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.