Building Theme Weeks Three and Four

If you're a regular follower around here, you know that I've decided to continue homeschooling (but with a bit more flexibility and less planned) during the summer, and if you read the last update, then you know that we're also relocating at the end of August.

So there's a lot going on and the homeschooling has been more sparse than I wanted it to be. We've been continuing with our weekly trips to the library and children's museum and doing lots of reading and work in the garden (yes, I do consider gardening an essential subject in my children's education). But there are fewer photos of cute little projects to share. And we all know how much I love to indulge in cute little projects.

The highlights for these last two weeks of our building theme have been:


I originally got this idea from this pin, from Skip to my Lou (which I had to start following on Pinterest too...)

skiptomylou.org



But since we don't do sugar, I used little cheese cubes instead. Dried fruit might work okay too, or salami.


We got some coupons for the zoo from the summer reading program at our local library. I normally am not a big fan of the zoo. I do love seeing animals, but it's heartbreaking to see them caged essentially so we can come and gawk at them. Chobie was enthusiastic about the idea. I told him about my feelings, but he said he still wanted to go.

I do have to admit that it was better than I had expected. The animals had "habitats" with plenty of space (including places to hide from prying eyes if they wanted). I also had time to think about how it is a more complex issue, now that there have been so many generations of animals raised in captivity that cannot be released to the wild. I was also impressed with the Red Wolf exhibit and the role that the zoo has played in helping red wolf populations rebound.


The children had a good time. They both found the waterfalls in the habitats to be as interesting as the animals.


There were elphants


and tigers



and penguins (oh my?)


I also liked the attention to flora at the zoo. As a plant dork, I took note of all of the many and varied species present. Chobie explored a bit...



Back at home, Chobie did some building of his own with the boxes we have been packing for our move.



He made Bee a little sidecar to sit in.



A lot of our reading lately has deviated from our homeschool theme and just followed our general interest. (I've found some good stories that I'm planning to review soon.) But this one fit right in with the building theme Bottle Houses: The Creative World of Grandma Prisbrey [affiliate link]. Most of the books so far have been about building houses in a conventional fashion, but as the eco-hippy-style-green-building idealizer type that I am, I was thrilled to pick this book up. Plus, it's based on a real story so you can look up images of Grandma Prisbrey's bottle houses. If you're really adventurous (or just local I suppose) you could go see them in person.


Those are the major highlights from the last two weeks, or at least things that I took pictures of anyway...

Otherwise, we've been doing lots of repition reading our Bob Books, practicing letters and numbers, patterns, basic addition, sorting...again and again and again.

What have you been learning?


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