A Beautiful Autumn Week

I'll start with the end of the week....Friday, we headed north to Pembroke for some time with our LDS homeschool friends. Cailin and Connor joined Jen and her family on a hike of the Cascades. The rest of us came a few hours later for lunch. (Brianne isn't fond of the back pack we have for her to ride in--sad, becuase I would have loved the hike.)

Brrr, the water was cold but the temperature didn't keep them from getting their feet wet.

A garter snake!!

Having fun traipsing around the rocks.

During the week we expeiremented with math. While at the library, I picked up a book about math. When I got home and looked more closely at it I became very excited because it was about place value and carrying in addition. This was something I wanted to work on with Delaney and here was a book to read to help me introduce this subject. After picking up some colorful Mike and Ike's we headed home to work out some of the problems from the book. Yahoo, she's getting it. I think she finally understands place value. This next week we'll tackle redistributing/carrying.

Things really are clicking for Delaney. Now that she's reading better I thought we might try to add spelling back into our routine. She's doing well with it. Here she doing her spelling with magnetic letters.....
and writing them in flour. I've also had her write them in playdoh and do 'rainbow word' where she writes the word over and over in rainbow colors.
Cailin's enjoying her science unit on blood. Here she is making sugary version of blood.

mix corn syrup (plasma) with sprinkles for the platelets, mike and ike's for the red blood cells, and two peanuts for the white blood cells. Viola there you have it, edible blood. Okay I really didn't expect her to eat that sugary mess....but this vampire did! Gross!

I left Ryan home one afternoon, to complete his science labs while I was taking Cailin to her soccer game. I get a phone call from my Dad, telling me that he's concerned (tounge in check) that our house will be burned down soon by Ryan. Appartently, as Ryan was talking to his grandfather he told him 'how hard his labs were...so, so hard.' I know how much he dislikes the lab part of his chemistry, but honestly, the drama!

Mmmm, cabbage and Drano, this should be interesting.

No pictures of Connor, but I'm sure he's relieved and happy for that bit of news. He's still plugging away with Life of Fred math, and the rest of his school work....this week his research was on insects and he choose fire ants. I don't think they are the cute and friendly ants he may think they are. Living down in Texas Vicki and I learned the hard way to avoid those anti-social (pun intended) guys. I had the misfortune of having them pay me a visit while staying the night at scout camp in Texas, it was one of those significant emotional events in your life. They are not fun!

I'm always looking for ways to better organize our time and work. I've done mulitple things to help Connor--ways to help him help himself--planners, checklist, calendars ect, but nothing has staying power. I'm hoping this simple weekly check-off list will have staying power. So far, after two weeks it's still working. I think it's because I can see it and thus remind him-plus, it's on the wall, he won't lose this list.
I've posted his entire week for the off chance that years from now he's want to remember what he did in Challenge A....hahaha probably not, but just maybe he'll pull it out to show his kids to verify his "up hill both ways" type stories I'm sure he'll give them!
I've created velcro tab type planners for the girls and Liam, but they didn't work. The fault with them is that they have to be created every day. Here's their checklist that we create--one for each day. We make each day's list on Sunday for the following week. Now, it's up to me to make sure (follow through is hard for me) that they get everything marked off.