spring vacation

I am playing a bit of catch-up at this point, so be sure to look behind this post for two others I just posted this evening!


Our precariously teetering use of curriculum materials last week came to a grinding halt this week, and by Tuesday night I realized that I would do best just to call this a vacation week and start anew next week. It was the only logical choice to be made, given the way the week was turning out.

In the meantime, there's just no stopping the learning from happening! Here the kids (center top of photo) are participating in creating animal habitats in their Museum Explorers class on Monday.

And here are the habitats they created! Zoo Boy's is on the bottom left, J's is on the bottom right. They used a combination of animal stamps and paints to create a habitat for the animals they chose. My favorite part about J's creation is the hand print (hard to see, but it's in the upper left corner of his painting). He was sitting there contemplating his page and what he already had on it, when he reached out and used his hand like a stamp to add himself to the habitat. Pretty cool stroke of creativity!

Zoo Boy had double creativity-duty that day, making this bunny bag in his Monday Munchkins class.

Tuesday we had to cut our usual rhythms short due to my having a dental appointment. My dentist is in the town I grew up in, so I dropped the kids with my parents and headed off for my cleaning. Unfortunately, they found a problem that had to be dealt with ASAP, so we wound up having an impromptu pajama party at my parent's house (didn't make sense to drive all the way home that evening just to turn around and drive all the way back up there the next morning), and didn't get home until mid-afternoon on Wednesday. Talk about a way to kill a week's plans! By then I had long since abandoned any attempt at curriculum, which served us well come Thursday, as I had a lunch meeting with a friend (at a McDonalds with a playland so that the kids could play while we visited), which would have messed up any attempt at "school" that day anyway.

On Friday, we headed out to the children's museum for Zoo Boy's uber-cute class called Spoonfuls of Sugar, then caught up with some homeschooling pals at yet another McDonald's playland, after which we drifted over to a bookstore for some fun and reading.


Winding up our week, J and I had a date with those same homeschooling friends at the Springfield Museums, where we took in a planetarium show (here's J in front of the star ball in the planetarium) and checked out a really cool art museum.

Family Story Time went on as usual, and we read Floss, by Kim Lewis; Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic, by Steven Schnur, illustrated by Leslie Evans; and The Story of the Root Children, by Sibylle von Olfers (a very appropriate follow-up to last week's selection, Mother Earth and Her Children).

Next week: One more week of Raven and River Adventure Circle (which I promise I will FINALLY blog about!). I'm already putting the finishing touches on our next adventure circle, which will be Five Little Ducks.