May Week - Hugging Friends, Being Consistent, Counting Down

Monday felt super spring-like with a cold morning and breezy afternoon. Kids were on autopilot for school because our routine is so engrained by the end of the school year. We've got 3 weeks before summer break. Most of the kids have already finished their math books and are just doing review pages.

Makayla, who by some crazy miracle enjoyed learning to do geometry proofs, did transformational geometry today. It's fun - translating, reflecting, rotating, and dilating lines and shapes on a coordinate plane. Lots of drawing.

Midmorning I ran to a local homeschool mom's house for a curriculum sale. They're moving and decided it's a perfect time to clear out books her kids have outgrown (she only has a 10th grader left!). She had fantastic prices and wonderful books. I came home with 97 books for $50. These books would have easily cost me more than $700 new, probably closer to $900. History books, science books, literature, art - wonderful books.

Other Monday highlights: We did dinner over the fire pit tonight. Yum! Then I got a message from a dear friend I've know for more than 10 years online. She and her girls were driving through Ohio, almost to the Columbus Ohio Temple. Were we up for a visit? Yes! At 8:00pm they arrived on our doorstep on their way to a hotel further across the state. Samuel missed the picture because he fell asleep right after they arrived. It was wonderful to hug, talk, laugh, and visit!

Tuesday I had to scrape frost off the van windows before driving Makayla to seminary in the early morning. Brr! A typical spring in Ohio - unpredictable. Our school morning was much more predictable as kids moved through their daily work. Joseph finished The Icebound Land (affiliate link)today. Caleb and Oliver took turns reading to me from their All About Reading levels. Everyone read books, did math, worked on writing assignments, and so on. It was just a regular day. I love regular days!

Wednesday Makayla officially got released from oversight by the orthodontist. She just checks back in if her retainers need replaced or stop fitting. When we got home from that appointment everyone got to work doing school and I started final preparations for my Cub Scout meeting. I'm a Wolf den leader and this month we're doing Adventures in Coins and Digging in the Past. We started today with Adventures in Coins. We learned about the parts of a coin, about the U.S. Mint, different coins from the penny to a dollar coin, and how to tell which mint the coin was made at. We did crayon rubbings of our favorite coins. Then I put coins into plastic eggs for a game. We needed to do a game that involved addition or subtraction so I made up coin war. The boys would go find 2 eggs and add up the amount of money inside, then compare their totals to see who had the most and won that round of war. This was repeated until we had used all the coins. We also did a couple other quick games.

• Money memory - I laid out a small number of coins on the table and the boys looked at them before closing their eyes. I removed 1 coin and the boys opened their eyes. They figured out which coin was missing. Each round I pulled more coins away. They did great with this.
• How many ways - In this game we started really simple. I asked the boys how many ways could they use our pile of coins to make 5 cents. (1 nickel or 5 pennies). Then I gave them bigger amounts. For 10 cents the discovered they could use 10 pennies or 2 nickels, 1 dime, or 1 nickel and five pennies.

Thursday was cool and rainy. While the dreary skies are not as cheery at sunshine the birds out my window did not seem to mind. We watched them flit around looking for worms. We read books. Kids did their assignments. My youngest boys pulled out our Mr. Potato Head toys to play with. Tobias used them in the typical way.

Mason and Samuel decided they were the potatoes and used the mouths on themselves. As you can see, Mason was also in the middle of playing with our dress up clothes. He needed to be a pirate after we read Pirasaurs by Josh Funk (affiliate link).

 I started a master class from my Read Aloud Revival membership - Ancients to Zoology: Teaching Through Story. I'm trying to work my way through the master classes and this was next on my list. I thought this would be a fun one to do while I'm counting down to the end of our school year. Once we reach that I get to change out books on my shelves for next year's topics. This master class will help me plot out some of those topics - like our science topics. Other master classes I have already tackled include Focus & Align (fantastic!) and then Find Your Personality's Superpower.

Joseph working on a writing assignment.

Friday has arrived and the kids were quick to get their formal school work done so they could move on to their own interests. The girls have been working on drawing and painting projects in their bedroom. The boys have happily done math games on Multiplication.com and built Lego creations with the new bin of Legos we rotated out of the attic last night. Tobias is down for his daily nap so I'm going to spend a little bit of my afternoon working on my master class before the missionaries come to dinner. It has been a lovely week and we can officially say we only have 2 weeks of school left for the year. Hip, hip, hooray!

Also on the blog recently:

• What Planning Looks Like in my Head - The Arts and Sciences
• How We Choose Books + Our Next 6 Read Alouds

{Linking here.}