summary week #29, spring #5

It was another incredible week weather-wise, with temps more like those found in June than in mid-April. We of course took advantage and spent as much time outdoors as possible!! Here's a photo of J and his buddy B walking past Zoo Boy along the lake that borders the museum property, where they played three times this week.

The kids check out a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach at their Earth Day classes. They also had their usual weekly homeschool classes, and a great private class at our favorite park about vernal pools. It was a classy sort of week!

Zoo Boy, ready to head out to the vernal pool.

We started our new Adventure Circle, Five Little Ducks, this week, and it was a big hit with the kids. I'll try to get a post up about it this coming week. We'll do it for at least 3 weeks, maybe longer depending on how things are going. Our curriculum story this week was "Tiddelick the Frog", an Aborigine folk tale about a giant ill-humored frog who drank all the world's water, and what the animals finally did to get him to release it. Seemed like a natural for Earth Day week!

J scooping up water critters in the vernal pool.

I've been reading through some of the Enki Education 1st Grade materials this week, in preparation of starting a 1st Grade block for J in a couple of weeks. I had been hoping that we could do a combined 1st grade for the boys, but recently I have been having the feeling that J is ready for "more" now, and I know in my heart that Zoo Boy is only just now really ready for the K materials, so will need a full year of K next year. So I'll try to balance working in the two grades and hopefully be able to combine them back together again during 2nd and 3rd grade. Of course, I'm sure both kids will dabble in what the other is doing as we go along anyway.

The weekend was both fun and educational. We attended a sheep and wool festival, and went to a family member's cooking-themed birthday party, where the boys got to make cookies and decorate potholders, place mats, and aprons. Fun was had by all!

Family Story Time books this week were Rooster's Off to See the World, by Eric Carle; The Tin Forest, by Helen Ward and Wayne Anderson (my very favorite story book about recycling, and using imagination and ingenuity to create beauty out of junk!); and The Princess in the Forest, by Sibylle von Olfers.