Tuesday, the highlight of the whole day was the discovery of the new "suction-cup lizard". He's easy to use ... just peel his face back and stick him to any smooth, flat surface.

Then enjoy the noises he makes when you pop him off again!

Your little brothers will  not only laugh, they'll think you're about the best thing ever.

Not only that, but it's far more entertaining than something boring like math or writing!

Nap transitions, camera woes, and excuses

That time between when a boy needs a nap every day and when he doesn't need one at all can be so hard ... lots of crankiness and tears, and it can be so hard to stay awake when you sit down in the evening to watch a little TV!

Note Benny's mismatched socks. 

 We were going to have a picture of Alex writing his list of subjects to complete on the white board (like I do Ethan's). He was sitting on top of his desk, shirtless, and had "REED" written down. I grabbed my camera ... and the battery was dead. I sent Ethan for his camera (our old one) ... and its battery was dead. Add to that an SD card that just wouldn't read any more because it was so old, and we're left with the one picture I snapped tonight. (And a recharged battery and a new SD card, both too late for the cute pictures this week!)

So I haven't gotten several week-in-review posts up, any of our vacation pictures, or anything else posted. We have been busy, but there's also been some post-vacation funk going on. Fighting colds, fighting children, and unmotivated mamas add up to just the essentials getting done. That does include school, but no pictures of this week and I'm too lazy to look back over our records and list all that we've done. I have high hopes for next week, though!

Week in Review, September 4-7

I managed to take absolutely no pictures this week. Zero. Not even the ones of Alex and Ben listening to frog books with their stuffed or rubber frogs. So I'm just going to hit a few highlights of the week, and hopefully we'll manage a more thorough review next week.

Ethan completed his regularly scheduled work for the three r's. He made a Venn diagram comparing marshes and ponds as part of his geography assignments, categorized characteristics of angiosperms and gymnosperms in science, and read all of the frog books I got for Alex's theme this week. He also finished Heart of a Samurai and was thrilled to get Swallowdale from the library.

Alex actually enjoyed one or two of his workbook pages and suffered through the rest. He explored the math concepts of patterning, measuring, and counting, wrote me lots of notes, teleported and time-traveled with his own Trio creations, and learned about frogs and toads for science. The highlight of that theme was probably the frog egg ice pops he made with me. At the end of the week, he sat down to tell me about what he remembered about frogs. This is unprompted his narration:

They can jump. 

They have smooth skin.

Some have round fingers. They are tree frogs.

Some have webbed feet.

Some have claws for digging.

Toads have bumpy skin.

They're tadpoles when they're babies.

Baby frogs have legs and a tail and are called froglets. 

Frogs have slime.

At this point, I asked him if he remembered why frogs have slime. He thought for a moment, then said, "Because they're mostly for boys?" 

Ben tried to get Alex to run away from me so he could play pirates, listened in on most of our frog books, built lincoln log houses, teleported and time-traveled with Alex, and declined to wear a shirt most days.

They all started back at AWANA with our church, loved spending the weekend with their cousins, and had a blast at the Central Wisconsin Children's Museum with some friends.

Cousins

Shucking corn with Grandma, swimming, or just playing ... cousins are great! (And we wish we were able to see ALL of our cousins more often!)

Week in review, August 27-31

We had another great week of school! I tweaked our schedule a bit this last weekend, and it helped Alex and Ben's day move along a little more smoothly. Ethan continued with his AWESOME attitude, even {imagine me falling over right here} doing schoolwork in the evenings just because he wanted to!

Not that the week was perfect or entirely conflict-free ... you can probably imagine how well the day went that started out like this:

Jumping games aside, Ethan:

*completed five lessons in CLE 500, moving him into the second Light Unit. (We started this earlier this summer, so he's a little bit ahead of where he would be otherwise.)
*completed six lessons in Winning with Writing
*completed three lessons in Growing with Grammar (and likes only having grammar scheduled three times a week!)
*completed three lessons in The World of Plants - among other things, he gave a short presentation on why plants are important in industry, dug up grass to inspect the roots, and constructed a model plant cell (no pictures of any of that because I tend to forget to take them.)
*continued work on Geography through Literature. This week he studied ponds and sawmills, did more mapping, completed vocabulary work from Paddle to the Sea, and more.
*continued with Wordly Wise vocabulary
*blew through three more spelling lists with Sequential Spelling
*studied Georgia and New Jersey in his state study

*read lots of books. I forgot to mention this last week, but we're not doing a formal reading or literature program, he's just reading a lot and talking to us about it. This week his favorites that he finished were Swallows and Amazons and Rakkety Tam. He was thrilled to find out that Swallows and Amazons was the first in a series, declaring it "one of the best books I've ever read." Rakkety Tam is another book in the Redwall series, a long-standing favorite of his.

