Week 2

Wow, this week went by fast! We had another great day at co-op on Tuesday, Gage's class read the story of "Lentil" by Robert McCloskey about a boy who can't sing or whistle but discovers he can make beautiful music with a harmonica. We discovered neither one of us can whistle either but God gives everybody different gifts. In the book, the town is eagerly waiting the arrival of the town "hero", Colonel Carter back home from war. We talked about how Daddy and Papa were both in the Navy. Since we have a Navy museum right here in our town I wanted to take an afternoon with Daddy to explore it, but we have been soooo busy we couldn't fit it in this week.

In Art class, Gage's teacher brought pastels and the kids made some beautiful art pieces. Here is Gage's:

He did the big shapes and his teacher came around the classroom and outlined their shapes. The kids were so excited to see the apple and pear come to life in their pictures!

Wednesday we visited with sweet friends that were in town from Alaska. Our boys are just a few weeks apart in age and played with one another from the time they were just sitting up until Zac moved 2 years ago.  We also got to meet Zac's baby brother, Jonas :-) The boys played so well, you would never know it had been so long since they had seen one another!

After a quiet day at home on Thursday waiting for dryer repair guy- never thought I would be so happy to do laundry again!- we went to open gym at gymnastics. It has been 95* with 100% humidity all week so we were VERY happy to be able to run around in air conditioning!

Saturday Gage started back at karate, he was a little hesitant when we got there but didn't take Sensei  Gator long to get him back into it! Daddy had errands to run all day Saturday, please pray for Grandpa Erhardt, he has had a rough few weeks. So on Sunday we packed up and headed to our favourite beach, I didn't get any pictures but here are some from the next day when we went with friends.

We have another busy week ahead, Grandma and Grandpa Haller are moving down!!! 

A Preschooler!

It happened. As many times as I have asked him not to, he went ahead and did it. My baby boy is growing up! Last Tuesday he started his first day of preschool. We found a great co-op of homeschoolers in our area, and he will go once a week for a few hours. 

The first class of the morning is based on the curriculum "Five in a row", the concept of which is to read a specific classic children's book everyday for a week and the curriculum gives you activities and experiments and topics to discuss that correlate with the story.  Our first book was "The Story of Ping" by Marjorie Flack. 

In the story, Ping is a little duck that lives in China on a "junk" on the Yangtze River. He doesn't pay attention and misses the master's call to return and makes the decision to stay behind rather than take his punishment which leads to some close calls!

So, in Gage's class, after they read the book they discussed why we should pay attention and then they also talked about ducks and rivers and how we use our local river for food, transportation etc.

Next, they did an experiment on buoyancy by guessing what items the teacher brought would float or sink by dropping them in a bucket of water. This was by far the highlight of Gage's day as his teacher had brought in a Lego man which Gage picked out to drop in the bucket! In fact, that evening we had to re-create the experiment at home in the bath tub! At least all his lego men are now clean!!

We also looked up China and specifically the Yangtze River on the map and made a Chinese stir fry  together this week. Such a fun curriculum!

His next class is an Art/Spanish class, his teacher is from Colombia and has taught art for years and she incorporates Spanish words while teaching art. He learned "buenos dias", colors and several others that I am going to have to review later, LOL! She also told them about Picasso and their objective was to completely color a page to the edges that she had drawn. Of course, Gage wanted to draw his own, so he drew a shark! 

I asked him afterward how much he liked his "school" to which he replied "my school is the bestest!!" So I would have to say it was a success! It also give me a couple of hours to update this blog ;-)