School on Labor Day??? Why Not?

Today we had the privilege having school as a complete family -- Daddy included. Yes, I know it's a holiday and perhaps it's unjust to have school on Labor Day but right now everyone is pretty into school so I didn't want to break the momentum. It was great to have Anthony involved and it was so helpful since both kids got so much one-on-one time.

Anna was introduced to her theme of the week: jungle, and her vocab word of the week: vines. She colored a jungle picture and then glued strips of green construction paper over it to represent vines. I had a file folder game put together from this site that she did with Anthony. We also read a book about a sloth and then did a Disney princess puzzle just for fun.

Colin did two pages of his handwriting workbook and then we reviewed some of the material from Classical Conversations. He enjoys doing the time line cards because of all the fun hand motions involved. We also practiced counting by 2s and worked on memorizing the first five commandments. He's working on drawing a basic map of the continents of the world (using circles for the continents) and I had a good world puzzle for him to do to reinforce the idea. Also, while playing outside this afternoon, we practiced stating the five kingdoms of living things, the question of the week at Classical Conversations. We're still reading through A Knight at Dawn and the hope is to hit the Renaissance Festival shortly after we finish the book.

Anthony worked with Colin on math. The Math U See Primer starts off very basic with counting and it was boring to Colin and I felt like I was just giving him busy work (something I hated in school growing up). Anthony moved him ahead in the book to an area that might be more challenging. Anthony and I both did well in math in school and would like Colin to enjoy it as well.

Now on to the fun stuff. Next week we're going to a hands-on science center in Dayton so we're building up to the field trip with a science week. Today we talked about the scientific method and did an experiment mixing cornstarch and water. Great fun! If you've never tried it, it makes a really cool suspension that has properties of both a solid and a liquid.

I plan to cover different branches of science and do daily experiments. Tomorrow we're going to talk about chemistry and try to clean pennies using different substances. I'm thinking this will be a great week.

Tonight if the rain holds off we're going to have a picnic dinner at a local park where there will be an outdoor concert by the local orchestra. I'm hoping to get there early so Colin can see all the instruments being set up and practiced.