Alex:

*worked on fun thinking skills games with Mom - his favorite this week was Trucky.
*studied the water cycle. We read lots of books and also did several fun activities and experiments, including making a water cycle bracelet with glow-in-the-dark beads, making it rain, seeing water vapor on a mirror, and watching food coloring move through shaving cream to simulate rain coming through a cloud.

For some reason, this is the only picture I got of Alex other than the jumping ones.

As you can see, that last experiment was mostly a fun way to make a mess. I saw it here, and if you click through to the link you can see that they made lovely prints with the colored shaving cream with they were done. My boys? Made - and I quote - "swamp water". Alex narrated the entire water cycle to me at the end of the week, though, so it would seem he did learn something!
*played more math games
*once again turned his nose up at anything that came in workbook form.

Ben:

 
*made faces
*played with little cars
*colored a couple of pictures
*stuck popsicle sticks in slots in a box
*saved the world several times (I know this because he went around yelling, "Don't worry! I'll save you!")
*wore his shoes on the wrong feet on purpose

Together, they

*completed five more lessons in The Bible Study Guide for All Ages. They seem to be enjoying this, and I'm a little surprised at the amount of detail Alex (and even Ben) are recalling.
*played some strange game where they couldn't step on the floor of the school room (during school), so they had to hop around from crate to pillow to chair to crate and back again
*didn't wear shirts and showed me their muscles

What a name ...

"Ethan," I asked, "did you read this special feature on Carl Linnaeus? It says he's considered the Father of Taxonomy."

"Yes, I did," Ethan answered. "It was pretty interesting. I don't think, though," he mused very seriously, "that I would name my child Taxonomy."

Mom falls on the floor laughing, and Ethan looks very pleased at how well his joke was received.

Week in review, August 20-24

We've completed our first week of school! While I'll spend some time this weekend tweaking our schedule and possibly rearranging the schoolroom to separate Alex and Ben's desks, it's been a very successful week overall.

Ethan 
*completed five lessons in CLE math 

 
*completed four spelling lists from Sequential Spelling
*did lessons 1.1 - 1.3 in Growing with Grammar and decided he really likes having a workbook for grammar
*completed five lessons in Winning with Writing
* finished the first three lessons in The World of Animals, his first trimester science book
*completed the notebooking pages for the first two states in his state study
*finished Unit One of Paddle to the Sea in Beautiful Feet Books' Geography through Literature- he's really loving this course so far, and was disappointed that it wasn't scheduled for every day!

*completed his first "shop class" project with Dad - a side table to use while they are hunting together

 

Ethan's attitude was outstanding this week! He has shown a huge leap in his desire and ability to work independently, take on multi-step assignments with a cheerful, can-do attitude, and buckle down and do his work even if it's not something he enjoys much. I am so proud of him!

Alex

*worked on phonics with Mom and a whiteboard (we're loosely using AlphaPhonics)

*practiced phonics with Happy Phonics

*did bits and pieces of some handwriting and number writing

*enjoyed various thinking skills games with Mom

*turned his nose up at Rod and Staff's kindergarten workbooks, but did some anyway

*LOVED his Five-in-a-Row selection, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel 

A brand new sensory bin!

Drawing trees like Virginia Lee Burton's in the book

Seeing how steam can make things move

A Mike Mulligan cake (the Teddy Grahams are all the people who were watching)

 Together they did four lessons in The Bible Study for All Ages. We like that so far, but it needs some tweaking in how we actually work it ... pondering that this weekend.

Benny

* played, interrupted, rode his horse, shot bad guys, and generally was three. 

First Day of School, 2012

Today was our first day of school for the year! This year, for the first time, we officially have two students. Ethan is in 5th grade (and boy, does that seem impossible!) and Alex is in kindergarten. I not only remembered to make signs for them, remembered to actually take the pictures, and blogged about it, all on the same day! You may take that as proof that miracles still happen. You will notice, though, that my writing didn't show up very well on their little signs, so I've added captions to the photos.

Ethan, 10yo, 5th grade, 2012

Alex, 5yo, kindergarten, 2012

Ben, 3yo, play school, 2012

Our first day went pretty well. Hopefully that's an indication of how well our year is going to go!

