Winding Down Slowly

 Our yard is still blooming. I'm obsessed with it. I love to be outside. I check my garden several times a day to see if any green things have poked through yet. Spinach and peas, and one or two beats!

peas

spinach

Our school days seem to be getting shorter and shorter and a lot less structured. Eventually, it'll just settle in to one eternal round of P.E. and outside time. :) I'm ok with it. I like that our learning has a cycle. Sometimes it's very structured and orderly, sometimes it's interest based, and sometimes it's free time to be outside or create or experience things.

There are so many ways to create. I've found that when I feel the need to create I turn to language arts. I read out loud to the kids more. We write together. We cut pictures out of magazines and make collages. When I'm feeling creative, I like the kids to be creative too, and I might show it by being more lenient and counting their desire to build with K'Nex as "school time".

Ollie has discovered the pattern blocks. :) I love his concentration face. I love how he gasps in delight when he picks out which shape goes where. I love that he's starting to want to be apart of what the big kids are doing. The other day he came running into my room while I was filming a couple of book reviews with Ivan, and insisted that he had book reviews to do too. I let him climb up in the chair and have a turn. It was adorable. (Just ignore Ivan being a goober in the background.)

Ever since our Redwoods trip, Ivan has been painstakingly working on a poetry book of his own entitled River and Rain. I got to see the finished product the other day. He put a lot of his heart into it. And I am in love with it.

And this last page coming up, it's my favorite. When he was working on it, he came to me and asked, "Mom how do you spell 'thum'"? At first I was confused, but then he said, "you know like when you see one of thum." So, I told him 'them' and didn't realize what he was doing until he showed my the page all finished. He recognized that sometimes in speech we pronounce 'them' as 'thum', and he rhymed it with drum. A slant rhyme! And although he probably couldn't give it that name if you asked him, he's recognizing it in language and using it in writing. This makes my little literary heart beat a little faster. :) And, of course, the eyes drawn on to the word 'see' are fantastic too.

Ivan has also picked back up on his reading goal. He did two book reports for me this week.

Adelia only has a month and a half left of her Kindergarten class. And although it has been a really good thing, I am ready for it to wind down. Getting her to do homework every day is not my favorite thing. Especially when some of the material she is supposed to be memorizing isn't on my priority list for Kindergartners. But the school has been great for her, and I'm glad we enrolled her. I'll do my best to push through 'til the end. (Even if that means bribing her with an M&M for every line of math facts she completes.

I have really been trying to work on descriptive language with the kids in our writing time. We did a fun activity last week that was sort of a clash between an art project and a writing assignment. We drew our hands on a piece of paper and wrote the word 'flowers' in the middle on the palm. Then on each finger we wrote different way you could describe a flower. Color, kind, feel, size, smell, other. Then we gave each of those categories a section. In the section we thought up descriptive words for the category heads. I encouraged them to make it as colorful as possible.

Ivan's

Lincoln's