School is officially done for the summer, the girls had last week off as well, I had to finish up some things at school so I am counting this as my first official week of break. I am so excited that Boo and Belle were chomping at the bit to start homeschooling, my intention was to do something for an hour each morning but both yesterday and today we were going strong for almost three hours! Our power went out for a bit yesterday so we adjourned to the library where it wasn't 85 degrees inside and then went to Bubbe and Zada's to hang out so our work got interrupted but I can't believe what got accomplished in the hours we had! Boo is still fascinated by weather and natural disasters so she wanted to do some work with both of those subjects. Belle pretty much wants to do what Boo does she followed along.
We found a website called
www.homeschoollearning.com that had some weather based activities on it and from there we decided which ones to do. I was thrilled because I could sneak the math and language studies in with it. The three of us picked cities to chart the weather from for a week. Boo decided on Cleveland because we will be heading there on Thursday and Dallas because that is where Grammy lives. Belle decided to do home and I wanted to show a contrast of temperature so I picked Barrow, AK. Each day we check to see what the weather is in each city and then Boo and I go back in the evening and see what the actual high temperature was in each city and figure out the difference between the prediction, between her two cities and the between the hottest temperature and the coldest temperature, yesterday there was a 63 degree difference between Dallas and Barrow which the girls thought was amazing!
I was going to stop there, and the girls were hungry (we started school before 8 yesterday at their instance) so we had breakfast and I was going to let them just do whatever. About ten minutes after breakfast Boo came in and said, "Aren't we going to do more homeschool? I have a report I want to do about different natural disasters". So following their lead we went back to work, Boo made a four page report on volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes and waterspouts complete with illustrations. Belle drew pictures of a hurricane, a tornado, a volcano, a landslide and and avalanche and then labeled each drawing with the words. An hour and a half later when the power went out we had to call it a day.
Today Boo finished her report and presented it to us, Belle decided she wanted to do a report on the human body so she and I worked on how we talk and how we see, she of course drew pictures and wrote a brief summary of how each works. I read to her from our human body book and then had her tell me what she thought it meant. I wrote down her words in our notebook that we are using for spelling words and she copied them onto her paper. She gets frustrated because she isn't able to read and write as well as Boo (of course this is due to her being 6 and Boo is almost 9) but she doesn't see it that way, she wants to do and feels she should be able to do everything Boo does. This seems to be an acceptable compromise to her at this point, I'm hoping the practice of writing, even if it is copying what I wrote will give her some confidence.
They then spent the the afternoon playing with their cousin Jack which will also be a big part of our summer, Belle was already asking if he could come back over again tomorrow. We leave for our trip on Thursday morning, just me, the girlies and my parents...Daddy is staying back to guard the manner. I am a bit nervous about the long drive, we are breaking it up into two days and have lots of books, CD's and art supplies to hopefully stay busy but eight hours in the car is a lot. I am going into it with no expectations and as my cousin Emily said, "Just letting it flow".
