Thundercake

Our thundercake crumbled like it was struck by lightning. But everyone still ate it.

Clouds on a Sunny Day

Today we started late because the girls wanted to make pancakes for breakfast. Shannon did the bulk of the cooking!  She stood on a stepstool with her apron on and poured the batter on the griddle and flipped the pancakes.  She did a great job and managed not to burn herself.  Of course there were a lot more drips on the counter and stove, but overall pretty awesome job.

To continue with the storm theme, we read the short and sweet book, "Little Cloud" by Eric Carle.  I then had them paint what their "little cloud" would look like and why.  There were a few false starts on this one.  Kodi was unhappy with his "dog cloud" and had to start over.  Shannon kept changing her mind on what she wanted her cloud to be.  But their finished products are great.  Shannon settled on a "snail" because Little Cloud, "saw a snail on a tree".  Kodi painted "2 dogs" because Little Cloud "wanted to bark". I love that reason!

Next we made cloud shape books.  They had to cut out pictures of clouds in different 3-D shapes (cone, cylinder, sphere, cube) and match them to the right page.  Then they traced the word and copied the word below the shape.  Next they drew their favorite of the four shapes and finally they drew a cloud in a shape of their choice.  Kodi's handwriting amazes me.  Even though he is struggling with reading, he can write letters so neatly and they always face the right direction.

It took Kodi awhile to trace and write all of the shape words, so I had Shannon do an extra thing about grandparents to tie in with "Storm in the Night."  She had to write about memories with her grandparents.  She wrote "Walk the dog with Nana and Grandpa" and "Me a My Grampa and Grama at Bufalo Thundr".

Then I had Shannon do a lesson assessment I found online for "Storm in the Night".  It was for 3rd grade.  She had no problem answering the multiple choice questions for comprehension and vocabulary.  She didn't enjoy answering the write-in questions so she found a way to answer in as few words as possible.  But her answers definitely showed comprehension.  

After that Shannon did 2 exercises in her 2A math workbook on division.  Kodi worked on dolch sight words on spellingcity.com.  Then they both played Dreambox (math).  Kodi loves Dreambox and gets very excited when he gets to go on this site.  Which is great because he is doing a ton of math! 

After lunch we headed to the library.  Shannon was so excited about this huge spider outside the building.  She took some photos with my camera:

The spider from underneath

It is blurry because she wouldn't get closer on this side!

Then off to the Siskey YMCA.  We just joined yesterday so that the kids could take home school classes starting in September (Spanish and Sports).  They will also be doing taekwondo at the Simmons Y.  And Shannon will be doing gymnastics at the Harris Y.  So we will definitely be getting our maximum benefits from the regional membership!  

Today was Maddy and Mia's fitness orientation.  They are both old enough to use the cardio equipment (treadmill, bike, etc).  Maddy can use the facility without an adult.  Mia can use the equipment if I'm with her (until she turns 12 then she can go solo).  There is a great youth center for kids 6-12 that Shannon can go to whenever we are there.  It's kind of like child watch but it has a rock wall, foosball, pool table and scheduled activities.  She was thrilled to go there while Maddy and Mia did their orientation.  Poor Kodi had nowhere to go since childwatch for 5 and under was closed from 2-4.  He just hung out with me and played Fruit Ninja on my phone.   In less than a year he will be able to join Shannon in the cooler youth center.  

Then off to the pool.  We had some drizzling earlier in the day, but when we got to the pool the sun came out!  The Farleys met us there and they played in the water for a few hours. Kodi is so happy he has his green band and can go on the big slides!

Random photo of Mia at the pool
I was testing to see if I could upload photos straight to the blog.

After dinner tonight we did some more shifting of items from the schoolroom to other rooms in the house.  We have decided to completely overhaul the schoolroom now that we have the nice new windows. The thought process was like pulling a thread...If we have to paint one wall, let's just paint all of them.  Hmm, if we have to move the furniture, let's take it all out and clean the carpets....Hmm, why clean the carpets when we can replace them with laminate, I mean, how many times are we going to move all those books out of that room?  And so on....So we are almost done moving everything out.  Just have the freezer, table and my desk left in there.  Jake and I will rip out the carpet tomorrow night and see what kind of shape the subfloor is in (expecting bad).

