Blogging Break

I've been on a bit of a blogging break these past couple of weeks because we've had a lot going on.  Some things good and some things not so much.  Last Monday I went with a homeschooling friend to a Classical Conversations meeting because I am planning on enrolling by boys in the program for the next school year.  We checked out one particular location last Monday and tonight we are going to an info meeting for another location that is closest to our house.  Then, last Tuesday, we had a field trip to the Atlanta Center of Puppetry Arts to see their "Space" show.  Johnny is an extremely cautious child and isn't comfortable in new experiences so the minute we walked in and the theatre was dim he started getting nervous.  He layed down on the floor even before the show started and when it finally did, the lights went completely out (oh joy!) so he was very upset and basically layed there crying the whole time that he wanted to go home.  Poor Charlie was really enjoying the show but we had to leave a few minutes early because Johnny's crying was getting loud enough to be disruptive.  Next time, I believe that we will leave Johnny at home :-)  Our unit this last week and this week has been on isects and I checked out about a million books on different types of insects.  The boys have really enjoyed those.  We received our ants for our ant farm today but only 3 out of 25 were alive so I believe we will have to try again in the spring when travelling conditions are a little better for the ants.  We learned all about lady bugs yesterday and the boys each chose a rock to decorate as a ladybug.  They turned out really cute!  I have decided that you probably know by now all of the usual things we do since I've taken quite a few pictures of it all so I'm trying to only take pictures of new/more exciting things.  Here you go:

 Painting their ladybugs.

 Johnny can ready pretty much any 3 letter word you put in front of him.

 What a serious face!

Johnny's ladybug upclose.

Charlie's ladybug upclose.  Does anybody else think its strange that my 4 year old has defined pecs??  :-)

Living Water

Today we read the story of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:6-14.)  We talked about how Jesus told her about living water.  We discussed what that meant.  Then, we moved onto a science experiment of which I took no pictures for some strange reason..oops.  We put 1 cup of water in a saucepan and set it on the stove on high.  We watched it boil and we watched and felt the steam that was coming out of the pot and we talked about how the water was turning into a gas.  We stuck our hands in the steam and felt how wet they got.  After a bit we measured the water that was left in the pot and were left with 2/3 of a cup of water.  Then we finished up our liquids/solids/ gassees chart that we've been working on this week.  Unfortunately this picture didn't turn out too well.

 Johnny does really well sounding out simple words and being able to spell words that I say out loud to him.  He enjoys working on his blend ladder and worksheet.

 Charlie was doing some tracing but I think he was more like drawing pictures around the tracing he was supposed to do :-)

 Johnny was able to read all of the words on his word list.  It gets longer every week.

Charlie "working"  :-)

MONDAY

Today was a day that makes me think, "What was I thinking!!??"  But, we survived and we will be back at it tomorrow :-)

We did do school this week!

I was really bad about taking pictures this week, but we did do school!!  Here's some proof ;-) :

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Here's a look at what we've been up to these past few days:

Octopi

This is how we start school every day.

Charlie was hard at work on his do-a-dot "I" page.

Johnny worked on writing his O's and the number 9.

Then, he worked on some letter sound discrimination.

Charlie worked on some counting and number recognition.

More sound discrimination..

Its funny, when they work on the floor, they move around all over the place.

I traced their hands (with just the 4 fingers) and made and octopus that they painted.  I cut them out and we will used them in a couple of days when we make an ocean poster :-)



We're Back!

School is officially back in session as of today.  I introduced new letters to the boys for this unit and we learned about the octopus.  We also had a special helper today :-)

I look forward to having more exciting things to blog about this year!