First Half of April

We are halfway through April and we have been SO busy, as usual!

Here are the kids at their gym class:

The day before Easter we went to a town Easter egg hunt. It was COLD! They had fun collecting eggs though.

 On Easter we had our own Easter egg hunt at home.

 Unfortunately the kids weren't feeling too well. This is what our Easter looked like:

After a nap Caitlin seemed a little better. I downloaded a math app for Caitlin called Medieval Math Battle. She loves it!

 Jayden is still really into Legos. This is one of his creations from April.

I had a school project to do and I had to visit an art museum. I took the kids with me and, surprisingly, we all had a great time!

 

After our art trip the kids did some painting of their own. 

A homeschooling friend recommended a math program called Beast Academy. This math curriculum has a textbook that is set up comic book style. It teaches concepts in a cute and funny way, while still doing a thorough job explaining each topic logically. The workbooks are full of puzzles, mazes, and other challenges to get kids to think outside the box. So far Jayden LOVES it. He actually asked to do EXTRA math work!

  The kids also earned new stripes on their karate belts!

The weather is FINALLY starting to warm up! We spent an afternoon at the park, enjoying the first day outside without coats in what felt like 8,000 days!

We stopped at Home Depot for something and found a bunch of starter plants on sale. We plan on having our own little garden this summer so we grabbed some and temporarily have them on our window sill.

And finally, Jayden started floor hockey! I love watching him step out of his comfort zone to try new things! <3

March

In science we are learning about the surface of the earth.

This unit starts off showing how much water covers the surface of the earth by playing a game.

First they hypothesized how many times their finger would land on water and how many times it would land on land. They took turns spinning and throwing an inflatable globe. Then we recorded where their right index finger landed (land or water).

After twenty throws we recorded our findings. Their results were 7 times land, 13 times water, which translates to about 35% land, 65% water.

 

Then we read that land makes up 1/4 of the Earth's surface, meaning land really takes up about 25% of the Earth's surface and water takes up about 75%. 

For book club this month we read Follow My Leader, by James Garfield. It's about a boy who becomes blind after a friend accidentally throws a firecracker towards him. Jimmy has to learn how to do everything all over again, from getting dressed to learning to read braille (which we briefly learned about). He also gets a guide dog named Leader, who ends up giving him the confidence he needs realize he can still see, just not with his eyes.

During one of our teatime Tuesday reading sessions, Caitlin decided to see if she could walk across the living room with her eyes closed and her hands out, the way Jimmy did when he first learned how to walk around after losing his eyesight. She fell and hit her head!

We recently found out that one of our favorite gym classes is still in session. J & C participated in a few classes a couple of years ago but we stopped going. And now it is part of our rotation again. They played a few games including dodgeball and capture the bowling pin. Jayden got to be team captain because it was his birth week. 

Jayden is also part of a writing class. In the month of March he worked on comma placement and essays. 

For the second class he worked on apostrophes in relation to possessives and contractions. They also touched on the differences between homonyms, homophones, homographs, and heteronyms. Finally, the studied the format of a business/formal letter by reading an example and writing a reply to it using the same format.

Both kids also took a nature writing class (Juan took them so I have no pictures!). According to them they read a book called "The Curious Garden" by Peter Brown.  They made nature journals, talked about life from the perspective of animals and trees, and went outside to observe the birds and look for signs of spring. The kids also learned about the famous botanist Linnaeus. They sketched their own plant, named it, and described it.

I don't take many pictures of math or LA because it's pretty dry stuff, but both kids have completed the first half of their textbooks.

Jayden's math

Since Caitlin is technically a kindergartner I didn't think she would want to work as hard as her brother does at school, so I never ordered the second textbook required for her curriculum. But she is really doing amazingly well, trekking right along with no signs of wanting to slow down. So for the month of March we worked on reviewing concepts while we waited for our new book to arrive.

For history we finished our Ancient Greece History Pockets. For some reason, this is the only picture I have.

And finally we joined our friends in a fun filled afternoon at a skate park with other homeschooled kids. They were filthy and exhausted by the end, a sure sign of fun times!

Miscellaneous pictures for March include:

Sensei Dean gives the kids a board to break on their birthday at karate class. Here is Jayden breaking a board.

 We went to a friend's birthday party. We played dodgeball, capture the flag, and lasertag!

 Here they are playing with little creations they made from legos, along with minecraft figures.

And now I'm all caught up!