Week 33 and 34 May 9-20th: Crafts and Beach!

 Two weeks have just flown by! We had our first veggie sale of the season this last week! We are making progress on building our huge growing tunnel we received through a government grant, and the boys have started their final writing papers of the year.

Board games continue to be a huge part of our homeschool. The boys spend a lot of free time playing them, especially the days that I work in the garden. We got one expansion for Castle Panic and they have now played through it many times, and discovered additional ways to play in the instructions and have played their way through those as well.

We have baby turkeys! Six hatched out of our 40 eggs! We think Leaf, the brown tom in the front of the picture, was too young and didn't quite do his job! Perhaps the next breeding cycle he will be more mature and know what to do; he is the sweetest tom turkey and I would love to keep him forever.

Popsicle sticks and hot glue are one of their favorite crafts. They build these elaborate weapons and shields, battle and break them, re design and rebuild, and go again, and again, and again!!

They are also designing their own board game....Michael has been writing a book of Monster for it for the last two years, and about a month ago they started making these little stand up characters for the game. They have at least 30 little guys that they painstakingly draw, color, cut out, cut out cardboard backings and stands, and glue them all together.

We finished the 4th Harry Potter!! We will watch the movie this weekend! We also immediately started the 5th book.

Both Michael and Emmet have requested to do cursive for handwriting, so we found some Minecraft cursive workbooks and they do a page most days.

Michael has been reading the How To Train You Dragon series this year. He is on book 11 of 12! He is excited to finish a whole series for the first time ever!

Last weekend we spent the whole weekend working on our growing tunnel, this weekend we got to escape the farm for a few days and are enjoying beautiful weather in Yachats! So many tide pools, drift wood, and even a dead snake!

We also read two chapters of story of the world, learned about Pluto's moons, and started our research papers. I realized that after asking them to write opinion pieces, that we have never had instruction on writing papers....it comes very naturally to me, I think the biggest fault in homeschooling is probably forgetting they dont know everything I do yet! So for our research papers, I chose Pluto's planets, found two books and one online resource, sat down next to the older two and read the books and online resource. Then I wrote in front of them my research paper, only about four sentences, showing them two ways to cite sources. Oh my goodness! Between that and a friend lending us their IEW paper writing workbook, we are off to a great start!! IEW has you read your resource, then choose one or two key words from each sentence. You take those key words and write new sentences about your topic. It simplified the whole process so well. I wrote down what Michael said each sentence should be, and he is working on copying in his own writing what I wrote while he verbalized. Whew, breaking it down to simple steps is hard!

Emmet finished his last math book so we also just got him a new one of those! Avery is still working away one lesson a week on All About Reading. We will be schooling through the summer this year, but just at our slow and steady pace as usual!

The Dillmans