We have moved past the Vikings this week and Gavin has been learning about the Crusades.  He is reading Our Little Crusader Cousin which is a Yesterday's Classic book, and The Boy Knight by G.A. Henty.  He also read You Wouldn't Want to be a Crusader and we have all read short biographies of Peter the Hermit, Henry II and Richard the Lionheart together.  Austin also read about St. Francis this week and we did a St. Francis craft.  Gavin will read about St. Francis next week.

 

It's kind of hard to see but they drew a face on a piece of paper and then added a brown felt 'robe', string belt and some cute woodland animal stickers on the bottom of the robe.

 

Austin continues to do well in handwriting.

Adelaide has figured out her workbooks so she can do them all by herself.  Now she just sits down and goes to town.  She's also staying in the lines fairly well for her age.

Austin and I played a counting game this week in RightStart math.

Gavin has been learning about Mars.  He had a project to make a space rover that can land softly enough that people (or in our case marshmallows) don't get ejected out.

He eventually figured it out after trying a couple different ways.  Then he recorded his findings in his science journal.

This week in math he has been concentrating on fractions as division and fractions that equal other fractions.  We played a game that was like memory but you had to find equal fractions like 1/2 and 3/6.

On Wednesday we went to the zoo!  We joined some other homeschooling friends there and we had a great time.

We got there when it opened and the carousel is free the first hour so the kids rode several times.  Saved us $3/kid per ride, which is one reason I try to get there early!

I was very pleased to see this...for the first year ever Gavin actually read the signs for most of the animals we saw.

We took a picnic lunch.  It was a beautiful day so it was pleasant to be outside at the zoo.

That would be a hippo swimming by Adelaide.

 

 

 

 

Austin got Thursday off too.  Partly because I knew he'd be tired after spending all day Wednesday at the zoo, and partly because I had to get ready for the co-op class I was supposed to teach Thursday afternoon.  I kind of procrastinated this week....

 

Today he played with dividing paper geometric shapes in half and then looking at them in the reflector.  The reflector was one of Gavin's favorite things in kindergarten and Austin really likes it too!

Gavin is working on a multilevel diorama to show the levels of the feudal system in the Middle Ages.  Today he did the top level: the Church.

We copied the stained glass window from a picture I found online and we are using Playmobil to decorate our diorama since they have so many Middle Ages themed Playmobil.  He even had a monk!  We are not gluing the Playmobil stuff down...Gavin nearly had a fit and I had to tell him ten times he was not going to glue them down!