Summer School

It is flat out TOO HOT to do anything else, so we have started up school!

We are just 3 days into our new curriculum(Heart of Dakota), and are really enjoying our school time.

It is just the right blend of reading and activities, although it will be next week before I'm organized enough to add in our math and Isaac's formal grammar work. I have both of them and need to lay out the scheduling for each subject.

The boys enjoyed geography playing "twister" with the continents we taped to the floor, making currents in the bathtub with medicine droppers for paper boat shapes, and for science today we learned about sea creature's blubber with a little vegetable shortening on their hands and a sink full of ice water.

Alyza is learning all about the letter "A", and how God created everything... She is very enthusiastic, and the fingerplays and songs we are learning are PERFECT for her learning style and personality. Trystan is reading like a hurricane, devouring everything I give him. Isaac is enjoying himself despite his preconceptions, and really likes his biography on Amelia Earhart he selected. Overall, a great start!

We still have plenty of time for playing in the hose and eating popsicles, too, those other required summer courses! Yesterday the kids were sprayed by firemen at the library park, and went through fire obstacle courses... quite a hit!

Other than that, the house is a bit of a wreck, and we are all getting a workout killing flies! SUMMER!

Learning something new today...

Today we went to the library and signed up for the summer reading program, and checked out armloads of books, too. We picked out books on tadpoles, frogs, toads, dragonflies, and fun summer projects. Trystan picked out a stack of readers as big as his head... the librarian was very impressed with his ambition!! Isaac had a hard time selecting a book, and finally settled on Old Yeller... I read that book the summer after third grade, too.

We spent time at the park right outside the library with friends we ran into while we were there. We checked out all the baby fish in the lake, the goslings, and a critter we thought was a crawdad. Trystan fell in the water, so we had to stay until he stopped dripping! We spotted a few dragonflies, too, while the kids were all trying to catch minnows with their hands.

When we got home we were reading book after book (after cooling off!) and discovered the little critter in the shallow water we thought was a crawdad was actually a dragonfly nymph!! We learned alot and will study them more in depth in the next few weeks. So fun and exciting!!

Field Trip to the ZOO