week #3, block #1 summary

Wow, but this seemed like a long week. Our rhythms seemed a little out of whack, due to this, that, and seemingly everything else. We had a bunch of rain and not much nice weather for morning walks, and butterflies hatching, and a couple of late nights (which translated into late starts to our mornings), which found us only doing our Harvest Adventure Circle a couple of times. (One day because we were practicing the Community Circle I was leading at our homeschooling classes.) The good news is that the kids are still enthusiastic about the circle, so we'll for sure get one more week out of it.

This first photo shows the kids playing with cuisenairre rods during their practice time this past week. We'll be working more with the rods as time goes by, but we let the kids just get familiar with them this week. They also did their usual reading -- J finishing up Frog and Toad All Year, by Arnold Lobel, and Zoo Boy reading Duck in the Truck by Jez Alborough for most of the week, until he insisted on us purchasing "Hop on Pop" by Dr. Suess at a museum gift shop, after which he read that instead. And we got rolling with our handwriting practice, which I still owe you all a post about (coming! soon! just too much else to post about this past week).

Monday was the first day of the fall semester of our Homeschool Classes. This semester I am leading a community circle and teaching a preschool level class about animals. Being the first Monday, I didn't know how many families to expect for circle, and was overwhelmed when there was about 100 kids. Out of necessity we held the circle outdoors. Not all of the kids wanted to participate, and this caused a great big distraction for those that did, and by the end of circle (which I cut approximately in half, as it just wasn't working), I had about 5 adults and 8 kids who had stuck through the whole thing and seemed somewhat interested. I thanked them and promised them a less chaotic circle next week (we decided to keep the circle folks indoors from now on, that way the screaming mass of playing children wouldn't be such an attractive distraction). Afterwards Zoo Boy told me that he really liked the circle, so it couldn't have been that bad (especially since he really is not a formal circle fan).

Next came Folk Dancing -- Zoo Boy opted out in favor of running around with the dozens of other boys, so J and I learned a fun dance together. Then he went off to soccer, while I corralled Zoo Boy to come indoors with me for the preschool class. The preschool class was cute, my theme was Opossums, and I'd arranged for the kids to meet the museum's resident Opossum as well as the other activities I'd planned. We made the cute (if I do say so myself, given that it's my design) hanging 'possum craft pictured above, we did some movements to an original Opossum poem (what can I say, I was feeling creative), and we read the book Possum's Harvest Moon, by Anne Hunter. Everyone seemed to enjoy the class. Afterwards the kids played with the other kids for awhile, then we called it a LONG day.

For curriculum stories this week, we worked with "Rapunzel" and "The Little White Dove". Almost the entire day on Tuesday was consumed by our butterfly debacle. Instead of painting, we had some playdoh play (I needed a little time to do some of my own work, so an unsupervised art activity was in order). And our science story for the week was "Busy Wings", as we wrapped up our study of Monarch Butterflies' life cycle and migration.


On Friday we joined our friends Kyra and Fluffy at the Springfield Science Museum, where we hung out for the entire afternoon, checking out the special dinosaur egg exhibit, participating in plenty of space talk, and exploring the museum at large. It was a perfect place to hang out on a torrentially rainy afternoon. Likewise for the Dinosaur State Park museum the next day, where our family adventure for the week took us. It was pretty much all about the fossils this weekend.


We also stopped at Cabela's huge store in East Hartford, CT. The kids were wowed by all the taxidermy (here shown in the Africa section). We checked out canoes (yikes, there's an item that inflation has not been kind to!) and other water transport options (we saw a really cute pedal-power boat that piqued our interest).

For Family Story Time this week, we read Little Beaver and the Echo, by Amy MacDonald and Sarah Fox-Davies; In the Woods: Who's Been Here?, by Lindsay Barrett George; and Home at Last, A Song of Migration, by April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Alix Berenzy. And we started reading Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater, which is absolutely ADORABLE, and very timely indeed, given that the first sentence of the first chapter starts "It was late September". Talk about your happy coincidence! The kids are as enthusiastic about this book as they were with their beloved The Trumpet of the Swan.

One more week left in our first Language Arts block -- I'm already busy mapping out the details of our first Math block!