Last Week of School!

Week 34 of 34...check.

We ended our school year with minimal school each day...Bible, history, science, and art.  As interested in the exploration of America as the boys are, they were even more excited to welcome in summer break.  As much as they enjoy astronomy, they were happy to end their astronomy unit with a paper space station and close the book for a final time (for now).  We'll do a few things over the summer, but we'll do it casually and enjoy the casualness of the next few months.  

Christopher with our card stock space station.

Matthew playing "Fox and Geese", a game from the era we studied.

Their daddy is deployed for the month, so we celebrated with some friends on the last day of school.  The kids did their school work early in the morning rather than during their normal school time in the afternoon so they could really enjoy being done during our morning celebration of swimming at the beach and a sundae bar at home with friends.  

The boys asked to celebrate at Beach Berry, a local frozen yogurt joint with three different topping bars filled with every topping imaginable.  Did I mention this was a self serve place?  It's fun and we do go there sometimes, but not by myself.  Not with my little two year old swiping toppings off the counters while I try to help five kids get their bowls filled.

So we made our own.

They all loved it and we decided to save the toppings so we can do it again sometime.  It was so fun to have our friends over to celebrate with.  They also finished up their school year as early as we did and will enjoy the lazy days of summer starting in May. 

*********************************************************************************

But really, what mom with a two year old, a three year old, and three young boys can actually have a summer full of lazy days?  

I've been filling my post-kids-bedtime evening hours with getting ready for a certain young lady's 4th birthday party.  Every year I say it and I will again this year...how is she already turning four???

"Discovering a New Planet"

I forgot to add the link for the play that the kids put on for Chris, Anna, and me.  They love watching it over and over.  I was the narrator as well as the camera woman, so my voice is really loud compared to theirs and you'll have to adjust your volume throughout.

Enjoy!

Our Week: 16 (and 17 &18)

Our life.

One week at a time. (Okay, so three weeks this time.)

2012.

Week 15, 16 & 17.

This week. . .
(4.8.12 -5.5.12)

So things got a little busy here.  We had Chris' dad and step-mom visit and then shortly after, my dad and my grandma came to visit, my dad from south Florida, and my grandma from Michigan.  It was fun to have four generations in our home.

Chris went on a short TDY right before my family came and so they all three ended up flying in on the same day, and all traveling through Atlanta to boot.

And while Chris was in Virginia for this TDY, he was told that he'd be leaving for the middle east in eight days.  For a month.  He left the day after my grandma flew home to Michigan and the same day my dad drove back south.  Oh, I'm not ready for these longer ones* again.

*And yes, I realize that to other military folks, one month is not that long.  To me and my kids though, it is long enough that we will miss my husband/their daddy A LOT.

My friend Cheryl at https://www.facebook.com/CrazyMessyBeautifulPhoto took this photo last month.  It's my favorite.


These weeks in school...

It got done here, there, and where ever and whenever we could fit it in. We really want to finish up, so we kept up with it in between doing fun things with family.  My grandma enjoyed listening to our history and Bible books along with the boys so that worked well.

So, for the older boys, this was weeks 31, 32 & 33 of our school year.  In these weeks, we...

