Our Week with Wacky Weather

Monday was a high of 90* and Friday was thunderstorms and a high of 63*.  Welcome spring.  I'm glad I didn't take all the long sleeved stuff out of Hannah and Katie's closet when I started bringing out the short sleeved clothes.

So you remember how last week we got a new dryer?  Well, I asked the delivery guy to leave the box for Katie and Hannah to play in.

Only Eli totally claimed it and he and Jack made a tank out of it and were shooting stomp rockets and nerf guns from within it.

Maybe when we can replace the dishwasher the girls will get a box.  (Although, now that I think of it, when we replaced the dishwasher in the old house, there was no box.)

This week's lesson on our Home Art Studio DVD was the color wheel out of oil pastels.

Last year, we painted the color wheel, but blending oil pastels is a bit more challenging.

Even though this was is "fourth grade" disc, I find that most projects appeal to a wide range of ages and abilities.  Katie is 5, and although she didn't exactly blend the the overlapping areas, she did get the experience of working with pastels.

See the water in the bag?  That's tree sweat.  We learned about transpiration this week.

The leaves' stomata (which breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen) release excess water back into the air.

This week is Terra Nova testing at the high school.  Since the seniors aren't tested, Sam has late start, and has been home until 10 am most mornings.

This gives Sam free time in the mornings, some of which was spent playing with younger siblings.  Katie is "fishing" for Sam with links.

This coming week, I'm going to be posting a review for some art supplies that we've been thoroughly enjoying!

In God and the History of Art, the kids reproduced "The Bird Cage."

The idea being to blend colors and capture realistic details.

This book is part of our My Father's World, Exploration to 1850 curriculum.

It's nice to have art related readings and projects that go along with what we're learning about in history, but some of the work is a little beyond my artists.

You know, it's funny.  I make these rice trays for Katie, since they're designed for toddler/preschooler play, and everybody ends up playing with them.  In fact, even Paul picked it up while we were talking in the school room one day.  Jack has developed a game where he'll ask someone to hide a lid under the rice, and then he'll search for it using a magnifying glass and the dig tool from his bug excavating kit.

The Magnatiles continue to be a favorite around here.  The boys like to build structures and drop "bombs" of more Magnatiles on them to see how the buildings collapse.  I'm calling this hands on engineering.

We got outside to do leaf classification just one day before the weather turned into rainy thunderstorms.

I brought Lukey out with us to pet the grass and rock in the sunshine.

The cat answers me when I meow at him.  I hope I'm not saying something offensive.

This was actually a pretty interesting project, where we looked at how the leaves are situated on the plant, what shape the leaves were, what kind of veins they have, and what sort of edge they have.  It's really made me pay more attention to all the variety in plants we see when we're out and about.

My teens' school has uniforms, but they allow their athletes to dress up for game days.  I thought Brianna looked particularly cute this morning as she headed out the door.  Her game will probably get cancelled, as the weather is icky, but it's nice to get a break from the polo shirts once in a while.

Now that we're back to our normal curriculum, we're moving along nicely.  We got 6 days of work done this week.  I need to absorb a week of work by the end of the school year if we're going to finish when the big kids do, so I'm hoping we can keep up this pace.

Fortunately, we still make the time to bird walk.  Today, Jack asked me how pencils were made, so we googled it, and watched a rather interesting video.  I love it when I get to learn something new right alongside the children.  We may need to watch some of the other How It's Made videos, too.

Next week, we'll get into the dawn of the steam engine and machinery, touch briefly on China, continue our state by state look at the USA, and begin learning about Napoleon!  Sounds fascinating!

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