Ooblek revisited

We made a summer bucket list at the beginning of the summer. The first thing the boys wanted to do was make more ooblek. 

Benny played with his so long his hands were smurf-like blue when he was done!

Ethan opted not to color his, but Alex and Ben both added food coloring to theirs.

They left this terrific mess and went outside to play. It took me a loooong time to clean up, mostly because I kept getting distracted and playing with it myself. It really is a fascinating substance!

 Alex is five! (Okay, he has been for over a month ... his mother may be a wee bit behind in her blogging.) We celebrated in our usual way. Grandma and Grandpa came over the weekend before for presents and dinner - there's something to be said about summer birthdays and opening gifts in your swim trunks!

Presents! The best part of a birthday when you're five!

He wanted a cake that looked like his two bunnies - Mama Bun-bun and Baby Bun-bun. I have a couple of pictures that show his stuffed animals and the cake, but I love his face in this one! Grandpa suggested that perhaps the Baby Bun-bun that he was holding ... um, tooted in his face. Alex thought that was funny ...

Very, very funny.

As a side note, these two pictures are good representations of Alex's sense of humor and personality. They may explain why I never quite know what to say when people (like Awanas leaders) tell me what a good, quiet boy he is.

On the morning of his birthday, he went with Dad to get donuts and a birthday balloon. There may have been other boys anxiously awaiting their return. Or the arrival of the donuts. Whichever.

Happy birthday, Alex! You are a joy to us, and we love you very much!

Sounding it out

I haven't had high expectations for Alex for kindergarten. He won't turn five until June, and we're not big on formalized early education in our house, preferring instead to enjoy lots of books and follow our boys' interests. I figured if Alex got a good start on reading, covered some very basic math concepts, and had fun learning about the fascinating world we live in, we'd call that a very successful kindergarten year. And we wouldn't be starting him in school until next fall. Alex, apparently, has his own ideas about when he should learn what.

He surprised me by bringing me the book I had purchased to use to teach him to read, and requesting that we start NOW. He's known his letters and the sounds they make for quite a while, but he couldn't blend the sounds into words. So when we sat down with the book and he started sounding things out, I'm not sure who was more surprised ... Alex or me!


He loves reading, and requests that we practice nearly every day. We do most of our work on a small whiteboard, but he's also reading some little readers I got just for him. (Not everything should be a hand-me-down from big brother, right?) When he reads the little book by himself, he gets to put a sticker into his book. He loves that, and I love seeing another one of my boys becoming entranced with the wonderful world of reading!

Bubber

Before Christmas this year, I saw a box of really cool-looking Bubber on sale. I did a little research on the messy factor, and everything I read said it was cleaner than play dough. Since we use play-dough all the time and that's well within my tolerance for a mess, we went ahead and bought the boys some.

The reviews that said it was cleaner than play dough?

They LIED.



Do you see all those tiny little pieces that break off? Bubber is really an interesting sensory experience, but it crumbles. A lot.


It may not help that the boys think that they need animals, men, play dough tools, AND kitchen tools with which to experiment.


Maybe it's too harsh to say the reviews lied. Maybe my kids are just weird.


Huh. Yep, that might be it after all.

Mornings

There's nothing quite like snuggling in mom and dad's bed in the morning, reading Lego comics together.

Just because it made me laugh ...

Ah, spring!

When a {very} young man's thoughts turn to .... well, piracy.

And chasing your brothers while defending your "ship" ...

... and wearing helmets askew ...

... and utterly mischievous smiles, too.

Double Digits

Ten years ago today was a Tuesday. I went to work suspecting that I was going to have a baby before the end of the day. It's hard to believe that little bitty baby - he was only 6lbs 3 oz when he was born - is ten years old today!


Returning from the traditional doughnut run this morning

We celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa (and Uncle Joe, since he was up for the weekend) on Friday night. Ethan request sauteed chicken, brown-sugar glazed carrots, and french-cut green beans for dinner. We added in twice-baked potatoes to round things out a bit, and of course there was cake for dessert. A (Lego) man-eating shark cake!


I wasn't completely happy with how lumpy the shark is, but Ethan liked him.


Every good ocean cake has shells and starfish and sponges, right?


I liked the happy crab ...


... but Ethan coached me on the octopus so that he was somewhat more realistic-looking.

And of course, no party would be complete without presents!





Happy Birthday, Ethan! We love you and are proud of the young man you are becoming.