Building a community

It's one of the things that concerned me most about home schooling from the beginning...making sure that he grows up into a community of people that know and love him.  I think now that I was wrong to make this an issue about home schooling.  I think it's an issue for kids in general.  Unless you belong (and are very active) in a church, it's hard to find a group of people to call your own.  There are definitely home school communities and we have a great group that we see almost every week now, but I really felt like we needed a little more.

Enter the community garden.  It's new in our little town and we're VERY excited to see it come together!  We went to a work day yesterday to help finish the building, mulching, and digging that needed to be done before the grand opening next week.  It's a fabulous, energetic, loving group of people and we had a wonderful time!

Chipmunk spent nearly two and a half hours filling wheelbarrows with dirt.  With a Chipmunk-sized trowel :)



 He really worked over there by himself for a long time - people kept coming up to offer help and he would tell them "No, thank you. It's MY job!"

I'm so excited that we're getting to be a part of this.  He's going to be able to learn about where his food comes from, gardening, friendship, helping people, and so much more!

Happy, dirty, and exhausted.  Just the way we like him!!  (Thanks so much for the photos, Gretchen!)

Plants and Flowers

Granddad bought this wonderful book not too long ago and we've been reading it just about every day...several times a day...for weeks!  :)

Today was a science day, so we followed up with our bean sprout and spent some time looking at it in detail and identifying all the different parts.  It had come far enough along that we could see the leaves coming out of the bean and the roots were developing really well.  (please excuse the nasty rag - it's one we use for painting)



To see how water travels through a flower, we did the classic food color and daisies experiment.  It's still so much fun!

Fresh white daisies!




I filled them ALL UP with water!




All of the color added in...they're so pretty :)



10 minutes later...it's turning blue already!  We could see the blue and the green pretty quickly and in about an hour we could see the yellow and red starting to come into the petals.  I can't wait to see what they look like in the morning!



More tomorrow!

Shapes and Puzzles

A wonderful friend gave us a bag full of puzzles and games and we're really enjoying them!  These shape puzzles require that The Chipmunk find (and name) the shape he needs and match the colors to the card.  After that, he uses them together to make a picture.

He gets so excited that he just can't sit down.




Matching shapes and colors




Naming everything




And putting it all together!



He's known his shapes and colors for a while, but this is great reinforcement.  He's having to makes choices about size, shape, and color and figure out how they all go together to finish.  The puzzles get progressively harder and we're looking forward to doing more!

Beautiful weather and good friends!

Sometimes you just have to forget about everything else and go outside.  I don't think we've come in except to sleep for the past three days!

Just enjoying the sunshine :)






A little time at the park...




A ride (or three) around the block....




Flowers for Mama!!




A trip to the creek....




....and....

A little Montessori

We've been working on phonics a lot lately and really enjoying these printables.  I can't find the link right now, but I'll post it when I do!

Building a beaver dam

Little Man is really enjoying his book about beavers this week, so we went out after the rain and built a beaver dam!  He gathered sticks and rocks and made a (tiny) functioning dam.  We spent some time talking about why beavers build dams (to create ponds where they can build lodges to live) and the benefits of dams to the local environments.  We watched to see that the water on the other side was cleaner - the dam acted as a filter and sent cleaner water 'downstream'.  We had a lot of fun stopping the water and watching it move faster when we let it go and then finding ways to measure how fast the water was moving (we ran along side it).

Photos by Granddad!

Bookaholic

The Chipmunk LOVES to read - we spend close to two hours every day curled up with books.  I love the choices he makes and the variety is hard to keep up with some weeks!  These are the books that he's interested in right now - we read each of them at least a couple of times every day and follow up with activities that reinforce what he's reading.  On the list this week....writing a letter to a friend and mailing it, building a weather station in the yard, starting more seeds, and building a beaver dam!