Our last week of January brought with it some super fun days! It snowed, we explored a fun river, and did lots of cooking!
Avery has been getting into cooking like his older brothers, and has scrambled eggs down now!
Emmet made scrambled eggs with a kale salad, celery leaf garnish, and ranch dressing on the side. Can you tell we have been watching a lot of Master Chef Jr? The boys have been working on menu ideas and plating skills!
It was a glorious week of triumph for the boys: they got permission to use the Nintendo Switch again! Keeping video games to only one day a week and only one hour each, it has gone fairly well introducing it back into our lives. Michael has so many plans for his Minecraft world that he wrote an entire page of to-do's the other day! Last week our babysitter encouraged him to design something he wanted to build and he created a draft of plans for a potato cannon. She asked him to write a list of materials and steps to build it, which he balked at at first, however she is really good at giving kids space they need to accomplish what feels hard at first. It gave him courage, I think, to attempt spelling on his own and write more than a sentence at a time. I was blown away, and again reminded how letting them learn through their own interests is really the fastest, easiest, and most productive way to homeschool!
One day of co-op we went north to Battleground and explored Louisville Park. They had a beautiful, deep river to throw rocks in (wade into too far if you are like Emmet and cannot pass up the opportunity to swim no matter the weather), grass fields to run around on, and even the playground was open so we took a turn playing. Most of the kids in our group hadn't played at a playground since last winter, so it was a pretty special day. We found a deceased fish the kids looked at and one friend found a fish egg in a small pool of water!
It snowed!! We had two full days of snow at our house. We sled, built snowmen and a pretty cool snow fort, which is still standing slightly. Emmet, who is never cold, enjoyed the snow shirtless! He was happy until we started a snowball fight, brrrr!
We joined the Kids Moon Club at the end of December. They have a fun story and activities based on each full moon of the month. January was the Wolf Moon. We read books about wolves, made pawprint wolf cookies, and set up an area of our dining room as our moon corner with moon cycle charts.
Our second day of co-op we discussed how animals stay warm in the winter. We focused on adaptation and how many animals grow thicker fur, eat to gain blubber or fat, or use natural materials to pad their nests. We used plastic bags in bowls of ice and placed different substances in the bag to see what insulated against the cold best. We had wool, fleece, cotton, and crisco. The kids really liked the hands on project and feeling all the different textures. It was SO cold in reality that day, that we skipped the lunch and book reading together and came home! That afternoon was when it started snowing!
We did little math this week except a few board games, and our science was the project with co-op. Michael and Emmet read almost every day and Avery completed the first 8 lessons in 100 Easy Lessons to Reading! Our chapter for Story of the World was on the Ottomans and Ahmet the 3rd, the Tulip King, and how the Turks also tried to copy the West like Russia, however they kept their people from copying the West's ways too much, like the diplomatic government that was forming. It was a short chapter and we never got to the two projects I had planned to compliment it.
Hope you enjoyed the snow if any fell in your area!
The Dillman's
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