More Education...

I mentioned before that Chris takes the boys to the Lowe's Build and Grow workshops every other Saturday.  It's a great time for daddy-son bonding and the boys are always excited about what they get to build.  They also get patches for each workshop to sew on their Lowe's aprons.  Gabriel is usually the only one who cares about the patches and asks me to sew his on his apron each time they come home.  But recently they completed a three series workshop making a train and two train cars and each came with three different patches that fit together to make a patch train.  Anyways, Christopher wanted his sewn together, so I thought it was a great time to teach him to sew.

I'm not a great sewer and I've messed up when sewing Chris' rank on his uniforms so many times that he'd rather pay someone to do it rather than let me even try anymore.  I have a sewing machine that I did okay with, even making those mini crayon rolls once for birthday party favors, but there's something wrong with it now and I have no idea where to even begin tyring to figure out how to fix it.  So I sew the patches on the kids' Awana uniforms and Gabe's Lowe's apron by hand.  Chris does it sometimes too so I figured it was time to let Christopher try it.  He did fine, and now it's one of those things that he'll know how to do well enough to survive. 

I should write that on a list somewhere so I can check it off. 

Back to our Rome to the Reformation school work...

We learned all about Rome this school year, the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the Muslim conquests, and the Crusades.  Toward the latter part of all that, we learned about the feudal system, which is where castles and knights and swords come in.  It was very popular subject with my boy.

We put together a card stock castle and the boys gathered their Lego guys to have battles with it.

I love how much my boys take after my husband...this tongue-out-while-concentrating thing is from him.

We took a trip to Disney World right after this (and I took hundreds of pictures of course) and while we were there the boys and I went to the Medieval Times Dinner Show with my dad and his girl friend to see "real" knights in action.  It was really fun and we had to eat dinner with our hands and drink soup out of the bowls real authentic-like. 

Gabe wore our knight costume there...so cute!

Our pickiest eater would only eat the bread dessert.

When we got home the kids were all in to mock fighting with swords and they made these coats-of-armor (shields) for a school project. 

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Our homeschool group organized a Valentine's Day party that we went to and consumed mass amounts of sugar.  It's nice to get together to do the fun parts of public school that our kids miss out on at home. 

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We finished up our study of anatomy and physiology a few weeks ago and said goodbye to our skeleton the boys named Bob Bones.

We spent a lot of time with him and learned all about his innards.  It was a fun study and the boys got really into it.  I think this is our favorite year of science.

Especially since now we have started our Astronomy semester.  We just started our third week and the kids are really into the reading (using Apologia Astronomy) as well as the experiments.  I've been pretty good at taking pictures of that, so I'll be able to update that regularly hopefully.  We've also just started learning about the ancient far east...China, Japan, etc. 

I'll really try to remember to be more regular with blogging for these last 11 weeks of our school year!