Study

Today a good friend of mine was featured in an article in the Fargo Forum about her method of "unschooling". We do use a curriculum to cover basics, but I like to allow the kids to dig deep in their own interests. Currently, Miss A is all about dinosaurs!

Chinese Calligraphy

I Heart this!

Slimey

Its raining outside, time to make slime :)

handbook of nature study

We are starting a new unit/curriculum for the spring/summer.  The kids have their annual school exam next week and unless there are areas that NEED improvement, we'll be done with formal school for the spring.  Whats that you say?  Done with school in March?!  Ok, ok, we won't stop doing schoolwork, but we are going to stop the FORMAL stuff.  I'm guessing test results will show X is not super great at spelling and writing, but I'm not particularly concerned about this as our spring/summer projects will be addressing those weaknesses that I'm already aware of.  We are going to be using the Handbook of Nature Study as a spring board for starting a notebooking project.  The kids love being outside.  I love having them be outside.  So its only natural (pun intended) to go on outside!!!  I'll try to show what the notebooks look like as the kids get started on them.  But here's a little of what we did on our nature walk today.

I wasn't entirely prepared for this adventure as we had only planned on going to the children's museum, but they wanted to go to on a nature walk too at Buffalo River State Park (which is 20 or so miles from the museum) so we went there on a whim and I only had my cell phone to take pictures.


We went down to the river and just sat on the rocks for quite a while, watching the river flow, throwing in twigs to see them float, and tossing in stones to see them drop.  I did have snacks in the car for the kids, so we sat down and ate our snacks there.

We saw moss growing on the trees.

Yellow and green moss!

He says "take a picture of me pointing at the moss" (clearly, moss was an interesting highlight of our walk!)

A is showing how the grass is starting to come in on the path, we'll go back in a couple weeks to the same spot and compare what it looks like :)

And on the other side of the path the trees are bare, again, we'll go back to compare this later.

Diggin'

Well, spring is here and we are back out spending time at Buffalo River State Park. They must be prepping the pond for summer because there were several loads of fresh clean sandpiles sitting in the swimming hole. The kids seriously enjoyed climbing and digging. Its supposed to rain the next couple days, but hopefully we'll be able to make it out here again soon!

Lemonade

Well somehow we ended up with a beautiful 70 degree day here so the kids set up a lemonade stand.

Swimming

The kids are doing fantastic in swimming lessons.  A is not as enthusiastic about it as she had been a couple years ago when she went, but their skills have improved dramatically.  We stopped going to lessons because they were so far away downtown and twice a week was a lot of running.  There is a new YMCA near us now with a pool and so we signed up again.  The last session they were the only two kids in the class and had two instructors.  AWESOME.  X went from not really even dunking under water much to actually being able to swim.  A can jump into the pool on her own now and with goggles will go under water to get toys.  I'm impressed.

dr seuss - the lorax

I forgot to blog about this a couple weeks ago even though I very purposefully took pictures to document all that we did- d'oh!  So here's a quick rundown on how we celebrated the release of the movie The Lorax and Dr. Seuss's birthday....

First the kids read the Lorax (after a bit they got bored of the reading part, we switched to the nook and they used the read to me feature ha ha ha)  Also, you'll see that A is "reading" along with the story.  She has read it so many times on the nook that its pretty much memorized!

Then they started working on some projects drawing a Truffula tree.  It was using multiple mediums...

Crayons...

Paint....

And we even sprayed perfume on them so it would smell like "fresh butterfly milk" as stated in the book :)

The fluff for the trees was, of course, raw wool that I had cleaned and dyed  :)

 

In the book you have to pay to hear the story, we used coins to figure out how many different combinations could be used to come up with 15 cents.

Little A likes drawing more, so she took the opportunity to draw a picture of the Lorax.

Remember, this was BEFORE they saw the movie, in the book there is no picture of the Once-ler, so they each drew a picture of what they thought the Once-ler would look like.

Below shows (left to right, even though the subtitle on the pages may differ...) the Lorax by A, the Once-ler by A, and the Once-ler by X

 

We also used the some of the main themes of the story and talked about the difference between NEEDS and WANTS.

valentine preview

A sneak peek of our party decor for tomorrow! My favorite is the pendant banner made from Little A's old shirts that I was having a hard time parting with, I think it turned out so cute :)

Winter birdfeeder

A made a little winter birdfeeder (shape of a heart) today. She also made us a pizza lunch :) Ideas were from her latest Highlights "High Five" magazine

Biography writing

So I told X he has to write more, and just so happened in his book there is a unit about biographies. So he wrote one about me. It says I am special because I like to play video games. Hmm, I think he was thinking about himself on that one! But focused and hardworking all the same.

Little writer

Perhaps its just me, but I'm thinking that the fact my not yet 5 yr old writes more than my almost 8 year old is pretty interesting! She needed help with spelling, but this was all her! His handwriting is much clearer and he can write more words without help, but she WANTS to write and I have to threaten him in order to get a single word out.

It says-
"Deep in Jellyfish fields [in] a Pineapple, he turned into Gary"

byzantine empire & lego learning

Today is the first day that A hasn't had preschool.  We decided she was ready to be done going mornings to her preK class because she's developmentally ready to do harder work and, quite frankly, I don't want to be running around when winter comes.  She's been very excited about the idea of staying home and doing school with X so I'm hopeful that it'll work out well.


This morning we started out doing Lego school using materials from here and the redirect to the lapbook on the same site.  The kids worked mostly on math skills with this project.  The did estimating, measuring with legos, measuring with a tape measure, and graphing the colors of legos.  A also did some handwriting copying the color words.  She started to get bored so she went off and played with some army men for a bit ;)  While she was doing that, X finished up some language arts work from last week.  He worked on dictionary skills, looking up spelling words and writing down the number of meanings those words have.


Then we started working together again using Story of the World we are studying the Byzantine Empire.  Specifically Justinian and Theodora.  I totally lucked out because at after-Christmas shopping yesterday I found this mosaic kit on clearance so it was perfect timing!  A was particularly impressed to learn that Theodora was a wool spinner before she became the Empress!  While X worked on the mosaic and A colored some paper dolls of Justinian and Theodora, I read the history book telling the story as well as the Byzantine story of Saint Nicholas (again, perfect timing since Christmas was just a couple days ago!)  After lunch we'll be working on some math and reading then it'll be off to theater rehearsal this evening.  Busy day!


LEGO SCHOOL

LANGUAGE ARTS

BYZANTINE EMPIRE