The Weekly Wrap-Up: The One With Pumpkins, Monet and Brains

Our very-busy-weekend is in full swing here! It's really been a great week and I'm looking forward to lots of fun this weekend.

We are staying right on track with school so far~yea! On Tuesday we took a little (much-needed for me) break and visited a pumpkin farm. The kids were so excited to pick out their pumpkins! We ended up carving them on Thursday, aka *Pumpkin Day*:) Lots of pure family fun that day!

In other school news, Mr. B finished up his first handwriting book, Getty-Dubay Italics A, this week. He has cruised right through that~he loves it! So now I need to order book B, but in the meantime he is practicing with this wonderful handwriting book I picked up last Spring at the homeschool convention. I really love it! It's put out by the Center for Essential Education. They had them for a couple of different handwriting styles, Italics included, and several skill levels, too. I have one waiting for The Princess as soon as she finishes her Getty-Dubay book D.

It's a wonderful way to practice handwriting and learn God's Word. Mr. B was so excited about it!
Things are going smoothly in the rest of the world of language arts as well. The Princess is doing great with her grammar, enjoying reading through Robinson Crusoe, whizzing through those spelling quizzes. Mr. B finished up his first reader this week~so proud of him! We are also working through a great little set of books on the long vowels that I picked up through Scholastic books last year. He also enjoys spending time on Starfall.com. If you haven't tried it yet, that's a great site for early readers.

Math continues to go well. The Princess is nearly into multiplication (she just doesn't know it yet:) and absolutely loves doing timed drills several times a week (amazing, I know!). Mr. B is all typical boy when it comes to math~it comes very easily for him and he catches on to each new concept so quickly.

In science we are studying Venus. We made our own *lava* this week to see how it flows and then hardens into *rock*. Who knew there were so many uses for flour and butter?

We are still enjoying history with Story of the World I. We're learning all about the ancient times.

In our artist/composer appreciation studies we've been learning about Beethoven and Monet. We all love listening to Beethoven's music during school time. And we're enjoying this series of books that we discovered at the library: Famous Children. Check them out here.

We also looked all through this wonderful book that was a gift from a dear friend years ago (she knew I loved Monet and was headed to France for our honeymoon:). I think we are going to give our Monet study one more week because we didn't have time to make any of the recipes in this book and the kiddos thought that would be fun. Plus I have one more painting project I wanted to do with them.

They have done several coloring sheets of his paintings though. I have to say, it is really fun instilling a love of beautiful art in my children.


This Friday marked the end of our homeschool group's 8-week co-op. It's a bittersweet time: the kids are all really sad and the moms are pretty glad to not have crazy Fridays for a while. haha Seriously though, I love co-op, too. It's fun to have different learning environments for the kids to experience.

A favorite class this time around was *Blood & Guts*. This was the week we dissected a brain...a sheep's brain to be exact. Kind of gross, I know. But the awesome mom who teaches this class really made it even grosser..er...greater by serving up brains...jello brains to be exact. Isn't that the coolest jello mold ever?! She made them with apricot jello with strawberry sauce. It was so funny to see the kids' faces when they thought she was serving real brains! :)

The Princess wasn't sure if she even wanted to taste them, but I told her we could share and she braved a few bites. If you didn't think about what shape you were eating, they were really good!

She wasn't even sure if she was going to touch the sheep brains, but she did let me get one shot of her holding them.
The evening after the final co-op was Presentation Night, when we all come together to let the classes present what they've learned. Both of my kiddos' music classes did presentations with boomwhackers and recorders. It was really a fun night!


And that wraps up our week! Whew...I'm ready for bed now. Saturday and Sunday are going to be full, full, full! I hope you have an awesome weekend, too!

This post is linked to the weekly wrap-up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.