Adelaide continues to want to join us as much as possible.  She loves writing letters so she copied N for Nest on Monday.

This is Austin working on his notebooking journal in science.  This is his first semester with a notebooking journal and he's doing a very good job in it.  It has coloring pages, copywork, crossword puzzles, labeling and short sentence writing that go along with each chapter in our science book.  Gavin does the same thing in a notebooking journal for older kids.

Here is Adelaide entertaining herself while the boys are working.  This is a color matching game (bird to egg) and the next one is a number matching game (frog to lily pad).

For our art project this week we did Audubon themed reverse glass paintings.  You are supposed to use transparency film, which I didn't have, so I cut a laminating page in half at the crease to get two pages and that worked fine.  It's a bit cloudier than transparency film but still lets the light through enough to work.

  

The boys used a black Sharpie marker to trace a bird on one side of the page, then turned the page over and used color Sharpie markers to color their bird.  Then we used strips of black construction paper to make a frame and hung it on the schoolroom window.

Here is the final result.  Austin's is the top bird and Gavin's is the bottom bird.  They turned out nicely and look pretty in the window.

We have started learning about the Victorian Era.  The boys made and labeled a salt dough map of England and Ireland (you'll see that below) and they are working on labelling the map with country names, surrounding water, major cities, mountain ranges, etc.

 

To do this I just typed the name of each label, cut out each word, laminated the words, then re-cut them out and put a little piece of magnetic strip on the back.  Then we just put a blank map on the dry erase board and they can put the labels in the correct spot.  It's a bit of work but I'll keep the labels so we can use the same ones next time we learn about the Victorian's.

Here's the salt dough maps.  For some reason Austin has been asking when we'll be doing a salt dough map for the last several weeks so he was very happy to work on it this week.  We took a snow day on Wednesday (we take the first snow day that public school gets) but we painted our salt dough maps since that's fun school work.  Just wanted to explain why Austin's in his pajamas and Gavin's shirtless as they are painting.

This one is Gavin's, before it was labelled.

This one is Austin's.  We were supposed to include Scotland but I couldn't fit it in the box.  The top lighter green is where it starts.

Austin loved Oliver Twist.  He finished it in his free time.

We talked about bird's feathers this week and about how they preen and put oil on the feathers to keep them waterproof.  So we tried it as an experiment.  We put a little vegetable oil on one feather and then dipped that feather and a non-oiled feather in a bowl of water to see what would happen.

The boys recorded their observations in their notebooking journals.

That was our week.  This week we will start learning about the Oregon Trail, then the Civil War and then Industrialization.  This week we read books that talked about the Victorian Era in broad terms as to the changes that took place at that time, daily life, etc.  The rest of this semester we will study more specific events and people from this time period.

We have settled back in to our normal routine following Christmas break.  Adelaide likes to join us while we work.  She keeps asking me to give her work to do so I finally printed some free preschool resources off the Internet so she would have her 'school' too.

 

 

This semester we are learning about birds and other flying creatures in science.  The first 3/4 of the book focuses on birds and the last 1/4 focuses on insects.  It worked out nicely because in history we have been learning about the early 1800s and we read about John James Audubon so our artist for the month is Audubon.  The boys tried their hands at drawing a bird and painting it with watercolors.  I let Gavin use the artist quality water colors since he's getting older and takes better care of things.

 

If you noticed our schoolroom looks different, it's because we moved it to our finished room downstairs and made the schoolroom we used upstairs into a playroom.

He chose to draw a cardinal.

Austin decided to draw and paint a barn swallow.

Here is Austin's barn swallow.  He did a good job with the scissor tail and the markings on the breast.

Here is Gavin's cardinal.

This is Austin working in his science journal.

Adelaide reading while the boys are working

and playing games.

You may remember this ladybug game from Austin playing it.  You have to match the number of dots on the ladybugs.

We are also working on a state bird notebook.  This has been kind of a fun project and a good way to tie some United States geography into science.

This is Gavin's Alaska page.  We watched some short videos of the bird and listen to the bird's calls.

Austin's Arizona page is sideways...sorry.  Basically we have added pictures of the birds, their nest and/or eggs, a map of the state, a U.S. State stamp picture and a U.S. State stamp that has the state bird and state flower on it.  Then the boys add information about the bird and draw a picture.

 

 

We made some suet to try and attract birds to our yard.  So far it hasn't worked too well but we don't have a good place to put it in our yard either so I can't completely blame the suet.

That would be Austin with Adelaide's bike basket on his head...not sure how that came about.

That's about all the somewhat interesting things I can think of that we've done this last couple of weeks.  Just easing back into our schedule.