An Atypical Homeschool Day

I haven't blogged about a typical homeschool day in quite a while, and I'll keep it in the back of my mind to do it fairly soon, since I know how curious y'all are. This post is about this past Monday, when we were all set to go to the Crayola Experience. It's been on our schedule for quite a while, marked as "field trip" on the kids' calendar. But Monday morning as we were starting to get ready, I had this feeling I should check the website to make sure they'd be open. I vaguely remembered something about them being closed on certain weekdays, except in summer. Sure enough, Crayola was closed. I had to break it gently to the kids and decided that since the field trip to Crayola would have been considered a school day, we could find some fun things to do instead of breaking out the heavy academics. We decided to make it a PE and Art Day.

We had recently, accidentally, ended up at a local park area which boasts an "Interpretive Trail." The kids had wanted to check it out, but like I said, we were there accidentally, and had our true destination to get to. (I was lost. With a GPS.) So, the Interpretive Trail was first on our list for PE and Art Day. There were stations along the way to teach us about biofilters, habitats, geology, and more. There was a giant "bird's nest." I'm not sure how much of the information the kids actually digested, but hey, it was still PE!

Afterwards, we found a shady picnic spot.

Our next stop was playground time for more PE. By the time we left, we had racked up about four hours of PE between the trail and the playground!

Finally, we made our way home for Art. Free Choice Painting.

Sometimes it's fun to have an atypical homeschool day.

Sewing!

Last week we invited a homeschool friend over for a sewing play date. The kids were excited to sew their own pillows, but the other mom and I both thought they'd last maybe ten minutes and be bored to tears. To our surprise, our 9, 7, and 6 year old children sat quietly concentrating long enough to complete their entire pillows themselves! I also made one for Kai. They were all incredibly pleased with themselves and their pillows, and I was definitely impressed with their focus!

Fall Face Paint

Kinda creepy....

Alexander's Self Portrait at age 6

This IS my day job

Last year I learned how to twist balloons. This year I am adding to my resume by learning to paint faces. Alexander is a great subject, stays very still, and (with persuasion) picks a nice variety of designs. Jack... not so much. They both love it, though, and so do I! I took my paints to a recent park playgroup and got a chance to practice on other people's kids, all of whom sat even more still than Alexander, probably just because I wasn't their own Mommy. It was nice to get a chance to paint some girls, too, although Alexander did allow me to give him a butterfly face one day. I didn't bring my camera to capture my work on the other kids, but here is just a sampling of some of the things I've done on my own kids.

ETA: This is soooo Alexander. He started out the day as a vampire, then decided he'd like to be a fairy instead. I love this kid.

Gingerbread House Year Two

To keep ourselves busy during our snowy weekend, we worked on our second annual Gingerbread House. I am not sure if Jack put any candy on the house, but I know he put a lot in his mouth. The guys were all concentrating very hard. ;) I think last year's house actually looked better, though! Especially after today, when I found the boys at the counter eating things off it!!

Balloons!

One of the few things that we know for sure that Jack likes is balloons. So, a couple of months ago I decided to try to learn to make balloon animals and creations so that I could do them at his approaching birthday party. I found a ton of how-to videos online and quickly had success making the basic hound dog (this picture is of my actual first attempt).

Justin got into it, too, and learned to do a bunch of animals himself. I now know how to make about 20 simple creations! It's actually quite easy and really fun. The other day my friend Petra gave me a how-to book and I added a few more to my repertoire, including the alien-eyeball hats sported here by my sons, and the SO easy octopus which was a huge hit. I also showed off my new-found skill at a recent MOMS Club "End-of-Summer Party," which has thus far been my only experience twisting balloons for kids other than my own. It was fairly amusing to me that out of the many choices I had laid out for them, 90% of the boys chose airplanes and 90% of the girls chose ladybugs. I hardly got to show off at all! Ah well, there will always be kids wanting balloon animals! I'm pretty sure I'll get another chance!

ALEXANDER

My poor Alexander has such a long name that he still can't spell his own whole name. ;) Poor baby, right? :D He can spell, "PopPop," "Mommy," "Daddy," and most of the time, "Jack" and "Xander." He can, however, write his whole name, when reminded of all the letters. Most of the time, though, he'll write it and then "color it in" or something, so I never get a good sample of his writing to save for posterity. Yesterday I pretty much stole this paper away from him before he could do anything else to it! He really wanted to add a drawing of himself, so I made a box for him and told him he was only allowed to draw inside the box! I am so cramping his style!

Gingerbread House

Ever since the beginning of the week when I told Alexander that we could get a gingerbread house kit and make it together, he has been very much looking forward to it. We bought the kit on Tuesday and I told him that we could make it on Friday when Daddy would be home. Every morning he would ask if it was Friday or if it was the day we could make the gingerbread house. He would check his calendar for the "art project" sticker and see how many days away it was. It was rather adorable that he was SO excited about it! Today was finally the day, and you can see that we all had a rather good time participating in the construction and decoration of our gingerbread house! Now... where to put it so that no sneaky three-year-olds eat it?

Happy Thanksgiving!

We had a lovely Thanksgiving and hope you did as well!

(It's a turkey.)

Calendar

I've been wanting to get Alexander one of those cool preschool calendars that are out there, but couldn't find one that had exactly the features I was looking for, so I decided to make my own. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, but getting a little weepy over the fact that Justin just called me a loser for blogging about it. THANKS, Justin! ;) Anyway, here's what the finished product looks like. I still have a few more of the "stickers" to make for more holidays, with more friends and family member's faces, and for a few other events, but this is the general idea. And yes, Justin (and world), I AM a dork. I am hoping this will help Alexander learn to recognize more words and names, learn the days of the week, and provide a bit more structure to our days with the added projects like writing letters and doing good deeds. Hopefully some of our projects will even be "blog-worthy!"

Jack's family birthday party

For Jack's family birthday party, I decided on a nursery rhyme theme to play on all the nursery rhymes with his name in them. I'm no artist, but I have fun making decorations for my kids' parties, so these are what I made for Jack's:

Unlike his friends' party, which was rained out, this party was blessed with great weather, so the kids were able to play outside in the kiddie pool, blow tons of bubbles, and generally take advantage of our first *real* backyard.

I like this shot of all the kids eating cupcakes even though it's the backs of most of their heads because... well, can you tell how nice and still they're sitting?! I love how little Mackensie seems to be wondering why she isn't up at the table with a cupcake, too!

Jack got lots of great presents (thanks, everyone!), including some markers and paper from Aunt Eileen, and here he is creating his first ever piece of artwork:

The obligatory first birthday cake face picture:

Thanks everyone for coming! Oh, and I swear this will be the last post about Jack's first birthday! :)