Have you ever seen the rain, comin' down on a sunny day...

In Oregon, we have four seasons, just like anywhere else, and the go as follows: January-February cold with rain, March-April-May-June mild with rain, July-August "hot" with some rain, September beautiful summer, October-November-December more rain.

All joking aside, it is a gorgeous time right now, all the leaves changing and the rainy drizzle days make snuggling by the fire and reading so appealing. We are working our way through middle ages Eastern countries and had a really good selection of books from the library about Chinese culture this week.

In addition to reading about topics such as Chinese New Year, culture, foods, and the construction of the Grand Canal, we also cooked a traditional Malaysian ox tail soup called Sup Kapor. Then we visited an Asian food market! The boys and I had so much fun exploring all the different foods. It had been a while since I had been to one, so we stocked up on some of our favorites: rice noodles, buckwheat noodles, oolong tea, daikon raddish (for our soup), rice crackers and more! We also found a few new things to try like Ramune soda and cute headgehog shaped red bean paste buns.

While we drank tea and practiced math this week I caught some cute photo moments of the oldest teaching the youngest his math. It was a very sweet moment of our week. The older two did pages in their Usborne books and Avery has a dry erase book. They also worked on their Handwriting Without Tears work books.

The boys started practicing piano this week again after I revised our current curriculum schedule. We had set two days a week aside for nature journaling, nature science, and art with our co-op, but everyone is taking a break for the time being. Instead we went for a hike through our back yard, which we are fortunate to live on a mostly wooded 20 acre piece of land, so pleanty of trees to fullfill our nature studies topic this week: Autumn Trees! We collected evidence from two trees, a maple and a fir, and placed them in glass jars, then filled the jars with water. It really magnafied what was inside and made for a fun project. Later in the week we wrote our findings in our nature journals to show how to identify those types of trees.

All About Reading and All About Spelling have been enjoyed by all again this year. Avery is really enjoying Ziggy the Zebra, a puppet that was an ad on part of the pre reading set. It has made our lessons so fun and full of giggles! This week we learned the letter H and will cover the letter I tomorrow. The older two read from their reader book this week practicing what we learned about the letter Y last week. Tomorrow they do their spelling lesson 4.

In conjunction with our Asia studies, we worked with diffusing paper to create water color scrolls and paper lanterns. We are waiting for the papers to dry and tomorrow will add the finishing touches.

Trying to read 50 different books in one year is going to be a challenge. Not necessarily the read the book part, but trying to record a book each time a boy reads one to me, and encouraging them to pick age appropriate books. Emmet constantly brings home pre-teen type, 50 page fantasy novels saying he will read them to me. It is cute to see he is wanting to read like that, but we need more practice first. Of course I have heard many a mother say reading just clicked one day and they took off, so I still hold out hope that might be true. ;) Michael is not as motivated, and always is frustrated when he cant read a word. It is amazing to me how he can be told what a word says, then remember it forever, whereas Emmet phonetically can sound out almost any word he encounters. It makes teaching them together interesting.

We decided to download a learn Spanish CD, Paul Noble is the narrator and we all took to it right away. We covered lesson one this week to begin, and I hope to cover two lessons a week while driving to activities. Our last subject of the week is Technology and we fulfilled that by doing the 3rd and 4th lesson for Lego WeDo 2.0. It had the boys make a robot that moved in circles and then made a sound with the motion sensor.

Despite how much I enjoy the sunshine, I am pretty happy that the weather has me singing Credence Clearwater, wearing slippers, and sipping warm tea all day long. If nothing else, the beauty of all the maples around us changing colors is most enjoyable.

Cheers to a good weekend for all!

The Dillmans