Summer

Summer is finally here!!! We are 9 days away from Gracie graduating 1st grade!!! Wow what an amazing feeling. We are so proud of her and what she has learned this year. Gracie reads all the time and loves her American Girl books and is currently reading Charlot's Web. It is one of my favorite things to see her reading all the time. :)

Ashten is done with preschool and will be moving on to pre-k/kindergarten in the fall. He loves letters! Sounding them out, writing them and tracing them. He walks around tracing letters everywhere we go. I think I see a little engineer in the making. :D He is a smart guy and loves to learn.

So on to summer and new adventures and field trips and enjoying being kids!!!!!!

Plants

These are our little seedlings.....since it has stayed winterish through the end of may we are not able to plant outside yet. We planted flowers of all kinds in little plastic cups for the front planter box that will be going in front of the deck. :) Can't wait for them to grow bigger so we can plant and enjoy them. The kids get to see first hand how to plant and grow. In a few you can see the roots on the side of the cup.

Sewing class

Her jean purse

At homeschool co-op Gracie had a hand sewing class and she had a lot of fun in there. Yesterday was the last day of the semester so she brought everything home to show us. We are so proud of her. She also made some cute animals. A dino, dolphin and elephant. :)

T-REX ROAR

We love the show Dinosaur Train on PBS. The kids just love dinosaurs right now. When we were in San Diego we went to the museum of natural science in Balboa park. They had a wonderful dinosaur exhibit. A full size T-Rex that moved his head and arms greeted us on the first floor with a growl. On our way out we purchased a fossil kit of a t-rex head so we could excavate it when we got home. I think it was the first thing we did after we got home because the kids were so excited. So I hope this was the first of many dino digs. We hope to do one in the back yard this summer.

The body book

Gracie's body

Ashten's Body

We are working on a fun project. My friend showed me this when she did it with her kiddos. IT has been so much fun. We traced the kids on long paper and then each day we are coloring and gluing that body part into place. As the kids are coloring I read them a description of the body part and its function. Watching the process is fascinating and so amazing how God made us!!!! We will post more as we go along.

Olympics Vancouver 2010

Oh how we wished we could have been there. Only coming around every 4 years makes it a very special event. We made great little journals for the Olympic games. We included maps, the mascots, symbols of the sports and the medals. The evening of the opening ceremonies was a fun evening. Keller was supposed to go out of town that day but his trip was canceled last minute. This ended up being a huge blessing because earlier that day Gracie split her eyebrow open and we had to go to urgent care and get her eye glued. ;) Never a dull moment that is for sure. So coming home and just relaxing was just what the doctor ordered.

Gracie got her journal and immediately got to journaling all the sights and sounds from the opening ceremonies. Ashten decided drawing pictures was fun and some of the letters he knows how to write. All in all the kids loved watching all the sporting events. Gracie loves the ice skating and Ashten of course all the fun ski jumping. It is so fun to watch these amazing athletes who are the best of the best compete and always neat for the underdog to get a medal.

What we are up to. :)

We took a two week break for Christmas and now we are getting back to school this week. It has been a slow start but we are finally plugging along. Gracie is working hard on reading and phonics and Ashten is working on writing his letters and dot to dots, and finding pictures. We are awaiting some fun workbooks. More things for Ashten to keep plugging along on the basics and poetry for Gracie as well as a neat body book that they will both work on.

This school year 09-10 has been so rewarding and fun. I would not change any minute of it even the hard ones.

We are going to be starting a unit study of the 2010 olympics. Exciting new year of learning ahead of us. :)