A Week,Briefly (September 26, 2022)

 Honestly, it was an inspiring week.  

Monday

After our walk, we spent an hour planting fall flowers and spring bulbs.

Later, during our lunch reading, we paused to draw a scale model of the solar system with the sun at 1/25th inch diameter.  We didn't have room on the whiteboard!  I literally labeled "Uranus" on a corner of our bookshelf, but I refused to draw on the curtains to mark "Neptune."  I told the kids to just imagine a mark there.

After that, we did the math to find the distance to the nearest star (based on the figures in our storybook, which have probably been updated in the past 100 years, but are close enough to create a sense of awe, which is what I was going for.)

We watched 72 Dangerous Animals: Asia, and then we used Art Hub for Kids to draw tiger faces.

Tuesday

Even though we had 7 babies, which meant not enough seat belts to go around, the weather was so perfect, and the day so inspiring, that I dared to pack everyone up and head a couple miles up the road to a local nature preserve/park.

Little Princess made apple cinnamon muffins, Nature Angel buckled in all of the necessary car seats, and I did some packing and organizing.  

We did it!

First, we snacked, then we played, then we hunted mini-beasts for observation, and then we played some more.

This is my favorite picture from the day.

Nature Angel found a tiny frog, and she shared it with the babies, who were delighted to watch it hop about.

They were mad that I made them stop jumping . . . I was afraid the babies would copy them.

The big kids were such good examples for the little kids.

Since we hunted for mini-beasts in the morning, we drew ants in the afternoon.  It was a close vote between ants and roly-polies, so it will be roly-polies on Wednesday.  

Little Princess read All Creatures Great and Small as her main school for the week.

We fixed the math we did on Monday!  I'd forgotten to convert from feet to miles, so we were 5,280 times too short in our distance.  

It became really good practice in reading large numbers!

And seeing "Oort cloud" on the board reminds me that we finished our astronomy study for the month.  WEH follows a monthly rotation, and I gotta admit, I like it!  We left astronomy with the kids hungry for more . . . 

Wednesday

And then today we finished Jataka Tales.  The timing is working out very well for starting new subjects in October.

We also drew roly polies.

And we watched an episode of Blown Away--a glass-blowing competition.  We've watched all of seasons 1&2 in the past; today it was just the first episode of season 3.

We made our own abstract "glass" art by coloring on plastic cups with sharpies and melting the cups under the broiler.

I couldn't take many pictures of the process because the oven was blazing hot, and we had toddlers wanting to watch!

Thursday

Hard to tell what the weather is from this picture.  How the kids dress for weather is a constant puzzle to me!

Library, Dance, Church activities.

That's our Thursday standard, but we added lemon-lavender-scented playdough with autumn wildflowers/weeds for sensory play.

Later in the day, Baymax came to me saying he was bored.  I gave him a list of chores that could possibly fill his time, but he walked away, disgusted.  Eventually, he came back and asked if I could write math problems on the board for him.

Absolutely.

I gave him a row of perhaps 10 addition and subtraction problems, then another before he said it was enough.

Perfect.

That same afternoon, Mister Man pored over one of the second-hand math fact/problem/adventure books that I recently picked up.

Later, I found him at the board trying to draw out the solution to one of the riddles.

Nature Angel was able to finish the nature journaling page I assigned her the previous week; she'd been unable to finish because of her illness, but it was worth the wait.  I think her page is beautiful!

I realize now that I never recorded that Little Princess' project last week was to write an essay about the Artemis Program.  She rocked it.  I marked a few grammatical corrections for her to make, and she did so.  Otherwise, it was well-written, well-organized, and clearly passionate.

Now, to find her another assignment . . .

Friday

To celebrate the end of our astronomy study, I baked cupcakes, made frosting, and let the kids go to town decorating.

We lined enough of them up to make a solar system . . .

The half-eaten cupcake above Earth is the moon, by The Munchkin.

 . . . and then we ate them all up.

Nature Angel read the first 10 pages of Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar.  The impression she got was that everything that we study is connected in some way and that we shouldn't try to compartmentalize our studies because it breaks the connectivity of our learning.

It was pure joy to have a conversation with her and watch her try to put into her own words what she'd read.

Saturday

Soccer practice in the morning, followed by 3 sessions of General Conference!

I love watching my crew take notes about what is important to them.

And after the morning session, this dude made me smile when he asked if he could get a Book of Mormon off the shelf and read it for himself.

Yes.  Yes, you may, sweet boy.

We have 2 more sessions of conference today, and then we start October's studies--the ocean, Holland, Spain, and pirates.

It's going to be a fun month!