Monday, January 31, 2011

Busy Weekend

One of the (many) cool things about homeschooling is that it doesn't have to follow the weekday 9:30 to 4pm schedule of institutional-learning. This weekend was full of great learning times for the kids.
On Saturday, Ava got to go try out the ski's my dad made for her. Yes, he made them, like out of wood. He can do stuff like that! She spent the day cross-country skiing for the very first time and had a blast. (Pictures still to come). She also jumped into dad's snowshoes a couple times when he took them off and was walking around on them  in the deep snow. When I came to pick her up, she was happily (and speedily!) skiing around the yard.
She and Grandpa also worked with her microscope that she brought along when they were inside warming up. Since I had the two younger kids with me it gave her the opportunity to use it without worrying about her little brother and sister getting into it. We've installed a lock on her bedroom door for this reason too!
On Sunday, we went with our friends Angie and Malcolm (2 1/2) to the Children's Museum. Each time we go we never are able to do everything. The kids get so involved in whichever activity they are doing. This time around, we went to the new Living Art exhibit. The kids got to play "in" famous paintings.
Then Noah worked in the kitchen/restaurant for a half hour or so while Amora shopped in the grocery store.
Ava got to make a card for a little girl named Emily who is in the hospital with cancer at a station they had set up for her. There are several stations set up this month at the museum for charitable giving. I wish we could have got the them all. I know they also had bag decorating for Meals On Wheels on one of the floors as well.











Sunday evening, Ava and Amora and I went to a raw food potluck at Ecopolitan restaurant in Uptown. This was so fun for Ava as she has been watching me practice a raw food diet the past couple weeks and is very interested in it. She wants us to make some of the foods we tried there. There were some blueberry/cashew balls covered with coconut flakes that she loved and has been asking for since we got back.


Bedtime is often a fun time to play wind-down games. Noah loves "The Dinosaur Game" where I describe a dinosaur and he has to figure out which one it is. So I'll say "This dinosaur is a big meat eater that has sharp teeth and walks on two legs." And he guesses, his favorite, Tyrannosaurus. Both kids like "I Spy" which we have to play every night. John and the kids often play a memory game where they tell where 4 or 5 animals are hiding (like the COW is behind the TREE) and then the others have to remember where they were. I don't have near the memory the kids do apparently. It always blows me away how well they recall where everything is!
Last night, at 10:30 everyone was asleep but Ava and me, so she decided to grab a flashlight and we took turns quizzing each other on her Magic Math board. We also did math word problem game along with it, figuring out how many bananas, bunnies, or flowers were left after adding or taking away some. It exhausted me before it did her.  I told her we were going to be talking in our sleep all night saying the answers to math problems.
This morning, a Monday morning, we all slept in.

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