Week Eight: …no catchy title because it’s week freaking eight.

Week eight is going to consist of packing and trying not to eat my kids when all their toys and art supplies are already packed. All these weeks I’ve been saying that I’m committed to at least one educational activity a day. Well, that’s on hiatus until we move and unpack. …or forever. I’m exhausted by them, but Reid really enjoys it when we have a hands-on activity. Lucas seems to be indifferent or doesn’t want to do it. Since one is enthusiastic, I keep doing them.

***30 minutes later***

I’ve written four whole sentences in the last hour because the kids are being kids, so this post will be short. 

We’re fine…in the physical sense, but we’re all feeling the move and changes going on in our family. “Acting out” is an understatement…from all of us. I straight up had an adult tantrum yesterday because Lucas couldn’t keep his hands off the experiment that I had meticulously set up and measured. I ended up throwing it all out and packing all of their school things. I’m suffering now that it’s school time again and I have to draw everything by hand, but I still am holding it against them. This morning I drew some things that resembled jars (I’m no artist) for them to put the appropriate amount of stickers in instead of a premade worksheet. The other day we read a book called Even Steven and Odd Todd that my mom saved from when we were kids. The kids have been learning about opposites, but haven’t been introduced to even and odd numbers. They have, however, mentioned the characters in their daily conversations so I wanted to do an activity.  I don’t expect them to learn these until later on, but I wanted to reinforce the theory by doing an even and odds activity.

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I still had my own craft boxes unpacked so I dug out some old stickers for them to use.

I was trying to reuse the kid’s string and cup phone experiment from last week by cutting the string in half and having them blow the cups along the string to race them. We watched a video on how force works twice because they retain things better with repetition and I had them blow into their hands to feel the non-contact force that air makes. I had a series of different tools for them to use to experiment and see what blows air the best to make the cups move. I thought about this all weekend long. Well, Lucas couldn’t follow directions and kept touching things until one of the strings fell down. I couldn’t fix it to be an even start and finish line anymore and go mad. I threw the whole thing away and packed all their school supplies. That was the end of that.

***an hour and a half later***

Welp, I write this blog when I can make time for it, and now there is no time so here are the pictures from this week. 

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Last week we did a few crafts and a few worksheet days. They made string phones and toilet paper roll butterflies to practice their cutting and gluing skills. Their fine motor skills are coming along pretty well. I found that if they use markers in stead of crayons that their hand writing is much more legible. Who knew that all this time they could actually do it, but the crayons were making it hard?!

I tried the dotting activity again after Reid said it was hard. I changed it a little bit to make it easier for them to focus on. Instead of having to search for letters across a whole page, I had them searching for the same letters one row at a time. They found this activity to much easier, but still challenging.

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This week my BFF defended her thesis! I’m so excited and proud of her. While she was doing that, the kids ran around and I let them play with the hose. Boy, was that a mistake. They were soaked, but past their normal nap time, so I let them play in their new “forts” and have their tablet and snacks. It was so quiet and glorious that we’ve been doing it everyday since. My allergies have been too bad for us to spend a lot of time outside this week.

I was a little remiss that we can’t go back to Bouchon one more time for a Sunday drive and brunch, so we brought brunch to us. Reid would have preferred to go to Bouchon.

While my BFF defended her thesis, the kids pretended they were in a tub or something.

Mr. WTF took this video and I’ve had to watch it several times to remind myself that we’re some of the lucky ones.