Monday, August 25, 2014

Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of August 17

We had a good week last week!

Sunday evening a local church hosted a "pool party" at a community pool nearby. It was COOOOLLLLDDD!!! But the kids had fun! And I got to visit with friends I don't see often.


As I mentioned last time, the big girls got new scooters. When I realized that Little Bit's (hand-me-down, from a friend) scooter had lost a piece, making it really wobbly, I decided to go along with her pleas for a new one, especially since she still had birthday money to spend. So we ordered her one like her sisters, only with streamers and a BELL! The big girls were very generous about sharing their new scooters with Little Bit until hers got here, and thankfully shipping was pretty fast for hers, as it had been for theirs, so now all 3 girls have functional scooters and are having lots of fun with them (and I STILL haven't taken a picture).

Butter!
This week we started our fall preschool curriculum for Little Bit. We're using Wee Folk Art's Harvest Time Curriculum this year, but I've mixed up the weeks abit because some library books didn't come in as soon as I wanted them to.

I have Lexie read the story to Little Bit while Ashlyn and I clean up from breakfast. On the day that she read the book about making butter she wanted to be the one to help Little Bit with "art" (making butter) too. But we needed something to put the butter on AND Lexie insisted we also needed to read a story about the bread. She couldn't find the book she wanted, but did find "Apple Cake" which was one of her favorites at this age and conveniently talks about making . . . apple cake. So Lexie and Little Bit spent the better part of one morning making butter and apple cake, which we then happily helped them eat for lunch!

Little Bit's obsession at the moment is painting. She's become self-sufficient at it, as long as the table is cleared off, and the drop-leaf is up. So that's just become our permanent table set-up for now. She leaves her watercolor paints and the paint brush holder (an old tooth-brush holder) out, along with a little bowl for water. She dumps the water and gets new as needed, and the pictures, once dry, get stacked up or hung on the fridge. She's having fun, and with everything out and easy to get to, the big girls have done some painting too. I have to admit, I'm happy to not have to do a planned art time with her most days :)

We're continuing to use Bible Road Trip for Bible, and it's working well to have Little Bit color "What's in the Bible" coloring pages and listen in while I read. The big girls have another couple weeks left on their self-paced online history, so they're continuing through that.

We started our science for this school year this week too. I borrowed Apologia's Astronomy book from a friend, so we're using that, but it's alot smaller than the Apologia Chemisty & Physics that we used last year, and I didn't bother to buy the Notebooking Journals (workbooks) to go with this one, so after looking through it, I decided we'll do Apologia's Astronomy once a week (even so, if we don't skip any weeks we'll be done by January, but I anticipate skipping some weeks LOL).  Little Bit was very excited to be able to do science with her big sisters. We went out and got new 3 ring binders for them each to keep their science papers in and Little bit immediately drew a picture of a satellite and an astronaut, based on our first day's reading. When I asked if she wanted me to label it, she said no, SHE wanted to label it. So I wrote the words and she copied them . . .I've decided she's going to teach herself to read by spelling, she loves writing things down and is always asking how to spell things, but hasn't shown any interest in "reading" per se, so I'm interesting to see how that plays out over the next couple years.

Lexie and Ashlyn have renewed their interest in flying through Life of Fred (math) as quickly as possible. Lexie has started the first "middle school" book (Fractions), which is a thicker book, and Ashlyn is bound and determined to catch up with her (I'm hoping she doesn't, it's much easier when they're in different books instead of fighting over the same one).

This week would have been "school picture week" for the not back to school blog hop, but I couldn't get the kids to all be cooperative at the same time, so I decided not to bother. At one point I did mention to Lexie, as we sat on the neighbor's porch, that we needed to do school pictures, to which she said "so take my picture. So that gave me this one:


So then I turned to Ashyn in the hammock (too far away to hear what we'd been saying. Our neighbor was on the phone so we were having to be quiet) and told her to smile, which she did, quite nicely, giving me this one:

 THEN she asked what it was for, and Lexie said "that's your school picture" at which I got this reaction:


Little Bit was off playing with the neighbor kids during all of that so I didn't get a picture of her during our impromptu photo shoot, but later she asked me to take her picture with her new hoola hoop, so we'll go with that one :)

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