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We are in the full swing of summer! We celebrated Tristan's 6th birthday with a family baseball game/cookout. His cake featured Lightning McQueen racing around a baseball diamond. We kept decorations simple, and asked the guests to sign a T-ball in honor of Tristan's birthday. Each guest received a baseball shaped Krispy treat and a box of Cracker Jacks as a party favor. We are grateful that the weather was nice the afternoon of the party. Tristan really enjoyed coaching his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in a family game of ball. We have also begun summer reading . The Swiss Family Robinson by Johan Wyss proved to be a riveting story we could not put down. That's one book we can cross of our list. The kids loved it! Anastasia was a little (very) upset when the dog ate the mother monkey, but it didn't last long. The next time I began to read, she was pulled right back into the story. We are also reading about George Washingto...

As I mentioned in my last post, we enjoyed strawberry picking a few weeks back. We went to Weaver's Orchard for their story-time and picking. It was great fun! We also enjoyed one of the Farm Days at Oregon Dairy . The kids enjoyed seeing the cows and enjoyed all the fun activities and free food that was provided by the sponsors. Gwen's new favorite word is "moo".

Last week, our last week of school we put in some review and we went out to pick red raspberries and strawberries. We read Harold and His Friends: A Harold and The Purple Crayon Treasury, adapted from the television series by Valerie Garfield. Then each day of the week, after reading one of the stories, we would review. For language we reviewed all of our vocabulary words learned this spring. It is astonishing how much Tristan remembered, especially with simply a picture prompt. We also reviewed our personal pronouns, metaphor/simile, and onomatopoeia. For Math we reviewed time, dates, adding subtracting, measuring and patterning. For Science we reviewed the moon and stars. For Geography we took the story disk from all the books we read this semester and placed them where they belong on the map. We also re-read The Ultimate Interactive Atlas of the World. For Social Studies we reviewed each story and what we could learn from them. We didn't really do much for Art...

Last week we read the story All Those Secrets of the World by Jane Yolen.  This is a sweet window into how children understand and deal with life. Neat that the story is about Jane Yolen, and even my children caught onto that fact by the  second or third reading. Our vocabulary words for this week: Jimmies, Horizon, Perch, Sycamore. We discussed who is telling the story, and identified the use of personal pronouns. We also found the foreshadowing in the story. The children were excited to find it, like they discovered something special. For math we learned how to add two. Two plus any odd number gives and odd number and even plus two gives even. (If Janie was 4 when Daddy left and 6 when he returned, how long was Daddy away?)We also learned how to subtract dates, and figured out that all three of them are two years apart in age. Our geography lessons included finding the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, and placing our story disk there. We learned about bays...

Last week we read Mr.Gumpy's Motor Car   by John Burningham. This is the follow-up story to Mr. Gumpy's Outing also by John Burningham. Both of these are funny, lively, unbelievable stories about a friendly man sharing life with creatures big and small. My kids enjoyed Mr. Gumpy's Outing better than Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car , but Five in a Row recommended the latter, so that was our story for last week. Our vocabulary words for the week: Lane, Overhead, Churned and Nearly. We noticed the British slang words used, "squash, trotter". We identified Onomatopoeia: squelched, gasped, chugged and we looked at the symbolism, when the text said "rain came down" the illustration showed car driving down hill. We compared and contrasted Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car to Little Blue Truck, by Alice Schertle, and compared the excuses given in Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car to the excuses given in the classic tale, The Little Red Hen. For Math we counted passengers in Mr. ...

Two weeks ago we learned about Hawaii. We read the story Punia and The King of Sharks by Lee Wardlaw. This story is so fun and full of interesting things to study further. The story includes vocabulary words with definitions at the beginning. It is also packed with descriptive words, metaphors and simile. For math we added and subtracted sharks (4,000 sharks plus one/ 4,000 plus 1,000?). We practiced basic multiplication. If there were two lobsters for every shark guarding the cave, how many lobsters would there be? How many times did Punia trick the sharks? How many lobsters did he steal if he stole 2 each time? etc. We also learned how to count to ten in Hawaiian. For Social Studies/Geography, we located the Hawaiian Islands and learned about the formation of  the Islands. We learned about the culture of the Hawaiian Islands, who lived there before Captain Cook discovered the Islands, and how the culture has changed since then. We talked about the Tro...