Two weeks

So, I fell behind a bit, but here is the past two weeks work we've been doing.
We got to make our own crayons. We peeled the paper off some old crayons, broke them up and the kids selected which colors they wanted to put in their cups.

Then we baked them for about 5-7 minutes.

An voila our own mixed crayons.

The kids absolutely loved having their own creations to color with. We'll be doing this again for sure. :-)

We just learned about Constantinople and Emperor Justinian and how there were mosaics in the church there. So, Denny is making mosaics (a dragon mosaic kit I bought at the store) to decorate our school room. I'll post pictures when he finishes all four.

He is also learning about verbs. We have been working in sections. We talked about action verbs and then state of being verbs. Now we are talking about linking verbs and to help him practice what he learned we made these cards with various nouns and adjectives written on them along with some linking verbs.

He chose a noun and an adjective and then picked the correct linking verb to complete the sentence. He was having a blast making funny sentences. The one pictures below is normal but he made some crazy sentences. LOL.

This year in science we are learning about the earth. So, having just read about volcanoes, we decided to make one out of a soup can, dirt, vinegar and baking soda. Oh, and red food coloring to make it look like lava.

 The kids had a blast making the volcano erupt. We went through nearly two bottles of vinegar!

This is what Ben's morning looks like. He usually doesn't wake up until we're already started with school, so he sits at his highchair and eats his breakfast then we give him toys to play with for a little while. By the time Emily is done with her school he is usually done playing with us and wants to roam, so we let him wander through the house. Don't worry, our house is child proofed and he doesn't have access to anything dangerous, plus our downstairs isn't very large so I can hear him wherever he may be down here. Most of the time he selects a toy and comes wandering back into the dining room to play with Jacob.

Emily is learning to follow directions and made a yummy snack of apple slices and peanut butter. She was so proud of herself.

Emily got to paint with food. We used half of an apple and a piece of celery for her to make a painting with. She wasn't too sure about the idea, but enjoyed herself once she got the hang of the idea.

During Denny's history lessons I read a story to him from Story of the World and then he narrates back to me what happened in the story. Then he has a coloring page or a map to work on. This day he had different building throughout the Byzantine Empire to color and glue in the appropriate place on the map.

Denny is learning about weather and we had a crazy downpour the other morning so we stuck a pitcher outside so we could measure our rain. We only got 1/4" but it poured down! We were surprised we didn't get more because the road was flooding. He has a project going to study the water cycle. (A dixie cup with a small amount of water closed in a ziploc bag and taped to a window for the sun to heat it up and show how the water becomes rain. We haven't had a sunny-enough day to make it happen, but hopefully we'll see it soon.

So, that's our report for the past two weeks. Overall, we had a great time! Both kids are doing really well. We get next week off so we're going to visit a few museums and go to storytime at the library as well as celebrate Jacob's 3rd birthday! I'm looking forward to a week off and just getting to play with my kids. :-)