Around Here

School is in full swing, and we have been learning and playing together :-).

I am doing this post on my phone, which means I can't move my photos around or caption them. Hopefully, it will all make sense.

Lily has been growing in every area! Physically, she has grown so tall and now has some meat on her bones. She and her brothers have been taking swimming lessons. She loves it! No big surprise - as she really is a very active girl as I have said many times before. Over the weekend, she also discovered that she loves to throw and kick the football to her daddy.
Yesterday, we went to a homeschooling co-op, and you can see her right there doing the art lesson with everyone else. Yup-she is a lefty!

This is Aaron's first year of more formal learning. He is registered in kindergarten with our charter school's homeschooling program. Honestly, I wasn't sure how things would go, as he is very sensitive and can be scared of learning new things. Things can be especially hard, I think, when you have two older brothers ahead of you who seem to know soooooo much more than you.

As an aside, there's a drawing below of a little girl trying to touch her ear with her opposite hand. In one of Nathan's social studies books, we had read about a small village in Africa where people do not know their ages. It is simply not a way they keep track of life or a marker for milestones. In order to determine if they are ready for school, they need to be able to touch their ear with their opposite hand by reaching their arm over the top of their head. I don't know why, but I love this! Nathan really got a kick out of this, too.

Anyway, Aaron has been really thriving and blooming! He has taken the plunge (not without initial tears, though) to swim lessons, soccer (he is really good), learning to read (he asks to do reading practice almost every day), and participating in classes and groups. I am so proud of him! It is so fun to see him come into his own, and enjoying it!

Below you can also see the siege tower that Matthew built out of Lego. This was a social studies assignment. We are studying the Assyrians, and their amazing, effective and often cruel methods of war.

And...we did school last Friday on our driveway in the morning. We were waiting for the space shuttle Endeavor to fly over us to its retirement. We finally did see it, and it was so cool! That photo was not taken by us :-).

Ok, off to start my day :-).