Some pictures from the last few weeks.  Sorry because it's really choppy but I wanted to get some pictures up because it's been a long time!

We have been taking advantage of the nice weather to go on many nature walks. Adelaide enjoys walking her baby.

We learned about the Transcontinental Railroad.  The boys raced across a cardboard box, stapling pipe cleaner 'rails' and laying popsicle stick 'tracks' to see who could reach the middle first.

In April our artist was Winslow Homer.  We studied a couple of his ocean and landscape scenes and then made our own.

This one is Austin's painting.  He painted an ocean scene.

And this one is Gavin's painting.  He painted a landscape.

This time both boys did an ocean scene similar to Homer's.  This was Day 1.

Another nature walk.  This time to a new trail.  We have to mix it up once in a while!

This might be my favorite picture of all time!

Adelaide at a soccer game.

Day 2 of our ocean paintings.  It was really funny because I held up Austin's painting from the day before and said, "this is what I think of your painting" and then started ripping it in strips.  Austin wasn't quite sure how to respond.  He was pretty sure I was joking but I was ripping the paper so he wasn't sure if he should laugh or be offended.  It might have been a little mean but his expression was priceless.  But then I explained that the rips would look like the white caps of waves when we pieced it back together.  The one with the red sinking boat is Austin's painting and Gavin's painting is the blue boat.  I think they turned out kind of neat.

In May we have turned to Monet.  This was a re-creation of his water lilies painting using tissue paper.

And, another nature walk.  This one was to a local bird sanctuary.  We saw lots of birds but they were all ones we had seen before.  We did see an Eastern Bluebird, which is somewhat unusual, and a woodpecker.  We heard a ton of birds.  I wish I knew bird calls because I'm sure there were many more species than what we saw.

I've been making the kids find a 'special' place to sit, away from everyone else, and setting a timer for 10 minutes.  Then they can focus on what they see and add an entry to their nature journals.  They are actually pretty good about sitting and observing for 10 minutes.

Gavin started playing baseball this year.  Here he is ready to go.

Just a couple pictures from this week because apparently I never took pictures during school time.  In my defense, we had a very busy week so we were a bit rushed most of the time.  But, on Friday, we took some time to go to the park and enjoy a beautiful day.  Well, at least the little ones while Gavin was at his piano lesson.

We found this mockingbird singing in a tree right next to the playground.

And, our neighbor brought home some fun super hero capes and masks for the kids this week.  They were a big hit!

Last week the kids worked on a prairie poem.  They used watercolors to paint the grass and sky, then markers to draw flowers and animals in it.  The poem is part of a History Pocket we were working on.  I just realized that I forgot to take a picture of the final product but they turned out nicely.  The boys enjoyed working on them.  Austin is really into drawing birds right now.

 

We finished up our study of Frederick Remington by talking about perspective.  We looked at some of his paintings that showed things going on in the background behind the focal point of the painting.  Then the boys tried making their own picture showing perspective and we glue pictures of cowboys on their picture the biggest in the front and smallest in the back.

 

Here is Gavin's picture.

 

 And Austin's picture.

Adelaide loves to do school with us.  I printed off some ballerina preschool worksheets for her this week.  Unfortunately, she can get them done faster than I can print them off.  Here she is doing a color by number ballerina.

The boys finished their birds and nests this week.  We spent a day painting the nests and eggs and another day working on our birds.  Austin's bird is a House Sparrow and Gavin's bird is a Robin.

I gave Adelaide a little wooden bird to paint.  It's pink, purple and light blue.  We called it the Adelaide-bird.

We added to our State Bird books this week.  I think we have about eight more birds to go to finish them.

And here are the finished birds.  This one is Austin's bird.

You can see it's little spotted eggs in the nest.

And here is Gavin's Robin on it's blue eggs.