• Read about several important men and women of the Reformation era...Martin Luther, William Tyndale, Anne Askew, John Calvin, John Knox...and about the new translations of the Bible that were being written so that people could read it in their own language.
•  Read about William Shakespeare...and are still enjoying it!  We are reading a recommended book called "The Children's Shakespeare" which has eleven plays in it written in storybook fashion, each about ten pages long.  My boys bring it to me each evening to read the next one. Can you imagine children enjoying Shakespeare?  It is mostly in language we can understand (hahaha) but has some words that I have to guess the meaning and try to explain it to the kids.  We also made a cardstock model of the Globe Theater.  We cut off an extra flap or something and it didn't work out 100% correctly, but we got the picture.
• Read more about Native North Americans.  We snacked on beef jerky, sunflowers, and berries, and also used berries as ink to draw with, as the Native Americans did.  We also made arrows out of straws.
• Finished up our Latin vocab words for the year!  The boys are thrilled.  It's not their favorite.
• Learned all about Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Keiper Belt, stars, and galaxies.  Wheh!  The kids put on a play about the discovery of Uranus.  We made our own clouds (like on Neptune) while some friends were over and attempted to make a baking soda rocket.  Note: Marshmallows will not substitute for cork when using vinegar and baking soda rocket. (What?  We had to stop up the bottle opening with something!)
• Debated about whether Pluto should get to be a planet or not.  Christopher and Matthew both said yes, and wrote and assignment about why.  
• Made ice cream (when learning about how freezing cold Pluto is) using plastic bags, heavy cream, vanilla, powdered sugar, ice, and rock salt.  It was pretty yummy, but melted really fast.
• Made an astrometer for astronomy to measure the brightness of stars.  It's been cloudy every night so we haven't used it.  We also poked holes in a cardboard box in the pattern of the big dipper and shined a flashlight into the box so it lit up the dark wall.  
• Made big planet orbit posters.  With glitter glue, which makes it even more fun.  

Wow, that sounds like a ton of astronomy projects this month!  We used a few that are in our Astronomy workbook that are not in the teacher's manual because the boys just want more, more, more hands-on work with astronomy.

Some pictures of our weeks...

Making Saturns (project from the prior week)

Doing art comfortably...

Writing backwards...the way DaVinci wrote in code.

Christopher's

Matthew's

Making clouds...

(warm water in microwave, drop lit match into water, quickly cover with bag of ice)

Attempting to launch the baking soda and vinegar rocket...

(I'm guessing Leah has to go potty?)

It's a dud.

Making ice cream...

Planets orbits posters...

Christopher's not finished with his yet; he has to make it just perfect...

An astrometer is used to determine how bright a star is.  Each rectangular hole has an extra layer of plastic wrap to make it harder to see dimmer stars (or something like that).

Using straws as arrows...the Native Americans used feathers for increased accuracy, so we cut the end of the straw to act like a feather.

Berries and beef jerky...snacks and writing ink.  

*********************************************************************************

Gabe's been working pretty hard as well.  We are pretty far behind still and he still has several weeks worth of work left.  Now I wish I hadn't been so easy to skip days if we just didn't get to it.  Good thing he's actually one year ahead, right?  

Math using animal crackers?  Gabe's favorite kind of math!

This tambourine is a project from way back when Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea and they celebrated with music and dancing.  

I just found the bells recently.

Whoa.  I think I'm caught up now with our school for the past three weeks.  ONE more week!  

(Not counting Gabe's work, which only takes a half hour at the most each day.)

Our Week: 15

Our life.

One week at a time.

2012.

Week 15.

This week. . .

(4.8.12 -4.14.12)

With family in town to visit, our school work kind of just made it's way in to our days whenever it could.  We skipped math, spelling, art, english and anything else except Bible, history, and science this week.  And we would have just taken a complete break except I really want to finish our school year.  Four more weeks now!

So, this week in school...

• We finished up the book of 1 John in Bible time.
• We read more about the discoveries of the Americas in the 1400s.
• We read about the Renaissance and how if produced a new way of thinking...more people thinking for themselves, which also shifted a lot of things from God to self...humanism.  One activity scheduled that we didn't get to but I'd like to next week is painting like Michelangelo did when he painted the Sistine Chapel...laying on our backs and painting above us.  I'm pretty sure the kids will enjoy that.
• In Astronomy, we read about Saturn.  It happens to be Christopher's favorite planet but is the one that we spent the least amount of time on since we were so busy.  I think we'll do some more hands-on stuff this week along with learning about the next two planets.

So...no pictures of school but lots of pictures of "field trips".  Love that we can call them that!

Chris was able to take off three days of work so we could have more time for the fun stuff to do around here.  Wednesday we went to the Navy base in Pensacola to watch the Blue Angels practice.  I was surprised that there were probably a couple thousand people there to do the same.  The girls don't like how long the jets are, so I ended up taking them inside the nearby Naval Museum, where the guys and Grandma joined us later to have a look around.

