Cows and carpet tiles

We ended up not doing official school over spring break after all. But we did do a lot of gardening, went on a tour of the dairy farm near us, and started some ambitious home improvement projects. We went to Cagle's Dairy with my friend Maureen and her kids, Margaret and Henry. Cagle's is less than 10 minutes from our house and is where we buy all our milk. I'd taken Ari and Milo on the tour before, but not since they were 3 and 1. They're at a much better age for it now.


Milo feeds a baby cow. After the baby cows, we saw how they milk the cows and the kids got to stick their fingers into the machine to see what it felt like. And then on to the processing place where they pasteurize the milk and put it in cartons. Then we went on a hayride around the farm, and Margaret got very close to a hungry not baby cow.


Next we fed goats and finally, of course, drank some chocolate milk.


My end of the year antsiness is kicking in, so I decided we needed to end the week by completely reorganizing our entire downstairs. The old set up was that our dining room was our schoolroom and what's supposed to be the master bedroom (we sleep upstairs) was the playroom. But I had a vision of one big schoolroom/playroom (or, as we now call it, schlayroom) and then putting the computer and futon (parts of the old playroom) in the dining room. Clear? Anyway, before I could do any of this, I needed to get rid of the nasty carpet in the playroom. We were thinking of cheap laminate, but then a friend told me about these super cheap carpet tiles at a place near us. They came out to 33 cents a square foot and were very easy to install--you just sort of slap 'em down and cut them to fit around the edges. The 33 cents-edness means you can't be picky about colors, but I think it looks pretty good.


Of course, now that that's done, there is much moving of furniture and books still left. We just bought three new shelves at Ikea today and managed to get one of them put together. My house is sort of a disaster. But it's on its way to being fabulously reorganized! So that's my excuse for how non-exciting we've been with school this week--that and the end of the year blah feeling. Oh, we did get test tubes in the mail from Oriental Trading Company, and it seems that that's the most exciting thing that's happened to Ari and Milo in a very long time. We have many scary looking potions in the cabinet now.



Which brings us to last week. Let's see. We did the chapter on the Reformation in SOTW. There's an activity page doing Henry VIII's family tree, which inspired Ari do his own family tree, complete with calls to grandmothers for help remembering some names. We read about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in science...and looked up the latest information on the whole "is Pluto a planet?" raging controversy. Near as I can tell, where it stands right now is that Pluto is a "dwarf planet" along with newcomers Ceres and Eris. I am slacking on the space pocket books lately; I need to look and see what we need to make something for them this week. Ari's getting close to finishing up Singapore 2b...working on volume last week. More adding for Milo in Earlybird. Ari just finished reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing on his own a few days ago. We're reading Ramona's World at bedtime...it was published in 1999, so I didn't read it when I was a kid like most of the Ramona books. It's a lot more focused on "girl" stuff than the others, which I guess is to be expected since Ramona's getting older. Ari doesn't seem to mind so far.

And it's very late, so I'll leave it at that!

Weekly Update: March 31-April 4

This was the last week before DH's spring break. whee! We'll still do school over spring break, I
think...although come to think of it we have plans pretty much every single day, so we'll have to see how it actually shakes down.

We didn't do so well with getting around to Green Hour Challenge (although we did read about dogwoods). But we hung out outside whenever it wasn't raining, and one day the kids decided to bring their sketchbooks out and do some drawing.
First up is Ari sketching the baby dogwood in our front yard (we got it 4 years ago when we took our Christmas tree to Home Depot to be mulched; they were swapping dogwood saplings for xmas trees). I tried to take a cool picture with the tree in focus and Ari blurry in the background, but I didn't have the right lens on the camera for that to work out so well. And here he is with the finished product:








And then we have Milo and Gus drawing. Milo wasn't interested in sketching a tree or a flower or anything like that. He drew two guys in jail. One of them was hanging upside down from the ceiling because he has suction cup hands and could climb up the walls ("but only if they're smooth walls"):












More money and time for Ari and more adding for Milo in math. On Fridays I try to get my stuff together enough to plan "Friday math"--a game or something otherwise different from our ordinary routine. I found a book called Mathemagic (a volume from the old Childcraft encyclopedia) at the thrift store the other day, so this week we looked through it some. It has a bunch of stories and games and puzzles about different math concepts. We did some "toothpick teasers" on Friday. The kids are happy anytime I let them play with toothpicks, so it was a hit. Pictures of it all in the slideshow.

In First Language Lessons, we're getting into the stuff that I never learned the names for in school. Predicate nominative--who knew? Not me, despite my graduate degree in English.

In science, we learned about Saturn and Jupiter (did you know that if you put Saturn in a giant swimming pool, it would float?) and then made these rocket books:

They're supposed to have stories in them, but Ari never wrote his. I assumed he was going to be super into it, so I printed a whole bunch of copies of the lined paper that goes inside for him. But no. Milo narrated a story to me, though: "I went to Io. Gus came with me, and it was his birthday. I saw Jupiter (because Io is one of Jupiter's moons)." It's a bit hard to tell, but most of the stuff on the front of his book is birthday-themed (a cake, a party hat, a balloon, etc.).

Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas in Story of the World. Listening to the CDs in the car is working pretty well. Gus was even asking me to put them on the other day. The "Mayan math" from the Activity Guide was Ari's favorite, as I expected. You know, the Mathemagic book says that zero was probably first used in India, contrary to SOTW's claim that it was the Maya. Quick googling says Mathemagic gets it wrong.

Finally, Ari and Milo have been playing a lot of chess lately. Because Milo is 4, he is neither as good at nor as patient with chess as Ari is. He'll usually play for awhile and then get tired and wander off, which makes Ari really, really angry--no matter how much you warn him beforehand that it's probably going to happen that way. But it makes a lovely vision of brotherly love before the part where Milo stops playing and Ari unleashes his fury: