We've been wrapping up the semester this last couple of weeks.  We will still do school the first couple weeks of December but we will have light days to make room for Christmas activities.

 

A few weeks ago we went to the library to listen to a man speak who had been observing a pair of Great Horned Owls for fifteen years.  He had some wonderful pictures and videos of the owls and we learned a lot about them.  The kids immediately wanted to learn more so we checked out some books about owls and read them at home.  Then we decided to draw a picture of a Great Horned Owl in our nature journals.  We followed some step by step directions I found on the Internet to draw our owls.  Since we have also been studying Lewis and Clark's journey across the west, we decided to blend the two subjects in our journals.  After the boys finished their owls (which we spent several days on), they wrote down facts about their owls in the margins around the owl just like in Lewis and Clark's journals.  We found some great pictures of their actual journal pages online.

 

Here is Adelaide's owl.  I was very impressed with her owl.  It's hard to see beneath the coloring she did but she followed the directions really well and had a great looking owl.  She even 'wrote' on the sides.

This is Gavin's owl.

This is Austin's owl.

We are almost finished with our Anatomy study.  We have one week left in our book.  We will be studying birds in the spring semester.  We are finishing up our reading about the War of 1812.  We haven't done any kind of crafts or activities for the War of 1812.

For the next few weeks we will be studying the paintings of Mary Cassatt.  On Monday we discussed some of her paintings and focused on how people were dressed and the patterns she used for their clothes and surroundings.  Then the boys worked on making plaid hats since each of the ladies in the paintings was wearing a hat.  I brought out some plaid shirts and we talked about how plaid was designed with patterns and then the boys went to work designing their hats.

 

Then they glued a silhouette head into their art books and added the hat on top.

This is Austin's plaid hat.

And this is Gavin's hat.

We continued working on our Lewis and Clark discovery posters this week.  We spent one day adding plants and one day adding animals.  The boys glued on the pictures I had copied from the computer then added the common name and Latin name to identify the picture.

In science we learned about the five senses.  We did an experiment (I don't think it was too accurate because the boys were very excited about it) where we blindfolded Austin and Gavin helped him smell, then taste different items I had picked out.

 

We did another experiment where we blindfolded someone and then I went to different places and hit a plastic bottle.  The blindfolded person then had to point to where I was.  Then the blindfolded person covered one ear and we tried it again.  The boys learned that we need both ears to accurately determine where a noise is coming from.

 

Here are pictures of our final day working on our Lewis and Clark posters.

And here are the final posters.  I made them label in pencil since they still make a lot of mistakes so you can't see it but they are labelled. 

This week we finished our lessons about Edgar Degas by exploring tinting and movement.  We had talked previously about how his paintings show a lot of movement and they tried to make paintings that showed movement. 

 

This week we talked about tinting and how to make different shades of the same color.  Then the boys glued a silhouette of a football player onto the middle of their page and painted circles around him getting lighter as they got closer to him.  Adelaide just painted what she felt like painting.

Austin chose orange for his tint color.

Gavin chose blue for his tint color.

While we waited for the paint to dry, we decided to continue our exploration of Canada by making Canadian Maple Cookies.  Dessert tends to be our favorite exploration activity for each country!  Gavin is chewing gum which is why he has a weird face in every picture.

Here are the boys final paintings.

And Adelaide's masterpiece.

And here are our cookies.  They were suitably delicious!  You can see someone's already been into them even though they were still cooling...

 

We continued learning about the brain this week focusing on the different parts of the brain and what area controls what activities.  We took turns doing this Stroop Test I found on TheCraftyClassroom.com.  You are supposed to say the color not read the word.  It was harder than it first appeared.

We also made these brain hats that show the different parts of the brain.  I found these on Pinterest but I can't remember what the website was were you can print them off.  Austin has his brain on backwards!

Austin and Adelaide worked on a Halloween painting this week.  First they painted their pumpkins.

Then, when the paintings were try, they added the face with construction paper pieces.

This was the final result...

Halloween was a little different this year because Gavin was at a soccer tournament out of town.  I took Austin and Adelaide to a church Halloween party instead of trick or treating.  The nice thing about the Royals being in the World Series and having a game on Halloween was that the streets were empty by 7:00, whereas normally we have trick or treaters until 8:30 or so. 

 

The first thing the kids asked me in the morning when they got up was, "It's Halloween today, right?".  Both of them were already in their costumes and they wore them all day, even when we ran errands.  They looked very cute together.  We did discover that hoop skirts and car seats mix like oil and water.  We also discovered that while hoop skirts look very graceful while you are walking calmly along, they aren't too practical for anything else.

Here's a few pictures from the church party.  They had a bunch of games set up and a big obstacle course bounce house.  Adelaide refused to play any of the games.  Apparently playing games is beneath a princess.  Austin had no such scruples and played them all.  The older gentlemen really liked his Navy uniform.