Our first week of school was completely different than what I planned a few weeks ago. The beginning of the week was pretty standard. We took our obligatory first day pictures, ate some delicious donuts from our favorite little bakery, and got to work. I was pretty concerned about trying to complete schoolwork for two students while a toddler ran around, but the first day was actually very smooth and very productive. I am not naïve enough to believe that these cooperative, cheerful attitudes will be present everyday for the rest of the school year!
Math
Benjamin's math was probably my favorite subject this week. His bookwork was scheduled to be about shapes but was a little dry, so we took out the pattern blocks and used them for several activities during the week. He traced them into his Kindergarten notebook, made pictures and played tangram games. Luke and Olivia were also drawn to them and while I worked with Ben, Luke worked with Olivia on her colors.
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| Benjamin loves puzzles, so tangrams were really fun for him. |
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| Luke helping Olivia to group her shapes. |
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| Ben's shape picture. We traced the outline and he drew . . . . |
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| An American Ninja Warrior course! |
Language Arts
One of Luke's favorite activities was a contraction review game we called "Contraction Surgery". I wrote the expanded forms of contractions onto index cards. Luke cut out the letters that weren't part of the contraction (for example, the "o" in "are not") and then used tape to put the index card back together. The tape represented the apostrophe. He then wrote the words into his Word Bank notebook (which I'll show and explain in another post).
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| Dr. Luke at work |
Where It All Went Downhill (no pun intended)
Throughout the rest of the week, we managed to get all of the necessary work done, but also had a lot of distractions. No pictures were taken and school was mainly marking off our tasks in between all of the extras. We spent an afternoon with about 30 of our closest friends at Greenfield Village, spent time with Aaron's parents who were in town, but mostly worked (or watched others work) on our backyard.
Our yard is situated about 5-6 feet above the neighbors behind us. The original owners built a retaining wall, but the wall was starting to significantly lean into our neighbors' yard. The city ordered that we have the wall fixed. After considering many options and talking to different landscapers and masons, we decided to take down the wall and slope our backyard down to the neighbors' property. There were lots of factors that came into play. The wall was in two parts that were situated around two garages and a shed. We had to make sure our garage didn't come tumbling down. The entire setup had to drain well so that we don't flood the neighbors' yards. Plus, in the middle of the wall was a utility pole.
The kids absolutely loved helping to prep the yard for the work. They helped to drag the brush to the curb and even attempted to dig out some of the blocks in the yard.
By Thursday morning, the major work had begun. The kids loved watching my cousin Andrew's landscaping business work. Sitting in the house doing schoolwork was not going to happen, so we ended up doing our schoolwork outside on the back porch and whenever the workers took a break. I think though, that the kids actually learned so much about landscaping, construction, drainage systems, machines, hard work, and so much more. I could never teach all of these things around our kitchen table.
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| Watching the dumpster get delivered |
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| There goes the fence! |
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| The first half of the wall was down by Thursday night. |
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| Luke sitting on the back porch with Papa while working on his math and phonics |
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| The boys built the construction site out of Legos. Later, they also added a very full dumpster. |
I'll include pictures of the completed project next week after we add the tree border at the bottom of the hill. Luckily, most of the project is finished, so we should be able to be a little more focused this week!
