WAY Late Month in Review (April)

(I swear, I WILL get back to regular posts someday!)

Learning how to ride a 4 wheeler bike

The kids' suncatchers

First spot of spring in our garden!

Hard at work on research for her book

Cross stitching (all from the pattern in her mind) a gift for her uncle's birthday

Chicken pox snake!

A cave with boulders on each side and a happy face cookie

Studying Brianna's bird watching book

She loves to try to paint/draw with her mouth

Painting her E for her alphabet book

Dot circles are still a favorite

She wanted me to take a picture of her happy face guy

Impressive tracing on her Gs

The kids love to turn my walkway into a mosaic 

Olivia insisted in joining Brianna in strength training (yes they're using soup cans for weights lol)

Earth Day litter clean up!

Making fine detail clay creations

Hard labour is great Phys. Ed. class! Doesn't matter if you're only 3 and 10, re-gravel the driveway!

2013 Running Season

The girls started training today for the 2013 running season. This will be their 3rd season. Currently Tanya is opting out of the Triathlon, but we'll see how it goes.

Their race schedule for this year is as follows:
May 20th, 9am - 5K
June 12th, 6pm - 5K
July 6th, 11am - 2.5K
Aug 24th, 8am - Triathlon (Brianna, 100m swim, 6K bike, 1.5K run, Tanya (if she goes) 200m swim, 9K bike, 2K run)
Sept 2nd, 9am - 5K
Sept 15th, 10am - 10K

Olivia may be taking part in the July 6th race (for her age group I believe it's a 200m run). She seemed to love watching the girls run last year and pretended to be in the race anyways :)

Month In Review (March)

Life has very much gotten in the way lately. My niece, Tanya, is currently staying with us and that just adds an extra kid's worth of busy-ness! Here's what we did in the month of March:

Tanya made a cake for my sister, her mom, for her birthday. She tried a new technique, marbling, for the icing.

 This was the girls 2nd year taking part in the World Education Days. They love it!

Cutting practice. Olivia constantly holds her scissors like this even after being showed how to do it correctly... any ideas to help her?

Her first time doing a pattern page! She got all of the right on the first try, the smart cookie!

My mom is in Culinary School and Olivia loves to help Grandma with her homework!

Tanya got promoted in Air Cadets!

 The age old science experiment of burning stuff with a magnifying glass was a huge hit!

Dot flowers

Tanya and Brianna are taking a bookmaking class this spring.

Olivia's attempts at writing 10. Pretty good I say!

Pre-writing practice. She goes from right to left often, but the lines are getting straighter

Month in Review - February

My brain is really scattered this pregnancy and I can barely remember to hand out school work, let alone blog about it! So I figured I'd at least pop up some pics for February to still be blogging about school. *Yes, I know it's the 12th of March, but shush!*

Brianna decided to make everyone animals with her Bendaroos. This was a penguin for Grandma

In February, Brianna cut an article out of the newspaper everyday to write an opinion piece on it. Olivia loved to help Brianna glue her articles into her notebook

Olivia's first sunshine drawing

Mystery Class started in February! 

Tracing shapes

Olivia helped make our Valentine's Day cake

Double fisting the markers while working on her Alphabet Book

Our version of a snow day means school turns into Phys. Ed so the driveway can be shovelled!

While out shovelling, Brianna forgot about her glass of water. She was amazed to find an "ice cup" in the bottom of her glass!

Brianna helping Olivia with her pattern sorting bugs.

Coloring caterpillars

Circle stickers for her letter C

Coloring Dora

For some reason she only wanted to write the 1s on this page.

Wooooo for Rosetta Stone! I can't wait to start this in the fall!

Brianna and Tanya's flute practice

World Education Days Results

World Spelling Day:
- Tanya got 407 words correct in 5 rounds (50 quizzes) with a 70.45% accuracy, an 8% improvement from last year.
- Brianna got 279 words correct in 5 rounds with a 65.34% accuracy, also an 8% improvement over last year.

World Math Day:
- Tanya got 747 correct answers in 5 rounds with a 93.42% accuracy!
- Brianna got 768 correct answers in 5 rounds with a 93.1% accuracy, a 6% improvement over last year!
And these are girls that "suck" at math *roll eyes* lol

World Science Day: (was randomly crashing and had to do it over 2 days)
- Tanya got 182 correct answers in 50 games with a 45.38% accuracy an improvement of 5% over last year.
- Brianna got 281 correct answers in 50 games with a 63.29% accuracy, an amazing *20%* improvement over last year!!
Both girls lost a LOT of accuracy points worrying about speed and getting through as many answers as possible rather than slowing down to make sure they correctly answered the questions they already knew.

We can't wait til next year!!

Why It Was So Quiet Around Here

After promising to come back and post often, I ended up anemic and sleeping zillions of hours a day and barely having time for school let alone tracking it on the blog. However, I had a good reason for anemia....

We've got #5 coming in June!

We've been trying for sometime for our last one and it finally worked! As you'll notice in my ticker above, I'm almost 18 weeks now. We hope to find out if baby's a boy or girl later this month!

Now that I'm into my 2nd trimester (and upping my iron!) I'm feeling a zillion % better and am back into the swing of things. This past week Olivia started Tot School again and Brianna is back to a mostly full schedule (she's on a slightly lighter load until the end of May for my sake), and Tanya has come back to join us for History, Geography and Science.

In History we are covering 4 of the major wars, 1812, Civil War, WWI and WWII, over the next few months. We're mostly watching videos and reading books. There's some war re-enactments that go on in the summer around here that we hope to attend as well.

Mystery Class starts again at the end of this month! The girls had loads of fun last year and with little help, got 6 of the 10 mystery locations correct. They're both greatly looking forward to it again this year!

For Science, we're taking advantage of my pregnancy and up coming birth. Both girls are interested in fetal development, so we're doing some in depth human biology. I am also planning a home birth and both girls will have the option of being there when the baby is born. Brianna is hugely excited on the prospect of that, Tanya goes from wanting to be there to "ew, gross" lol

In Math and English, Brianna is looking to complete her Gr. 5 curriculum by the end of May, at which time we'll go on "baby break". Because of Brianna's lack of handling long breaks well, I plan to have at least some math and English for her to do each week. Depending on how I feel and baby's personality, we'll start back with regular school in Aug or Sept.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for the Weekly Wrap Up!

Tot School - A & B

Linking up with 1+1+1=1

This week we mostly worked on A and B, but as usual, other letters get tossed in :)

Olivia's main concern this week was her notebook. She literally spent HOURS working in it. It wasn't necessarily her doing the exact worksheets, but she happily colored in the circles on her apple page, traced a couple letters when she felt like it and just generally enjoyed using the dry erase markers on the sheet protectors.

Write ABC Android app. Olivia thought this was just great!

Olivia was super thrilled to get some new paint this week. 

We've started on our alphabet book. Each week she'll craft a large version of the week's letter(s) and I'll cut it out and add it in. 

Dot stickers are still a big hit here!