Weekly Wrap-Up Sept 20-24

This week I went to download our pictures and we had 334!
That's 334 documented moments.
Well sometimes I just kept clicking away half caught up in the moment and half striving for that "perfect" shot.
Here are a couple of my favorites...

This week we really implemented our Calendar Time. This helped us stay on task and gave both Hazel and Jakob something to participate in.
My inspiration came from Homeschool Creations' post on Calendar Time.
We have adapted it to make it our own but as soon as we iron out the creases I will post more in depth about it.

We continued our experiment on mealworms, but since my books had not come in from the library yet on our next subject we extended the discussion to butterflies. I was so very impressed with the level of excitement shown by Jakob and he verbalized the various cycles of metamorphosis (which is a HUGE step for him).
We also had a little fun pretending to be a cocoon...

Over the weekend I fretted about whether or not I was "doing" enough in comparison to others that I read about on the blogs and a friend of mine whose child is clearly covering subjects far more advanced than we are... but this week really proved to me that we are right on track.
From his first inventions realized (aqueduct and a labrynth both made out of Legos), to the remembering of Isis being an Egyptian God (spurred by the name tag on a cow at a local Dairy Farm).
From the moments I thought I was going to pull my hair out thinking that an 8 year old boy and a 3 yr old girl could never get along. To the happenings of their secret sibling embraces and how, out of love showing your sister a new love increases your own ability to learn.

All in all our week was wonderful but out finest hour was Thursday. We celebrated the first day of Autumn by taking a field trip to a local park. We searched for clues to fall in the trees (such as this "mango colored").....

Since we had been studying the Seven Wonders we took the suggestion of my brother and went looking for wonders of our own. Here are some of Jakob's photos....

(After seeing the one above I realized her couldn't have taken this one as he is in fact in it, but the others are definitely his)

He now picks out any statue or structure and calls it a "wonder"... I love it!!

Our cooking this week involved making Caramel Apples. Sooo Yummy.

Watercolors were our demise yet again this week as we covered the wise men worshiping Jesus and following a star. I gave the kids blue and yellow to work with, which upon application immediately produced a meltdown because the colors ran. After a few minutes in his room and a calm(er) discussion he decided to try again. Again I think his first one was just as beautiful as his second but ... well you know.

Jakob's (the one on the Left is the first one)

Hazel's

Mine

In the end he still asks for more painting. I constantly struggle with whether or not to allow this level of stress in our lives but we take it day by day and see how it goes.
So.. That's us in a nutshell. How was your week?