Sunday, June 20, 2010

Here's Our Homeschool This Week

This week-ish, we:

painted our canvas shoes (more on that later)--
--layered colored sand into glass jars; drew a few Father's Day banners and cards; did a little watercolor al fresco--
--took some photographs, and drew tons and tons and tons of pictures

Gnomes 30th Anniversary Editionread out loud; Willow read to herself almost constantly; listened to CD readers (Manny's Cows: The Niagara Falls Tale has been a big favorite) and books on CD; spent a goodly amount of time at various bookstores; examined all the diagrams in the Gnomes book and spent a lot of time asking Momma if gnomes are real; and looked at books and fought over books and just plain loved books a lot
took swim class and went swimming; played in a couple of IU fountains (Is this legal? No idea)--
--walked and biked and rollerbladed; played at the playground and played at the yard; hiked and hiked and hiked at Squire Boone Caverns; and helped the Momma with innumerable errands and chores, including one big craft fair

worked the lever on the button machine and lots of other tasty mechanical tools; Sydney upgraded to the next level of her connect-the-dots books; played some inane Dragon Tales computer game; put together puzzles and Legos and Lincoln Logs and blocks off all sorts and sizes; and helped with cooking and baking and breakfast-making

explored an atlas on CD-Rom and marveled at geographic marvels and found shipwreck sites

Magic School Bus Discovers Flightplayed The Magic School Bus Discovers Flight and watched Dinosaur Train and Nova and Billy Nye the Science Guy and other dinosaur documentaries; performed the oil versus water science experiment; read books about shells and books about dinosaurs and books abour rainbows and books about tornadoes; had a few tornado warnings of our own; helped the Momma (sort of) with the gardens--
--had lots of hands-on fun with candle-making and gem mining and caves and a grist mill; and visited the zoo to spend time with the elephants, cheetahs, dolphins, and bears, and to pet the sharks:
And that's how we homeschooled this week. Next week, I hope for blueberry picking, an on-the-wall timeline, making butter in a Mason jar, and the beginning of the dinosaur atlas.

4 comments:

  1. amazing what you do in a week!

    i wanna go blueberry picking too! will you let me know what day you are going?

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  2. I am exhausted just reading that. It sounds like a blast, though.

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  3. I LOVE that Gnome book. It was one of my most favorite books as a young person...I still have it, and my kids adored it just as much as I did. They were convinced that Gnomes were real with a little nudging from Grandma who set up elaborate scenes and left "clues" in her gardens.

    Blueberry picking = blueberry pie. Yum.

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  4. Well, I am just including the "academic" stuff, so I'm not telling you about the numerous hours of sitting around or goofing off with My Little Pony or lying on the bed staring numbly at Caillou, which the kiddos also did plenty of this week while I did similar things.

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