Today's Lessons and the Redbox

NOTE: I typed this up last night, but was having trouble with the photos.

We had a GREAT day of school today! Like, totally-and-completely-everything-I-could-have-hoped-it-would-be-make-me-thankful-we're-homeschooling-and-sure-we're-on-the-right-track kind of GREAT. Here are some of the highlights.

J is making amazing progress with his reading skills. I am super proud of him.

We did a great math lesson (combining two lessons from the Saxon 1 book; we're gonna hang out with that one for awhile longer... no more debating myself, at least on this issue. I'll need to find another excuse for posting pictures). We sorted peanuts into 10 piles of 10. We counted them by 10's to find out we had a hundred peanuts. We laid out 10 peanuts and counted by 2's to find out how many were inside. We shelled 100 peanuts and made peanut butter, practicing following a recipe and talking about standard measurments. We served the peanut butter on bread that we sliced in half, then in quarters... intro to fractions.

We finished our history narration, map work, and coloring page for Hammurabi. The kids like Hammurabi. They do not like Sargon and Shamshi-Adad.

We went to the park and did a field study for our science curriculum. We discussed living and non-living things, looked at dirt under a magnifying glass, and drew some pictures of what we found. J and K both LOVED drawing pictures of roly poly bugs!

We also read tons of books today... Aesops fables (does Aesops need an apostrophe? I keep staring at this and just can't decide), Angelina Ballerina, The Golden Sandal: A Middle Eastern Cinderella Story, and a few others.

We did some free painting. And then did a painting project to wrap up our Monet lesson. We got the idea here. Here are a few pics from our painting session (note: if you try this at home, masking tape stuck to the construction paper and was really hard to remove. Letting the paint dry all the way and then removing it really slow helped alot)

W had lots of fun with the painting. We had to rename his Rudolph, though!

J worked hard and carefully.

He made sure to include a flower garden (the purple spots at the top)

and a water lily in the bottom corner)

K was really excited (and couldn't stop smiling for the camera)

Here is her finished project

And then we got the whole house clean, mopped the kitchen, got the laundry done, the kids folded socks, J folded W's pajamas (I know... I was shocked... J NEVER voluntarily does work LOL) and everyone had a bath before we had our family night!!

For Family Night, we watched The Tale of Depereaux. It was cute, though a bit intense for my crew. But it's a sign of my new obsession... Redbox. Seriously... I can go to Walgreen's and rent a movie and it only costs me one dollar! This is dangerous folks! Do you hear me, dangerous!!!! Think of all the movies I can rent, for less than my late fees when I inevitably return my DVDs late to the library (the late fee is $2... highway robbery). We watched Bolt from the Redbox the other night, and whole new realms of movie rental possibilities opened up for me. I had visions of all the amazing things we could watch together. I tried to justify renting movies by reminding myself that the kids watch so little TV anyway. But really, it's a slippery slope folks. If I start renting movies more than once or twice a week, someone reel me in. :)