We started September off with The Not Back To School Party at Webster Lake. It was such a beautiful day. Hot and Sunny, it felt just like August should have felt, but didn't. The beach was filled with homeschoolers celebrating. Hannah and Avery had so much fun. We even met a few more homeschooling families.
The girls hanging around at the playground on the lake.
Hannah and Avery also began taking gymnastics classes. So far they really enjoy them. They've only had three classes so far and they have learned so much.
The pictures aren't very clear because I had to take them through an observation window.
We just finished our first week of table time. Table Time is what we call our more structured learning. We started the new school year off with an Apple unit study. It was a lot of fun and very interesting. We read books about apples and apple trees, we completed 2 art projects. The first was making an apple tree out of a collage of shapes and the second was using apples to make apple prints. We also learned about fractions and used apples as our manipulatives. It was a delicious way to do math. When we were done, we sprinkled cinnamon on our apple fractions and ate them. We took a trip to the apple orchard and picked apples. The girls were excited because Mimi and Pop-Pop came with us.
We used apple seeds to conduct our first science experiment of the year. Hopefully we will get them to sprout and we will be able to plant our own apple trees. We won't know for six weeks if we are successful or not. Either way, it was a good way to introduce the Scientific Method. For home economics we baked an apple pie from scratch, even the crust. (my first time making crust from scratch) Baking always reinforces our fraction skills, not to mention our listening and following instruction skills. Tomorrow we will make and can 2 batches of apple sauce.
That will be a family project because Kevin will be home to help us. It's always fun to work together as a family.
These are some of the pictures that I took during table time.
Some pictures at a playground in Rhode Island
Customers in training:
I took these pictures at Price Chopper. They have child size shopping carts. What a great idea! It keeps them entertained while you shop. The kids loved them. We ended up squeezing all of our stuff in these 2 carts. I wish the stores that I usually shop at had them.
Next week will be a review week. We will review what we learned last year in table time. Hopefully, it will go as smoothly as this week went. I'm still working on ways to make it interesting and fun. Avery will get a bit of a break because she didn't do as much with us last year. She will probably spend time working in her workbooks, doing Starfall.Com and watching the Leapfrog videos that we have. (I highly recommend all the Leap Frog videos for learning letters, and numbers) If Hannah does well with the review, we will move on to our 3rd grade curriculum. Hannah will also be starting a Typing and a spanish course on the computer this year. She loves to use the computer so I am hoping the new classes will be fun for her.
We have also joined a co-op. Twice a month we will be a part of an art/handwork class filled with other homeschoolers. Our first meet up is this Monday. Also, our local library offers a once a month nature program that we will be attending. It starts this Saturday. We have so much to look forward to and so much to learn. As much as I miss summer, our Fall is starting off very nicely. Happy learning everyone!!!!!!
