School Check In

We have been just schooling along the last two weeks. We made some changes and we are enjoying them (see below). The weather has been wonderful here. They last few days has been very cold (and a little snow), but we had weather in the 60s last week! The boys and I took advantage of this and headed out to the family farm for a little nature study.

The boys are opening the gate to the family farm. January and no coats!

I am always surprised that every time we go out to the farm, we find something new to investigate.  We discovered this tree not far off the trail, but just now seen because  there was no leaves on the trees. It had this big hole in it and we wondered what could be living in it. Caleb tried to make it to the tree, but it was surrounded by thorn bushes. We concluded that whatever lived there was well protected because who would want to go through all those thorns!

 

We then made our way to the lake and discovered a lone duck. We watched that duck for an hour and it never got close enough for us to identify it. We know it is a diving duck and it had black, white, and maybe some red. I thought I saw red, but the boys didn't see it. With the sun reflecting off the lake, it was tricky seeing the details of this duck. From our description, Scott concluded that we had seen a Redhead, Canvasback, or Ringneck. I have no pictures because my camera died for no apparent reason. We then took a walk around the lake and saw a ton of animal activity (lots of trails, but no tracks and lots of scat), but no animals. We think it was raccoons.

We made a big change to our math program . . . . . well I decided to change it all together. I feel like starting the sentence off with "I have a confession to make!" since the school year is half over and changing a math program in the middle of the year is insane! (Especially since this is the third math program we have used in the past year! Shhh!) What makes it bad is that the scope & sequence of MUS, that we were using, makes it very hard to place them in our new program, Horizons from Alpha-Omega. First it was just a change for Tyler since he dislikes watching the DVDs with MUS. But, after getting it and looking closely at the program it seemed like a good fit for Caleb. It is going well!

Tyler is studying South America and I think I am enjoying it more than him. Caleb has been reading some Greek myths and is enjoying those.
We have been hitting read aloud time hard the past two weeks. We are reading Happy Times in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren. This book is hilarious! It is about the everyday adventures of 6 kids in Sweden. They had some funny adventures! We are half way through the book and the boys beg me to read more every time we read it. I believe Lindgren wrote the Pippi Longstocking books too. I tried reading these to the boys a few years ago and they hated it! I wish I had held onto those books! I believe they would enjoy them now. Kind of like the time I got rid of our School House Rock DVDs; now the boys like the ones I got from the library. But, that's a whole 'nother post.