Week of August 10th

Brie's art project

   This week was our first week in full swing. Brie has been doing her school for 4 weeks completely, but I have eased into the older 2 joining in. Last week my 5th and 3rd grader just did CLE LA, Reading, and Teaching Textbooks(math). That was not too bad :) This week we have added in Bible, history, science and some music/art.  I have really missed doing these fun subjects with the kids. We have learned a lot this week and had a bunch of fun.

MFW books with book basket

    Truthfully the MFW cycle we are doing is for 2nd-8th grades, but my K student loves joining in on a lot. We were working on week 8 and learned about Reptiles, Amphibians, King Louis XIV, and a bunch of other things. We actually didn't have a ton of books for our book basket this week but next week is loaded!!!
    For the big kids we were learning about the life cycle of a frog. The kids have known this for a while, but now we get to watch it, if the tadpoles don't die ;)

fishing out the swimmers

can you find the tadpoles?

   I confess to have neglected our pool for a week or maybe 2. In light of this a frog or 2 or a dozen had decided to lay their eggs in our pool. I know this happens so I try to stay up on the pool, but to my surprise we probably had 100+ tadpoles swimming around the sides of the pool!! I knew if I didn't let the kids rescue some of the tadpoles they wold be heartbroken so they dug up an old fish tank we had and filled it with a dozen or so little swimmers :)   The one little neat thing about this lesson is that the day we caught out tadpoles I didn't know we would be studying the lifecycle of frogs or that keeping some tadpoles would be suggested, so that worked out nicely :)

look at them go :)

Tony and Nick

 And of course the little kids weren't too interested in looking at the tadpoles because they were busy digging in dirt!!!

 Finally, the kids had a great time working on art. I am not a crafty type of person, I leave that up to Mimi  or my mom, but art time is good for them. This lesson they were paining angels. Anytime I pull out paint they come running so this was a nice lesson that eventually my K student decided to join in on. That is always nice when you can have an activity where they all decide to be calm, of course this was during nap time too which contributed to the quiet :)

   And finally we had 2 great moments this last week. Super Brie here lost her first tooth and my cat Kiki which we had assumed was long gone finally came home after being gone for almost 3 weeks. We had neighbors move and were afraid she might had gone with them, but thankfully she made her way back :)