Our Week - With Smoky Air

Please pray for all the firefighters battling the California wildfires.  We're safe from the flames, but the air quality here has been Unhealthy or Very Unhealthy.  Just when I was finally feeling brave enough for us to venture out of the house for nature walks, we're stuck inside some more.  

A rare cameo appearance from Jack.  I miss having him participate with us.  I'm not really sold on Distance Learning as a good idea in general.  I don't think that much screen time is good for anyone.  Jack goes from Distance Learning to video games to watching a show.  Knowing what homeschool really is, this makes my heart ache a little.  

First, take a moment to giggle at my lovely bat illustration on the white board.  Then, you can appreciate what Hannah is doing.

She learned to use the laminator this week!  One tiny step in helping her learn to be more self sufficient.  She wanted to learn to play a specific song on the piano, so I bought her the sheet music online.  Since you can only print it once, I wanted to make sure it was durable and wouldn't get torn or destroyed.  

We talked about how tree rings are made, and the girls did crayon rubbings of the stump in our yard.  

This made me SO sad!  We've been getting bags and bags of library books lately, but they shut down curbside pickup (the libraries themselves are still closed) because of the smoke from all the wildfires.  

I remember not being impressed with this project when I did it with the older kids.  I think Eli's guys had too many arms?  Not impressed with it this time around, either.  If God plopped another round of kids in my lap someday, *and* I was homeschooling them, *and* we were using this curriculum again, I would skip this next time.  

We sorted out all the birds from our buckets of animals, and I pulled out the matching cards, to help the girls start identifying different birds.  They each picked 3 birds to research some basic facts on, and they drew those birds from looking at the toy birds.  

Someone has a wee little touch of OCD.  

The girls' binoculars came!  Our first lesson was how to put the strap on, and our second lesson was how to say "binoculars" instead of bernoculars.  

Bookmarks made from tracing "Matthew" in Greek.  The book Matthew in the Bible was written in Greek.  

The girls helped me assemble and fill the new birdbath!  The float is a solar fountain.  I'll try to remember to get a picture of it when the sun is shining on it.  

While we were out there, we noticed a feather from a blue jay.  We listened to bird sounds on YouTube this week, and blue jays were one of the birds we listened to.  I discovered I really like the YouTube videos of bird cams.  Full screen on the desktop computer, it's like having a window, with birds fluttering and chirping outside.  Very tranquil.  A little piece of the outdoors, when it's unsafe for us to actually go outside.  

Navajo sand paintings.  We also did a couple of Navajo coloring pages, Katie is reading a book about Code Talkers, and they watched a DVD about the Code Talkers, with interviews with some of the actual surviving Code Talkers themselves.  

We've finished up the two "introduction" weeks, and we're almost done with the second week of learning about the United States.  We'll start learning about Mexico soon!  We did a bit of learning about Mexico back in April, early in Shelter In Place, but we'll get to go much deeper now.