April 28-30

After a wonderful birthday for our very own Trinity it was time to return to the regular school week… around the carnage that is new presents without a home in our livingroom/homeschool area of course! Sadly Echo’s prolonged nap the day before heralded her curling up to sleep in Baba’s chair for portions of the day… thankfully the cold seems to be relatively mild!

It was an exciting day for our officially 6 yr old… she started her GRADE ONE MATH BOOK! (seriously she said that in full capital letters I swear!).

She also wanted to share one of her two birthday shirts… this is her favourite she says!

The Goldie Bloxs are a great hit with the kids. This was a kickstarter I wanted to try ages ago. A whole series of engineering toys geared at girls!!!

We had more Treasure Island to read…

More stories to enjoy and interesting facts to find and share.

On Tuesday the twins worked on simple animal reports. I am hoping we will find time to do more of these over the summer. I am working on getting the boys to read through things on their own and try and pick out the points of interest themselves… we are still getting rather mixed results.

Miss  Trinity agreed to model the illustration we did for our Texas  themed book. Learning about where Gammie is and where Aunty Holly and Cousin Jimmie came from has been something the kids have been dying to do!

Another chapter filled with pirates…

Wednesday was swimming lessons… but first Emanuel and I had to work on his dinosaur dome growing kit. We took it VERY seriously and drew up our blueprint for planting first before getting our hands dirty in the soil. I am really hoping it grows nicely but just the experience of planning it all out was so much fun! Maybe we will design some imaginary parks together!!

Now back to swimming lessons… this time we took the whole family. The girls, Ken and myself were the boys’ cheering squad and wow did we have a lot to cheer about. The boys are all really progressing.

After swimming lessons we had a special visit over at Aunty Judy and Uncle Jim’s to visit with them and Robbie for a while. Any chance to see the critters and spend time with family right? Added bonus, they had left over scout car supplies since due to other kids not being able to make it Emanuel’s 4th place winner made it into the top 3 to go onto the next level of races!! Score!

And thus ends April! Wow! Onto May and hopefully (soon) catching the blog up in time for summer!! Maybe?

April 22-25

Once we finished our day out with zoo fun and egg hunting it was right back into the school fray. England was our topic over multiple days thanks to a combination of Little Passports, Activity Village print outs (on right) and library books.

Of course we are hard at work reading Treasure Island. Though the twins have suggested at times that MAYBE with all the deaths and mean pirates that this classic is not really kid friendly. Oh the world they have yet to experience!

We are, of course, keeping up with our reading.

But on advice of the always amazing Brave Writer and other inspirational homeschooling blogs, we have started to take advantage of the sunny days. So in the afternoon we dropped everything to enjoy sunshine and fresh air.

To celebrate all that spring and sunshine the kids had their last Pizza Hut reading program pizza for the year! We are already registered for the following year and are eagerly awaiting the summer program (though that one is online only with website rewards instead of pizza). We accomplished a lot of reading and together time over some really good books this year!

Our next big countdown is a short one… Trinity turns SIX on the 26th with her birthday party on the 27th! So we kept ourselves busy for the rest of the week cleaning and thinking happy nice day thoughts. After all the 26th is a bridal shower and the bachelor party for Gavin’s godfather Cory and his fiance Karen. Of course all of the adults were invited to these events so there was some kid juggling as we tried to work out ways to have the girls at the morning event and the guys at the afternoon… but that is skipping over a whole bunch of school and family fun!! So back to our week…

Tuesday had us watching Wild Kratts…

Bison

Reading about pirates…

And the girls hard at work on Echo’s ladybug mask thanks to her Easter stash from Gammie.

Middle of the week has our soon to be 6 year old completing her adding and subtracting book! I decided that since I already had a copy of our beloved Canadian math series for grade one that it was time for her to hop right into it! She is so pleased that she is on the same book as Emanuel… Emanuel… not so much!

We did spend some lovely quiet time with our Dirty Jobs episodes…

More Treasure Island… really the portions that stand out to them in a chapter are varied and interesting! Actually, we continued the trend with ANOTHER chapter the next day… I think we are ready for individual book reports in the summer!! At least by the twins! Exciting!!

And the decent weather is holding!!! And with that, our week is over and one of our busier weekends begun! Wish us luck!

April 7-9

Sometimes it is fun to curl up under a blanket and watch shows together.

Especially when we have a Wild Kratts to enjoy. That third season is finally out. New animals!!!

Kangaroos!

We had a fun spring/Easter themed book to read and draw a picture from.

And Miss Echo took a dress up break. She is definitely our princess of the day.

The kids did a venn diagram comparing what we know about Jesus and the Easter Bunny to see what sort of celebrations and such corresponded… things like bright colours and family together time of course.

Emanuel and Daddy snuck out to get spiffy… brand new haircuts! Though the lady did go shorter than we usually like with our curly haired boy.

That left the twins to follow suit with showing off their buzz cuts thanks to Daddy!

That evening we sat down and built our next science kit… a solar car. Sadly the next day when we tried it out it was not very willing to drive. Ken figures some tweaking is required. So I brought out the tiny solar grasshopper we got last year on a steal.

On Tuesday we gave a new method of egg dying a spin… Volcano eggs. You mix the dye (liquid) with baking soda using a bit of water, spread it on the eggs like paint and then add vinegar and watch the fizz. We used our plastic eggs that we picked up at Walmart though the results were not brilliant. I need to check into different dyes and the like for next year. The fizzing did please all! Who doesn’t love a good volcano activity?? We found our original instructions on Toddler Approved HERE.

Emanuel has started earning arrow points for Scouts. One of the ones they are doing with the den is a puzzle. They each have a part of it to assemble on their own and bring in a couple weeks to the meeting! Exciting!

We had a lovely sunny day to enjoy and a trip to Sam’s to take so photos first in the sunshine and then off we went.

Of course after that we had to enjoy just a little more sunshine in the backyard… it is a bit of a mucky mess but we managed.

We have been talking about the religious roots of Easter lately. The kids are starting to grasp the full life of Jesus now and it is interesting to see and hear how that impacts what they figure THEY should do – be kind, share His story, share…

We had planned to do family photos but with the snow still apparent I settled for some cute ones with the girls.

Echo then played in the sun room while the kids took their recess and played out in the backyard. It truly is starting to look like spring… so far.

Emanuel had his big wheel out…

The grass in our dish is starting to grow…

And we even found time for another chapter of Treasure Island…

An Easter themed storytime…

And a Wild Kratts!

Hermit Crabs!

Spring is here at least for the moment and we are trying to face every moment with a smile and our best intentions. New life, new start, new us!

Even a touch of green outside!