Homeschool Madness

On Wednesday, we took a spontaneous family trip to the aquarium store and Pet Smart. I was really shocked at the “fish” at the aquarium store. Who knew salt water fish were…cool!?

The kids were amazed at the sheer size of the fish, as well as the colorful plants and coral.

And they loved looking at all the animals at Pet Smart too!

Guinea Pigs:

The Birds:

The teeeeny fresh water fish:

So…this counts as school, right?

So, I finally jumped on the workbox train. Here is what we chose to use for our workboxes:

Here are our strips (I only have numbers right now. I have yet to print out the activity cards)

We only have six boxes. I think that’s plenty at this point. But I can see how we’ll need more as he gets into the higher grades…like, next year!

Today, we had math in the first box:

Bible (and AWANA) in the second box:

LLATL, Vocabulary, and Explode the Code in box three:

Science in box four:

Music and Art in box five (He had to listen to a classical music piece while drawing a picture):

And box six is our wild card box. I put several things in here everyday and let him pick two activities to do. Today we had Mad Libs, a word search book, his penguin lapbook, and a dinosaur drawing book.

This was our very first week using workboxes. It went remarkably well. Mario likes how he can see how much we have left to do. I like that he has stopped asking about how much we have left to do!

For the time being, I put everything we need for a single subject in each box. I count AWANA as Bible time, so I put that in with his Bible worksheets and things. Eventually when we get more boxes I can separate those two, and also separate LLATL from his Explode the Code and Vocabulary books. As it is now, it seems like there is a lot in those two boxes since I have had to put it all in together. BUT it works GREAT! (so far!)

I didn’t have anything Groundhoggish planned for Groundhog Day, but apparently the kids did! They had me read them Groundhog Gets a Say by Pamela Curtis Swallow. When we were done, they created a groundhog burrow on our couch and played in that thing for the LONGEST time!

Here’s the burrow…

Luigi helping his sister get in it…

All you can see is their feet!

Sometimes their plan is much better than mine!

As part of his Shakespeare class, DS got a worksheet on Shakespeare’s insults. The three insults he made:

1.Thou revolted, glass-gazing, block!

2.Thou giddy, stretched-mouthed, popingay!

3.Thou abominable, hare-brained, monkey!

Do some for yourself! Take one word from each list and add Thou to the beginning and you have your Shakespearean insult!

List 1: jesting, painted, notable, scurvy, decayed, flattering, shallow, capering, simpering, superfluous, meddling, counterfeit, juggling, viperous, venomous, manifest, threadbare, odoriferous

List 2: languageless, wasp-stung, lack-brained, mad-headed, thrice-double, nimble-footed, puppy-headed, pigeon-livered, marblehearted, strangely-visited, lily-livered, cream-faced, super-serviceable, frosty-spirited, egregious, smooth-faced, all-changed, hard-hearted

List 3: ninny, patch, fancy-monger, shoulder-clapper, fragment, sot, boil, promise-breaker, barnacle, puke-stocking, basilisk, tickebrain, bubble, whey-face, bug, shrimp, mole, flibbertigibbet

Tell me about one of the insults you made in the comments below!

And you thought you got away with having to see only one picture post…Ha! Here is what we’ve been up to just this past month!

Dino puzzles…

Dino skeletons…

Playing trains…

Snap Circuits with daddy…

A little fun in the snow…

Snowball fights…

I hid magnetic pieces in rice and had the boys find it all with their magnet wands…

Mario declared that this wasn’t school work. I asked him if he’d rather do a math sheet and he ran back to the table without another word!

The tots helped each other play Leapster games…

More digging in the ice; this time the tots participated…

We grew a Mystical Tree…

Mario used a magnifying glass to track the growth…

The tree after just 30 minutes (the package said it could take up to 6 hours for full growth)!

The tree fully grown…Mario was wowed!

Building a flying saucer with snap circuits…

Mario flips the switch…

There it goes!! Mario and Luigi both had a blast with this! I honestly didn’t think it would work!

Helping Daddy fix the computer. Mario got to screw the case back on!

Luigi and Peach LOVE the book How to Build an A…After going through a few favorite letters, Luigi decided the pieces would make a nice road.

And Peach joins him…

Building slot cars for AWANA! This is Luigi’s first year to participate and he is STOKED!

Well, now I am caught up and so are you!

Check out Camian Academy’s last giveaway for your chance to win a Lauri Puzzle!

You HAVE to go see what Target has! Today, I stopped by Target on a whim and found some really great deals!.

They had heart shaped measuring cups, silicone cake tins, cupcake tins, and ice cube trays, they had those growing capsules that kids love, tons of books, patterned file folders (for those lapbooks!) and some silicone cupcake liners (for Muffin Tin Mondays!). There is so much more! We even bought several different colored laundry bags so the kids could do sack races (Mario’s idea).

Ah, what a great day for some unexpected retail therapy!

Hi! We’re back!

I sure enjoyed the break we took…a little too much! It was so hard to get back into school work. The kids were ready for things to get back to normal, but I wanted to enjoy my babymoon just a little bit longer!

This is a little of what we did in November:

We found her feeding her baby one morning…

Story time with Daddy…

For Thanksgiving, they had fun playing with their cousins…Yes, that’s Luigi jumping off a chair onto the matress…

Mario loved wrestling with his little cousin…Let’s call him Bowser!

and in December:

Making and decorating cookies:

A little bit of snow:

Movie night:

Legos with Daddy:

A train set for Christmas…

Peach got a big girl bed…

Luigi got a train/car table…

Aqua Doodling together:

Connect4:

A word puzzle:

Helping Daddy clean out and replace parts in a computer:

Playing with fake snow…of course, Luigi had to drive cars through it:

Someone asked me what it was…here’s the box. I did see that Target had little vials of it in the dollar section the other day though!

Freezing and digging trinkets out of ice…this kept him busy for hours! (He keeps doing it over and over with new items each time!)

And finally…

I am far from caught up but this is my first attempt to get there. I have yet to download all the photos from this month! Eeeek! Until next time…

Baby Daisy was born November 14th! We are doing well and the whole crew has fallen in love with her! As a result of her arrival, we are taking a nice long break from schooling and blogging. I hope to be back full steam right around the new year. Until then, have a wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas! I know we plan to!

Here are some things we enjoyed doing together this week:

We read Tacky the Penguin and then did a couple worksheets I found in this month’s issue of Teacher’s Helper to go along with it! We’ve loved this book for years and this was a great chance to pull some literacy activities into it!

Mario then insisted on making a penguin puppet to act out the story. So Luigi naturally had to have a puppet too! Here he is with his pig puppet from when we did a unit on pigs a while back.

Mario set up a still-life this week of things he loves.

He was supposed to draw with oil pastels, and color it in with watercolor crayons and then paint to create a resist. But once he realized he could mix and blend with just the oil pastels, there was no stopping him. Can’t hamper a budding artist, now can we?

The children all had fun taking care of the Guinea pigs this week:

And Mario helped Luigi play this spider game:

We also had some great outside time this week!