First Day of School....kinda

This is our "preview" week, kind of a trial run for school in September.  I'm trying out Five in a Row with the younger two.  I want to see if it is challenging and interesting enough for Shannon and not too much of a stretch for Kodi.  The older two are finishing up Ancient Civilizations Vol. 1 (the Ancient China section), but they are using the unit study pdf directly and seeing if they can handle it without my assistance.  This is practice for September when they will be assigned sections for Ancient Civilizations Vol. 2 (Greece then Rome) and have to go to the pdf directly for the lesson plan.  

I read the book, "Storm in the Night" to Shannon and Kodi.   They seemed to enjoy the story more than I expected.  They sat quietly for the most part.  I don't know if I can read it to them again though.  It was sweet and the night illustrations were great, but it was slow moving and I don't know if they will want to read it twice.  We'll have to see if reading these FIAR stories five days in a row doesn't make us crazy.  Afterwards we talked about grandparents, telling stories from childhood, and also fears.

Next we discussed onomatopoeia.  I read some poems with onomatopoeia.  We did a craft hanging onomatopoeic words on raindrops from an umbrella.  Kodi was able to sound out "snap" and "bam" to write them down.  He also liked the word "whoosh" and even though I spelled it for him the first time, he decided to write it in tiny letters over and over on the drop.  Shannon took a few tries before she deemed her umbrella acceptable, so this craft took longer than expected, which was fine.  As you can see, she wrote "words" multiple times on her umbrella, not sure why.  She also had fun making a very large raindrop and a very tiny raindrop.  These aren't as pretty as the ones you see online, but they were made with supplies we had on hand and mostly done by the kids themselves.  :)

Next we discussed personification (and they came to the realization that  most  kids' movies have personified animals/objects).  We read some poems with personification ("April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, "The Train" by Emily Dickinson and "Hey Diddle Diddle") Did a game where they gave me 10 nouns and 10 verbs on slips of paper, we put them in two cups and pulled one of each and tried to make a sentence where we personified the noun. Took a few tries for them to get the hang of it.  Shannon kept having herself do the action with the object instead.  Two of our sentences were, "The scissors run across my paper, chomping it in two" and "The tree boughs fly in the wind".  Bough is one of our vocabulary words, bonus points!  

After that, Shannon did three sentences with nouns/verbs on her own and wrote them down.  Then I corrected them and she wrote them down again, neater.  She also decided she had to do illustrations.  So she added drawings of a caterpillar jumping for  "The caterpillar jumps from leaf to leaf", a book within a book within a book (an example of recursion, something she just learned about from Daddy!) for "The book flies through my mind" and a toaster looking at her hand rubbing her tummy, "The toaster hears me say, "I'm hungry".  We ended up discussing quotation marks because of this sentence.   She is getting the hang of them even though she is making them too large.

Kodi wrote his capital letters, then he wrote his lowercase letters. He writes very small and neatly for a 5 year old.  Then he did the Easy Peasy online slideshow of a few sight words (a, and, rat, cat) and read a sentence with those words.  He did the next slideshow (the, has, at, Ann) but kept getting stumped on one of them, so even though he wanted to move on, I told him to take a break and go back to it and try again later today. 

They both did math.  Kodi did 2 exercises in 1A, Shannon did 5 in 2A.  She is flying through multiplication, it is one of those things that comes easily to her.  Kodi is up to the last review in his 1A workbook.  I might have him finish it today if he is up to it.

Maddy and Mia did Ancient China and got through sections 5.2 and 5.3 and started 5.4 in the 3 hours they worked.  I will only be assigning them two sections a week in September so I think that will work out when they have other subjects to worry about. 

Then at noon it started to downpour and they begged to go outside and run in the rain.  

The fun ended when Kodi came inside crying that something out back "smelled really bad".  I guess that something got smeared on his face (looked like mud) so he couldn't get rid of the smell!  Poor guy was distraught over this odor.  So showers for everyone!  Mia and Shannon said they just took a shower outside, but I convinced them they would feel warmer if they took one inside too.