Trevor taking his phonics assessment

Trevor takes phonics assessments about weekly. His k12 lessons are broken down into about 4-5 days of lessons. The lessons right now mainly go over what he has already covered. Recently, he started in on sentence structure- capital letters, periods and question marks. Here is is reading his sentences and punctuating them. He's always pretty fidgetty when we do school work and yes, it's usually even noisier in the background. Rachael was making the fart machine fart at the cat, Ariel had on the Hullabaloo game and she was chatting away with herself.

A much needed update!

Here's pictures from a couple weeks ago. We are members of Baltimore's Port Discovery children's museum. We go about montly, at least. It's a cool place. They recently opened a Wonders of Water exhibit. The first hour was RSVP members only so we got to experience it while it was pretty empty. Here's pictures!


Spraying water at instruments. The cymbal made the most noise.


Making "container ships" with legos. They had to balance them just right or the boats tipped.


There was a big river thing in the middle that had different buttons to push that created spraying water, or activated water things. They also had ways you could dam up the river, or divert it elsewhere. The girls loved the rubber ducks and mainly floated them down the river.


This was an area where you could see whether or not various objects floated.


"Mommy, I love these boats!" Ariel claimed every small plastic boat in the place and carted them everywhere with her until another littler kid wanted one.


Making a huge bubble!

Our day was lots of fun. We played all over port discovery, however, my pictures all seem blurry or the lighting is off. I think I had the camera on the wrong setting. None of them are really worth posting. We finished the day with lunch at Panera Bread. All in all, quite a nice Saturday!

A lesson in archaeology

So today we did the activity part of SOTW history. The activity was supposed to be an "archaelogical dig" however, it snowed yesterday and it's below freezing here today. The ground is a big hard rock to dig in. So, instead of burying objects outside to dig up, I put them in a bag and pretended I had dug them up and brought them back for further study.

The point of the activity was to dig up objects and look at them and hypothesize what humans did with the objects and what importance they held to people. We decided we were green aliens from the Planet Z and humans no longer existed on earth anymore. We were making explorations to earth to discover more about the people who used to live there. So I had a ceramic bowl, a metal spoon, a pencil and a toy car. We looked at each item and discussed why we thought it was used for the purpose the kids chose. We realized the spoon was really too small to be a shovel, and it made a bad mirror since our reflection was upside down (I guess that would be a science lesson. heh). We noticed writing on the bottom of the bowl and realized we could go back to earth to search for books because humans must have had a system of writing. The toy car not only showed us that cars were probably a form of transportation, they were an important part of our culture since they were decorated (this was a funked up hotwheel car) so we must take pride in our transportation and also it was valued enough to become a toy for children as well. I kind of asked leading, open ended questions for them to come to some of their conclusions. We actually found out all kind of stuff about humans based on what we found- from our use of metal to make the spoon, to the paint on the bowl and the perfection of its manufacture (it must have been made with some sort of machine rather than handcrafted?). All in all, we had lots of fun and learned a lot. I was planning on taking pictures, but there really wasn't anything to photograph, since we were just sitting in the middle of our carpet and holding rather mundane objects.

I'll take pictures of our science experiment tomorrow. We'll observe several things close up and make conclusions based on our observations. We're learning that everything is made up of atoms right now. We started the Chemistry curriculum yesterday and read the first chapter of our textbook and talked about how everything was made of atoms. Ariel spent the whole day walking around pointing to things and saying "That has atoms in it!" It was cute.

A day at the zoo!

I am incredibly proud of myself today. I made it all the way into the DC zoo without once getting lost. The weather the last couple days has been amazing- 70 degrees, sunny. just perfect for a midweek zoo trip to beat the normal crowds. The zoo was not busy at all and we got first class looks at some of the animals. We got up close to the Komodo Dragon, and we got to talk to the volunteer about the Spiny Lobster. The man was passionate about the spiny lobster and really attached to the one at the zoo. The lobster was older than spiny lobsters usually got and he had hidden himself and wouldn't eat. The man told us he was afraid the lobster was dying, but hoped he was molting. It was nice to be one of only a couple people in the invertabrates building. We went into the think Tank, which talks about the way animals think and Rachael was intrigued by the casts of the animals brains. They had a whole row of them, from little to big and we talked about the differences in the brains. Then we went around the room and looked at other things. About 15 minutes later we passed the brains on our way out and Rachael ran over and listed which brain belonged to which animal. She remembered them! We finished the afternoon with an ice cream break while the girls ran around. Unfortunately, Trevor has a cold and was feeling pretty run down after 2 hours of meandering the zoo. So he lay down next to me while the girls ran around. All in all, it was a wonderful day! If this had been a weekend, the zoo would have been PACKED!


New homeschooling supplies! I got my Rainbow Resource order today. It is fantastic! I can't wait to start. Story of the World (top right) is a classical style history curriculum. The small book I read out of and the bigger book is the activity book which outlines different activities, supplemental reading, crafts, narration, etc I can do based on what we have read in the smaller book. It goes through history chronologically, which I like a bit more than his current curriculum. Top left is a Grade one math book which has geometry, fractions, etc in it. We'll work that but mostly in Developmental math (in the middle top). Bottom left is our main science curriculum which was I really impressed with. It's Chemistry and there's a hardcover textbook, with a teacher's guide and a student's lab book. Lot of experiments. The first chapter talks about atoms. It looks really neat and very kid friendly. I have two other Singapore science books- very supplemental. They are definitely not complete. Finally, we'll do Spanish once a week with our other curriculum, which I hope is good.


Trevor on the bears during our zoo trip.


Looking at the lions, which, oddly enough, i can't see in the picture now. Most of the enclosures were empty and guys were working on the "moats" around them. But there were two lionesses in this one.


All three of them fit in that T Rex skull!


The Komodo Dragon spent a long time studying us from the middle of his cage. We were the only ones by his cage. Suddenly, he lumbered right up to the front of the glass and sat there, head high, flicking his tongue in and out at us. He was soooo cool. I think he was our favourite part, just because he was so close.


My favourite animal EVER.. LEMURS!!!


Taking an ice cream break.


Girls playing ring around the rosy. Trevor didn't feel good, he has a cold, so he was laying beside me on the bench. Rachael picked her pretty outfit today. :)

Making a dinosaur....

Trevor got an Eyewitness Dinosaur kit for Christmas. The kit included a plaster mix that we poured into moulds (hm) and allowed to dry. Then we popped them out and pieced our dino together while reading about how dino bones are found. Trevor drew a dino scene on paper to make our bones look cool. However, we didn't actually realize how big the finished product would be. We ran out of room piecing him together and left off the end of his tail.


Contemplating the puzzle that needs to be put together. All those bones did look pretty confusing.


Starting to piece it together. He needed a little help.


We glued the pieces to the paper and then he painted it.


Almost done! I have to admit, we haven't completely finished it yet. Trevor got distracted because the girls wanted me to read to them. So he moved back and forth between his dinosaur and being read to. Then he moved onto another activity with a promise to finsh this one. We'll finish it this week and find a place to display him. He's pretty neat! I liked this kit, we learned lots and it was fun to do. I would definitely get more eyewitness kits.