February Wrap-Up

This is what my month consisted of:

That's the cake I made for our Cub Scout's Blue and Gold Banquet. Then there was Valentine's Day, which meant a lot of this:

We did some fun stuff, like the children's museum

And playing in the mountain snow


But mostly it was baking.

And molding...

And carving...

But now it's about 6 weeks till the last frost. So it's time for this....

which makes me very happy.

Weekly Wrap-Up

This has been a busy week for us...

• Monday started with our weekly co-op classes in the morning. We only have a couple more classes this semester, but my boys have really enjoyed it this time around. We took a break for a year but I think they were ready to go back. It helped that I am one of their teachers too.
• Tuesday we had our monthly Cub Scout Meeting. Rylan and Cale both recieved beads toward their current badge. I made these cupcakes....my excuse to try our new cake and frosting recipes. These were chocolate with toasted meringue frosting.
• We have swimming lessons every Wednesday morning- at least until Dec. 2nd. Rylan is pretty scared of the water, neither him nor Cale can swim. But for the past 5 weeks we have gone to Maryville College for our lessons from college student taking a class for aquatic education.
  
• We also began our unit/lapbook on the American Government. So far we've covered the founding fathers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the branches of the government....and some other things. Today we began on the presidents. Rylan LOVES the presidents. It's the one thing he's consistently been interested in for years. We will be going through next week, then I'll share our completed unit and resources.But for now...
  

Here's Cohen's constitution...I love 4 yr old writing

Cale's Government tree

• We also got our chickens this week. We've got one weakling, but hopefully she'll pull through.
• 
• We had our Cub Scout den meetings on Thursday afternoon. I wish I had my camera, since the Tigers were learning about the Flag, the Pledge and having a flag ceremony. One of the boy's grandfather came in with a flag pole, different flags, showed them how to stand. He was a Cubmaster for his son's packs years ago and did great with them. They looked adorable standing in uniform all in a line like that.
  

• And today is Paul's 30th birthday. He came home a little earlier from work today and we had crabcakes and peach cobbler for dinner

For more weekly wrap-ups, visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Cub Scout Achievement #6

Start a Collection

My oldest is a natural collector. He collects everything from the fake credit cards we get in the junk mail to rocks to shells to coins. Although he is normally well organized, his shelfs are not. Each collection has it's own box or bag but that is as far as his organization goes. So for the Start a Collection acheivement for his wolf badge I told him he could either fix up one of existing collection with labels and such or he could have something of mine that was in need of some work...of course chose the new collection.

I have this old box. And it is filled 500+ of these:

Some of them are from when I was a collector as a kid. Most I 'inherited' while going through the attic in my childhood house. They've sat in this can for years and years. So the other night we set to work sorting them. Presidents, animals, holidays, famous people, countries, historical, etc....

Last night I gave him my scrapbooking letter stickers, photo splits and an extra photo album and he worked on a couple of pages....

He's about halfway done. I can tell he's proud of it; he's picked the book up and looked though it a few time this morning and showed it off to his brothers.

Weather Lapbook

We started our weather unit this past week....most of it was based upon the requirements for the Cub Scouts Weather belt loop and pin. My 6 yr old worked on this lapbook to pull all his stuff together in one place:

The first side flap has a circle folded into fourths with his picture of the water cycle. Also it has our vocab words- I cut out cloud shapes and he glued them on craft sticks and I wrote the words, he looked them up in the glossary or dictionary and read the definition (dictated for me to write)

The middle is covered by his cloud page. Nothing beats cotton to make clouds! We made 6 different flaps, he wrote the name and created the cloud and then we read about what types of weather are associated with each to write on the inside. Under the clouds: There is a cloud shaped book about lightning and what causes it, a 'ways we use water 'mini book, a cloud shaped, pop-up rainbow he drew and how they are made. And a how accurate are forecasters minibook.

The other side flap has a copywork page- I wrote out some weather saying and he copied them below. And our weather journal for a 6 day period. We recorded rain, temp and wind.

The back consists of the Billy, Maria and the Thunderstorm coloring book. They have a few different titles on various weather situation- you can find them here. The extreme weather book was a cut-and-paste from the Owlie Skywarn's Weather Book. and a venn diagram comparing tornadoes to hurricanes.

A lot of the full paage sized documents I scaled down in the printer options to print 2-4 pages/sheet instead of 1 page/sheet so they would fit better in our book. I have another to share....my 4yr old requested another "reading lapbook" as he put it.....so we did one today on the short I sound. He didn't finish one part- the writing word cards and didn't want me to take pictures of it until he did that. So maybe I will share that one tomorrow.