Homeschool Groove & Photo Collage ~ 8/24/2012

Our garden has seen better days.  It has been so dry in the midwest this summer, we sort of gave up.  The boys planted sunflowers and those have thrived, and my husband planted kale and that has done great too.   The rest of it, not so much.

We made it through our first official week and have started to get into our homeschool groove for the year, you can read more about what I mean over at The Homeschool Village today.

Even though I have done away with workboxes, I have still been using the containers to "contain" each child's books and materials for the day.  We can clean things up when we are done for the afternoon, stow the containers in our school room, and then I can pull the containers out again in the early morning, ready for the start of a new day.

We have been reading a couple of "new to us" books over the last couple of weeks, here's a review of what we have been reading lately.

This year I have plans to do lots of hands on math for my younger crew.  Workbooks aren't really going to cut it yet so I have been going through my math pinterest board to see what tactile things we can do together.  I'm also going to be adding in some living math books.

We read A is for America this week as Jonah and Sarah are going to be spending a good part of the year working on States and Capitals.  We really enjoy these alphabet books.

I made some yummy banana bread for breakfast a couple of mornings this week.  I have been trying to pick relatively easy foods for breakfast, so we can eat and get the day started, but I also don't want to skimp on nutrition - we will definitely make this again.  Low sugar, no eggs or oil, with just a few chocolate chips sprinkled on top.  Filling and delicious.

Even though we are back to school, we are still trying to take advantage of our good weather and get outside as much as possible.  The other day we sat on the porch and reviewed our Latin.

Finally, our Five in a Row {FIAR} book for the week was Grandfather's Journey.  We enjoyed reading this story.  We talked about where Japan was in relation to where we live, in relation to Korea {where Sarah & Leah were born}, and we also talked about where California is located.  We briefly discussed the Pacific Ocean and how large of a body of water it is.

We have been working on the days of the week, Leah learned a new days of the week song at a summer class that she took in July.  We discussed how many days are in a week, counted on blocks how many days there are in three weeks.  That's a long time to be on a ship!

We also spent some time talking about birds and read a couple of extra books about birds.  A simple FIAR week, but a good week.