Current Exploits...

Since I stopped actively planning, our summer has very much improved! And we have a lot going on these days...

The Boy is working on a post-apocalyptic short story, and is about to start reading Animal Farm. He's simultaneously reading The Hitchhiker's Guide and The Maze Runner as well.

He's studying pen & ink techniques, such as stippling, with the aid of library books

The Girl is working on a veritable Minecraft universe in between bursts of reading from the last pages of The Time Cat and the beginning pages of Ronia, the Robber's Daughter

Plus a huge stack of library books on sea creatures

And both are helping with a tabletop garden project my sister is putting together for her severely disabled students - the table they are building here is the right height for students in wheelchairs to work...

We've also spent a lot of time at the beach with friends, learning the joy of body boarding! And for The Girl, some surfing too...

We're playing a lot of Garbage (aka Trash) and Apples to Apples Junior these days. I should dig out Scrambled States and Totally Tut while we're in game mode!

We're watching a few movies (tonight's is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, as we've been fairly extensively discussing WWII recently), and lining up documentaries that look good, and we've finally hit season three of Once Upon a Time, after taking a long break.

We identified a newcomer to our backyard, the Gulf Fritillary, which only nests on/lives in/eats passionflower vines. Our vine has expanded rapidly the last couple of years, and we were thrilled to identify the caterpillars we found all over it! We brought three, complete with the vines they were on, into the house, and then into our old butterfly habitat, for further inspection. We'll re-release them when they become butterflies. One's cocooning already!

And we are looking forward to the new things starting in just another week, when I head back to work, and The Boy heads to the junior college! The Girl is thinking of doing some volunteer work (maybe for this organization if we can get permission due to her age) while The Boy is in class.

A couple of weeks or so after that, we'll get back to regular math and writing. And we'll see where everything else falls into place.

Hope your summer is going as well as ours is!