Slices of Life

We had a bit of extra schooling this weekend. Luckily, the boys did not mind at all and eagerly participated.  I offered to do a fun science experiment with the boys.  We've been talking for a few days about making rainbow icicles.  It sounded easy enough and they look so pretty.  We were excited and with temperatures hovering around freezing this week it seemed like a good time to attempt it. Alec and Evan helped me set up the container, measure the yarn, decided on the starting color and then we headed outside.  The wind was whipping off the water and blowing our yarn all around. We soon realized we had no way to suspend the container off the deck railing like we had planned and so we decided to head back in and reevaluate our plan.  We changed containers, added a string to hang it from and set it off the hooks underneath our deck.  The string was still blowing all around and the hole in our second container was so large the water was just pouring through. We were ge

Today was one of those amazing days where we worked hard, got everything done we wanted to and no one complained! It's always refreshing to have one of those perfect homeschooling days where the work gets done, the kids were willing to work, and we all had fun. Of course, the definition of a perfect homeschool day often varies but today sure felt like it was perfect! I had pulled out a few things for them each to work on and was amazed when we were all done an hour later. Amazed because I felt like we did more work than usual and no one complained or dragged out their work!  We covered quite a bit today too!  Evan completed all 7 pages that were left in his Phonics book. He knew we were headed to Target today to buy some gifts for the birthday parties we have lined up this weekend and he remembered that I had agreed to buy him a small Lego set when he finished his workbooks.  He was determined to finish and buy his set today.  He filled in all the words, read me the sentences and b

Today we decided that we'd do some schoolwork while eating breakfast and head out for a half- day field trip. It's not always easy balancing schoolwork with field trips. We often go whole weeks without leaving the house and become quite focused on book work and traditional schooling. Other times it seems like we're hardly home and running from one field trip to another. We try to strike a balance and make sure we're getting in a lot of life learning opportunities while staying on top of our schoolwork.  Today's compromise worked beautifully! I had no idea how much work we could get done in less than 2 hours! Traditional Schoolwork:      Evan:   We filled in another page in his Hold That Thought for Kids book and then he worked quietly on finding domino doubles.  He picked out the domino doubles that matched the answer on his printout.  At one point he could not find 9 + 9 for the 18 slot but told me it must be three rows of three since that was 9.