We have been adjusting this last couple weeks to busy days and late evenings.  I think Austin is getting used to going to school every morning.  He loves it and always hates to leave but it wears him out!  Gavin has several activities in the later evening and since he gets up so early in the morning he's had some trouble with his attitude the next day but I think he is getting much better too.

 

We have been busy!  This weekend Austin helped Dad mow the lawn.

 

 

In math, Gavin is learning about even and odd numbers this week.  He has worked on mapping skills, finding things on maps.  He followed directions to find the pirate's treasure and then he followed directions to find where the robber left the diamonds. 

 

In history we read about more about slavery and then played a Underground Railroad game on National Geographic's website.  Then we read about Harriet Beecher Stowe and started Uncle Tom's Cabin for Kids (an adapted version of Uncle Tom's Cabin).  We will hopefully finish this book tomorrow.  In science we finished learning about pond habitats and today we started rain forest (more on that below).

 

Adelaide turned seven months and has a new tooth!  She's not crawling but she's still able to move across the floor to get to her brother's toys which is lots of fun for everyone!  Here she is chewing on her diamond ring today.

She is really close to crawling!

Gavin is doing great with the piano.  He is picking it up quickly all the sudden and really enjoys playing.

He likes to sing the notes as he plays.

For Cub Scouts Gavin was supposed to look at a local map.  Since we are learning about maps this was a great activity for us this week.  So we looked at a map of the city, marked our house, church, school, friend's houses, etc. on it.  We also learned how to find a specific street on the map.

And, back to the rain forest.  We read a couple books about the rain forest and then we decided to make our very own rain forest in our house.  So we hung up paper in the four layers of the rain forest.  We had to do it in the hallway because it's the only space with several feet of unoccupied wall space.  Austin helped us with this project.

It's hard to see in the pictures but here are our four layers ready to go.  The blue is the emergent layer, light green (although it looks kind of yellow in the picture) is the canopy, dark green is the understory and brown is the forest floor.

Gavin helped me make trees to go in our rain forest.

Here's what we have so far.  We will add to it on Thursday!

Then we played outside.  Adelaide wasn't sure what to make of the scarecrow.

Austin protected our house from danger.

We even managed to get out on the trail this evening.