We had a jam-packed super fun week! The boys went to forest school on Monday where they met some new teachers and played a lot of games. It sounds like they are re-structuring the program with a turn over of several teachers. Most of whom are college educated adults who have a passion for teaching earth science to children. The boys are warming up to it more and more each week and are always excited to tell me what they did when I pick them up. I think Michael wasn't meshing with some of the teachers, and we changed around our screen rules and between that and new teachers he is now flourishing and doing so much better overall.
Story of the World took us back to Japan where we learned they closed their borders to keep missionaries from coming and to keep war out of their country. We learned about Zen Buddhism and made some prayer flag paintings. We also discussed emblems that represent Buddhism and talked about what Zen means. We also made a little sand Zen garden...which I then regretted terribly as it was a memory sand type medium, which did not rake well, but clumped awesome!! The boys had a "sand-ball" fight in the living room while I was busy outside. Let's just say they had extra chores that day!
Michael is enjoying his writing prompt book. It had him working on anagrams the last two weeks. Emmet is still doing pages in his Usborne story writing book and Avery is plugging away at his Handwriting Without Tears workbook. Avery is also reading Bob Books to me. He has two almost completely memorized, which means we are about to take the next step to sight word flash cards! I am wishing I hadn't given away my copy of 100 Easy Lessons to Reading, however I bet by the end of the year he will be more ready for our All About Reading level 1. Just gotta get those letter sounds down!
The older two just passed 1000 minutes of reading!! They are on a roll!
Which brings us to the Zoo!! We had not been in over a year and the boys were really excited. We joined a few of our co-op to go on Tuesday, trying to get one more exciting thing in before the two week shut down! We got to see so many animals we usually don't get to see! The wild dogs, lions, cougar, and cheetah were all sleeping or pacing right in front of the glass. They were feeding the elephants bananas and we got to watch the red pandas playing. A pretty fun day! The boys really liked all the recycled garbage art they now have around the zoo and we had a good, but sad, discussion about littering.
Thursday we met one friend from co-op, staying within the mandate requirements, at a park and played with physics with a stomp rocket and our first time playing disc golf. The boys also spent time reading together at the park and riding bikes. Avery took a bigger bike with no training wheels and learned how to bike without them for the first time! He did awesome and was so proud!
Over the weekend we spent one day working on farm/market garden improvements, and the second day we played! We went up the mountain to find snow and hunt a Christmas tree in the state forest. We never did figure out where we could hunt a tree (every road we turned down to start looking either had zero parking (SO many people), or had houses down the road!), but we had a ton of fun sledding. Once we found the rive tho, the boys didn't want anything to do with sleds anymore and spent a long time throwing snow in the water to watch it melt, collecting icicles, and watching the water. We had only one kid fall in, ha ha.
Hope you had an awesome week and a great Thanksgiving!
Cheers,
The Dillmans
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