It’s June! The weather is warming up, and we’re gearing up for summer fun activities.
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Monday was our first official day of 1st grade for Holden and 5th grade for Haylee. Our new 2014-2015 school year has begun!
Of course, I had every intention of taking a first-day-of-school picture, but that never happened, as usual! LOL. Come on, I know you guys can surely relate!
In any case, it went pretty well. There were a couple of things I had forgotten to prepare, so we had to stop a couple of times while I got some things together, but all in all, it was a good day. The kids actually finished on time, and that was great!
The next couple of days went even better. Holden was finishing up around 12:30 each day, and Haylee was finishing up by 2 PM when we had to pick Hayden up from school. Naturally, it helped to have a little incentive going…I took them to Ocean Breeze Water Park both Tuesday and Wednesday because they finished up on time so we could go right when we picked Hayden up. That was great! We had so much fun. Not a bad start to the school year! I could definitely get used to this routine!
It seems the workload is just about right for both of them this year. I am making Holden do all of his own writing this year rather than tracing over my writing, and he’s doing remarkably well.
I tried to choose curriculum I thought they’d both respond well to this year. Haylee is again doing lots of workbook-based work, but since I actually planned for it rather than switched to it this year, I have it all organized and set up by day for the whole year. I even have it scheduled out on her daily schedule. They both seem to really like everything (well, except Holden detests handwriting, but that’s a given), so that’s a good place to start. I’m hoping we have a really good school year.
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My perennial flowers in my front flowerbed have finally begun to bloom for summer! Now that the daffodils and tulips are all gone for the season, I get to enjoy these gorgeous beauties! Look at all of those buds getting ready to open! I can hardly wait.
And I’ve got a solar lantern pole by my front door with 2 hanging baskets in it, and my petunias there are also doing beautifully! Such happy colors!
I just love flowers! They make me feel so happy inside and put a smile on my face very time.
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Haylee is doing Sonlight’s Core F this year, and it has us studying all the major countries of the Eastern Hemisphere. I really wanted to find some free printable lapbooks online to go with those countries that Haylee and I could put together as we go along. She loves crafty things and hands-on activities, so I figured that would spice things up a bit for her. So on Friday night, I stayed up really late researching, and I’m happy to say that I found most of the country lapbooks I needed for free at Homeschool Share. I downloaded the ones I would need, and I went ahead and printed up the one for China since we’re reading about China now.
On Saturday afternoon, Haylee and I sat together and assembled the China lapbook. It turned out really cute! It was just what I was looking for. The kit included any links I would need in order to find the information to fill out the elements of the lapbook, so it came together quite nicely without taking a lot of time for research. It was fun! Here’s how it turned out.
Then after we’d already made it, I decided the one we’d make was oversized, and that made it awkward to store. So when I was looking around online and found these premade lapbook bases and adhesive strips you can add so the lapbooks can be stored in a 3-ring binder, I got to thinking that I could very easily just make those myself from 3 sheets of cardstock, some clear packing tape, and a 3-hole punched 2-inch strip of cardstock with some double-sided tape on it.
So being the thrift person that I am, I set out to do just that. I took apart the above lapbook and transferred everything to my homemade lapbook that is 8.5x11 sized and easily stores in a 3-ring binder. I also printed the cover directly onto the front sheet of cardstock. Here’s how it turned out:
And then I made a cover for the binder to hold all the country lapbooks we’ll be making to go with her core study. With this setup, the lapbook sits nice and flat inside the binder. I’m going to pick up some of those little Velcro coins to use as a means of keeping the lapbooks closed as we flip through them for future reference.
Now isn’t this much better? I’m going to do them this way from now on, for sure.
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This was our first Saturday without baseball this spring. Boy, it was nice to sleep in since we all went to bed so late! 9 AM was very late for me. I made everybody a big brunch of omelet with smoked ham/onions/red pepper/New Zealand grass-fed cheddar, Potatoes O’Brien, bacon, herbed chicken sausage, and mini Grands biscuits with butter and local organic strawberry preserves that I got in this week’s fruit share CSA distribution. Yum! That was a nice treat and held us all over until dinner.
That’s about it for us this week! We’re looking forward to spending more time at the water park this summer. How about you? What are your summer plans?
See ya next week.
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