Slices of Life

As part of our 100 Days of Art Challenge , I signed Alec and myself up for a family art class.  He's been asking to do a class together for quite some time and a friend of mine had one planned as a fund raiser. We were looking so forward to it!  Just a fun day for the two of us. We made these adorable owl paintings (that are now hanging together in our foyer). It was fun but we did find it frustrating at times. We had a HUGE class and there just was not enough of the art teacher to go around.  Luckily I am a pretty good artist on my own and was able to help Alec through his frustrations and I swore that if we ever signed up for another class I was going to travel with my own brushes (since many of our problems stemmed from the brushes we had to choose from). But all in all we had fun and we were happy with our finished results. Adding stars to our finished picture We first started painting our backgrounds and blending all the shades of purple together. ...

I've been wanting to take the boys to an art museum for years.  But it's one of those trips that is easily put off.  I knew they would not love it as much as visiting science or children's museums and since they weren't begging to go we never got around to it. I figured that now was the perfect time to visit!  It went well with our 100 Days of Art Challenge , it was the perfect activity for us to do with Ian's hand in a brace, and, best of all, our art museum had free admission for the month of August! I am so glad we went too.  My boys enjoyed it tremendously and kept telling me how much fun they were having. We're lucky that our art museum is very kid friendly!  This month they had a special exhibit all about cats.  There was a scavenger hunt of sort through the museum to see all the art work that had cats in it.  We had a map to follow and each exhibit had a picture of a cat near it so we knew when we found it. Our first "cat stop" T...

We had a great time working on several art projects this week.  We also spent a lot of time outside hiking, swimming, and kayaking. We found a wonderful new science and history series that all three boys have spent the week reading and they've requested quite a few other books in the series through our library. Science : Alec and I played Chomp; an ocean food chain card game one night.  We also found the Science of Fun Stuff books and the boys have read The Thrills and Chills of Amusement Parks.  We all read Welcome to the Green House .  Evan read Snuggle Up, ZooBorns! , Splish, Splash ZooBorns! , and Hello, Mommy ZooBorns .  The pictures are just adorable!  We watched a hawk and a bald eagle circling around the lake and even saw them diving at one another and crying out in battle over a fish. Family fun:  We played the card game pitch a few times.  The boys went tubing. We watched The Good Dinosaur and Angry Birds movie. Alec, Evan an...

It hardly seems possible that I have TWO kids in middle school!  (In our town 5th grade is middle school even though many towns still have 5th grade with their elementary schools). I can not believe that I have been homeschooling for 4 years now.  Time sure does fly! Because curriculum choices are so unique and so abundant I do enjoy seeing what other people are using for their homeschooling and so this week I vowed to share what we're using... These are our pick for Alec's 5th grade year. We are a very eclectic homeschooling family and we tend to put together most of our own work but there are a few books that we use and try use on a fairly consistent basis and here they are:   For math:   I had the hardest time picking out a math book for Alec this year.  He's quite picky about what he likes to do and all the suggestions I had were met with a frown.  We finally settled on finishing up last year's math workbook.  (It was a 5th & 6...