Day #154/175 Days

Our summer school session is starting today. I’m looking at using a very laid back approach. I came up with a simple check-list for both Lego-Man and Conductor. All of their work can be done on their own. This will free me up to work one-on-one with Happy and use some time planning for next year.
Lego-Man/Conductor

• Bible Study (they will be reading through the book of Hebrews and filling out free Quiet Time form.
• Mathletics (20 mins)
• Quarter Mile Math (10 mins)
• Math Score (15 mins)
• Spelling (using a sample of Sequential Spelling video program)
• Writing Journal
• Read for 1 hour

Happy
We are working through a In the Hands of a Child lapbook I was able to pick up from HOAC for $5 (love deals like that – they are offering a new one every week). We’re using Blueberries for Sal. We’ll be covering blueberries, the story line, bears, and Maine. It should be fun and I’m glad I’ll be able to focus on him for a bit.

Day #148/175 Days

The boys finished their Lego lapbooks. Here are some photos.

Lego-Man's:

Conductor's:

Day #147/175 Days

Day #3 of their Lego Lapbook (only four days total). Today was about building with Legos. This is a really cool link to a mosaic built using only Legos. It's beautiful.

We spent the afternoon at a 4-H meeting. The group is gearing up and fine tuning our project for the fair. We had started out with service/therapy dogs. It was narrowed down to Service Dogs for Autism. We'll even be incorporating that in to our community service project.

Conductor was able to spend some time shooting a .22 rifle. I find it funny that he instinctively does things like this left-handed. He bats left too when playing baseball. None of us do this. Some long ago genetics are in this child though. He loves shooting and is getting very good at it. (His Daddy is right behind him coaching him the entire time and being sure all is safe.)

Day #146/175 Days

The boys did Day #2 of their Lego Lapbook study.

Then we went and played mini-golf! I had promised to take them last week and they were good to remind me of that. We had a lot of fun. Unfortunately I left my camera home. And Lego-Man won. He was pretty happy about that fact.

Day #145/175 Days

Today the boys started on a free Lego lapbook study. It's pretty self-contained. Thankfully hubby was able to print the color pieces of the lapbook for me at work so the lapbook will be "pretty." Not that the boys care!

I like how it's laid out. I didn't make them do the copywork each day. I did make them do the vocabulary word though. They discovered that Legos were invented in Denmark and were challenged to make a copy of the Denmark flag with Legos. Here is Conductor's:

My favorite part of the day was seeing this:

Those are just part of the Lego-Man's Lego collection. I was able to talk him in to bringing them out in to the living room to share with Conductor. They were challenged to build a taxicab out of Legos (link to instructions is in the lapbook). They didn't have all the exact pieces, but Conductor persevered and came up with this version....

In the evening we went to church to participate in an "Academic Fair." This was a time for the children to share things they had worked on that year - not everything - just their favorites. I think they had more fun playing with each other but I know the parents had fun chatting and looking at everything. 

Here is Happy at his table of things:

He had his geography notebook from co-op class and the three notebooks we had put together from our Five In a Row studies (along with the actual books). There were some miscellaneous papers there as well.

Here is Conductor at his table:

Open in front of him is the large lapbook we did on the Winter Olympics. He also did a lapbook on weather. The metal tray is a tin punching project we did for 4-H. He also had his notebook from geography co-op and his notebook we've started on his train unit study. There were other miscellaneous papers as well.

And finally Lego-Man:

He brought in his posters he created for his ecology class from co-op. One was of an "air community" and the other was of a "forest community." He also had a lapbook for the Winter Olympics and one on reptiles. There are various other things here as well including some photos from the class I taught last fall.

This does not mean our learning is done. We still have 30 days to finish up our "official" school year. Although, we typically school year round with longer breaks here and there as needed.