We're baaaaack.
We had a much needed holiday break. And then an even more needed vacation away from this place to Houston. Since the little kids hadn't gone to visit anyone for over a year they were getting a little twitchy and pretty much hated each other. But, like a glitchy computer, after a reset all is well.
Benson loves me. He drew this for me after being naughty as an apology.
Benson's cute primary leaders mailed him this pictured and he colored it so nicely. He doesn't usually color color pages, he likes to draw his own stuff, so I didn't know he had it in him.
He said, "Yeah. I'm a painter just like my grandpa."
He has graduated from babyhood to being a dish unloader now that he is so grown up. He and I do it together every morning and everyone loads dishes now throughout the day. Its working very well.
I taught a primary lesson on Sunday and Ben and Sam rounded up the stuffies so they could have a full class to participate. It was fun. We started learning the song "Joseph's First Prayer"
MONDAY, January 11th
Letter T time!
T is for tonka trucks toppling towers. We had fun building towers and knocking them down. We even made some cool slow motion movies. We also read Little Blue Truck. He picked out all the T's on matt's truck when we took a little field trip to Matt's truck as the intro to body systems.
It's learn about the body time. We are using the Good and the Beautiful Human Body Unit Part 1. So far so fun. They enjoyed perusing our pop up body books. They did a page drawing themselves and writing about what they look like.
We began reading the book Mr. Popper's Penguins which will go along with our Antarctica world study this month. Fitting for wintery January don't you think? I think the kids already like it. It's a classic.
We all got back into our math. That was a bit of heavy lifting after the break.
Sam did a strong verbs worksheet from her grammar book.
TUESDAY January 12
Since we are all feeling a little extra from the "quarantine 15" I added a little PE to this year's schedule. The kids all had fitness tracker/pedometers from last Christmas that we never used. So we pulled out those bad boys and set a goal of 10,000 steps before screen time. They were highly motivated by that and surprisingly competitive with each other about who would finish first. It has gotten us all moving more and has been really fun. Second day in a row with 10,000 steps for these rock stars. Ben even got in on it today and for the first time ever didn't complain about going for a walk and even walk all the way to Richmond Hill and back.
We began our Antarctica studies with an online adventure about the early explorers of the South Pole.
We continued reading Mr. Popper's Penguins with the younger kids.
Ally is cooking on her independent study courses, science and language arts and doing beast academy math still.
THURSDAY
Skeletal system, made body out of playdoh and tried to get it to stand up. It was floppy. Made a body out of playdoh with crayons inside for structure. They stood. Thank you skeleton 🦴.
Made a model of the spine using fruit loops and gummy lifesavers. Defined bones, ligaments and joints.
While we finished reading loud Mr Poppers Penguins we made our own penguins out of salt dough, well actually it was corn starch and baking powder dough. The kids really enjoyed the book. Fun read aloud and way to incorporate antarctica.
