Weekly Report... Field Trip & Flowers...

It is always good when the week starts with a field trip! We went to the Living History Day at the Petaluma Adobe... a recreation of rancho life in the 1840's. One of my personal favorites as far as time periods go.

Here is a Now and Then kind of picture. The shot on the left is from the previous time we did this... a few years ago. My kids look so small in that picture next to the bust of General Vallejo!

Of course, even before we went up the path to the building, The Boy found something he liked! 

 

Crossing the "troll" bridge

And our first glimpse of where we were headed...

Once we got there, we ran into friends almost immediately! We filled out our "passports", and started off with candle making.











It took quite a number of trips around the giant pot to complete the candles. The Boy and I made skinnier candles than The Girl and my mom.

 We checked out all the various things you can make from cow hair, horn, and so forth...

The kids tried their hand at weaving on a loom...

And dancing! Now they'll be ready for the Fandango in October.

Spinning was fascinating! The lady doing it made it look so easy.

And finally, we tried our hand at basket making, with decent results. The kids now want me to buy more basket making supplies at the craft store, so that they can practice for next year.

And just for good measure, a small collection of other photos from the day.

You might ask what else we did this week!

 

We had a moth hatch from a pupae we dug up out in our front garden. We set it free (The Boy named it Jake by the way)!

And speaking of the front garden...

We have blueberries and poppies...

And columbine with a bee...

And my new blue columbine!

Not to mention lavender, foxglove, lobelia, sweet alyssum, and geraniums!

We also did some "schooly" stuff. We did some Math Mammoth-- The Boy worked on decimals and fractions, The Girl worked on fractions, and an addition/subtraction review.

The Boy also worked on spelling, and this week voluntarily wrote sentences that were over ten words long each, for the most part! He started reading Grimm's Grimmest Fairy Tales, and is really enjoying it!

The Girl read from both Phonics Pathways, and Reading Pathways. She unfortunately did a fairly poor job on a reading assessment (I found it at Sonlight), and while we won't be doing another one of those for some time, I am hoping that this will be the thing that gives her more reason to really focus on her phonics work.

I started reading Twig to The Girl, and Swallows & Amazons to The Boy.

We read more of String, Straightedge & Shadow, as well as The Magic of Reality, A Thousand Years of Pirates, Treasure Island (we are LOVING this book!), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

We've decided to go ahead and start wrapping up for the year. We'll take a week (and a half) off after finishing up a few things (see below), and then start up our summer studies.

To be completed before we can call it done:
Finish our study of geometry
 Watch the remaining episodes of America: The Story of US
Finish reading The Magic of Reality and Giants of Science: Darwin
Read the remainder of A Thousand Years of Pirates, and Treasure Island

I'm going to start printing out activity pages, etc., from this fun-looking math freebie I got for summer use.

The Boy is excited that we're going to make good use of our summer with Totally Irresponsible Science! It really is a great book, and I'm betting we'll get through most, if not all, of the 64 experiments before summer is over.

I have put the first of my California history read aloud books on hold at the library. And we're planning out some great field trips. The kids are very excited about seeing history, not just hearing about it!

Hope everyone else had a good week! As always, head over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for more weekly wrap-ups!