After the museum we stopped for lunch in  Pensacola Beach and then went over to the end of the barrier island to Fort Pickens.

Here we are exploring the remains for Fort Pickens, used during the Civil War to protect the Pensacola Bay area.  The north actually controlled this fort even though it's down in the south.  We'll be learning about that era in history next year, so maybe we'll head back out there then.

And it seems like we found wild blackberries to eat everywhere we went with the grandparents!

Gotta love their imaginations...this was an airplane in their minds.

**********************************************************************************

We also rented a pontoon boat that week and cruised around the sound (the water between the mainland and the barrier island).  The boys have been wanting to do this since we moved here, but I'm glad we kept putting it off until family was here.  I'm not sure we can handle being on the boat with the kids on our own.  Grandma held Anna the whole time because she didn't like all the wind, and I spent a lot of time making sure the kids were sitting so they wouldn't go over board.  It probably didn't help that I did the emergency preparedness section of the saftey course Chris had to take before we could rent the boat.  Reading about everything that could go wrong is not the best thing for a slighty over protective momma to do! 

But it was an amazing boat ride and is definately on the to-do list when we have family visit again.

He's not actually driving the boat...it was turned off and anchored at this point.  (Just in case anyone is worried that we are being unsafe...I'm pretty sure it's against the rules for a six year old to drive the boat.) 

Same goes for this picture.

Anna decided it was better to just sleep through the whole thing.

But the boys were excited to jump overboard and swim around for a bit.

As I was sitting there toward the end of the boat ride, I thought about how great the day was...how beautiful God made everything.  And I told God how perfect it would be if he just added some dolphins to our day. 

And boy, did He deliver.  I didn't get pictures because I was trying to video tape at the time, but at least a dozen dolphins started popping up out of the water around us on our way back to the dock.  Some were almost right next to our boat and the kids were so crazy excited.  We've been driving near and over the water for eight months since we moved here and had yet to see any, much to the boys' disappointment. 

And it was a great sight for the grandparents from Arizona as well.

**************************************************************************************

We also headed over to Okaloosa Island to go to the "Big Beach" as we call it.  We understimated a Saturday during the spring and how crowded it would be.  And we didn't check the conditions since it was a beautiful day.  The flag was red, which meant the waves were big and the current was strong.  The older boys had a blast boogie boarding in the waves, Leah spent her time running away from the waves in the surf, and Anna preferred to stay up by Daddy in the sand.

It worked out well that Gabriel had a birthday party to go to at the same time.  I would not have been comfortable with letting him go into the strong current, even as close in as the boys stayed.  But the older boys were fine.  I think it was more of a yellow flag condition while we were there anyways.

*********************************************************************************

In addition to the Pensacola activites and the beaches, we also went up north to Milton to where the grandparents were staying at a RV park in their camper.  We spent an afternoon with them at the camper and swimming in a nearby river.  Chris took the boys and Leah back up there later and camped with his dad and stepmom while Anna and I stayed home. 

It was sweet to stay home with my sweet baby girl.  She was very sad when she was left behind with me, but a sucker and a bath made her feel better.  We hung out in our quiet house until bedtime and she just missed her sister so much she couldn't go to sleep.  I rocked her, which was so nice since do it so seldom lately.  She again didn't want to go into her crib so I rocked her again and after she was sleeping, I just held her for a while, taking in her sweet smell and enjoying feeling her belly breathing against mine.  I thought letting her sleep in bed with me would be a perfect ending to our evening by ourselves, but it didn't quite work out that way and I rememered why we don't have our children sleep in bed with us.  Waking up every hour with toddler feet and arms smacking me awake isn't the most relaxing night. 

They are so used to having a room mate while they sleep that I can understand why she didn't want to sleep alone.  I'm not looking forward to the next time Chris is TDY or deployed and I have to sleep by myself. 

*********************************************************************************

Have a great week!