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: