red oak road: Homeschool Mother's Journal - the week after Memorial Day

Update: First of all, I want to thank all of you who have inquired about my father-in-law's health. He is doing as well as can be expected. After a lot of tests to determine how advanced the cancer is and if it has spread and if my father-in-law is well enough to withstand chemotherapy and surgery, he will start chemo next week.

In our life this week... we enjoyed a fun "end of the homeschool year" party. We school year round, but we finished our science program last week and have about two more weeks of our history and math curriculums. Then we will take a break before embarking on some summer fun learning activities. We keep the summer much lighter and more interest-led.

Places we are going, people we are seeing...

L-R

A and one of her best homeschool friends :)

The moms

More moms

P and two of her homeschool friends :)

In our homeschool this week...

L-R

The girls have been studiously working on a research project on Explorers.

Allie is researching the life, adventures and journey of Amerigo Vespucci and Piper is researching Christopher Columbus.

{We like Italian explorers.}

We study one artist a week.

This week the girls chose Salvador Dali.

{Obviously we are keeping things in Spain and Italy this week around here!}

We were all beyond fascinated to learn that poor Salvador's older brother had died just before Salvador was born and his parents expected him to be a replacement for his brother...actually they expected him to be his brother. Poor Sal grew up muy confused!
The girls also enjoyed learning about how Dali claimed his mustache was an antenna.

In addition to reading a biography on Salvador Dali, the girls filled in the notebooking page I created for them. {We are digging notebooking!}

Then we tried our hand at some Dali-inspired art :)

We used cardboard dipped in brown paint to make the effect of bark.

Muy cool!
Not pictured: we watched several youtube interviews with Salvadore Dali.

If I am honest, we are pretty much already in relaxed summer mode.

I spent oodles of time on home improvement projects and the girls washed my car this week.

School only took a couple of hours each day and most of that the girls did independently - they are doing their Explorer reports almost entirely independently.
They have discovered the TED talks and are enraptured with those
and we just can not get enough of the history teachers videos!

Having less school = more time for innovation.

Or, I am too cheap to buy my kids toys, so they have to make their own toys.

My girls ~~are obsessed with~~ LOVE American Girl dolls and all of their accoutrements,

but I am too cheap to spend hundreds of dollars on all the props...so Allie and Piper make their own.

Allie is constructing an American Girl house in her closet. I will share pics when she is done. She spent hours this week sewing curtains for this house.

Piper created the Cindy-Lu Who American Girl doll :)

Piper also made DVD cases, replete with little mini cardboard DVDs inside.