Weekly Wrap Up: A Birthday Week and Slower Pace.

We began the week with Esther's birthday.  My little girl is 7 now.  It seems like yesterday she was just born!   I don't have a huge place, and right now, it's under a lot of construction (ie: painting) so I am trying to make the kids' birthdays special by other means rather then having a party.  She took her birthday off of school work.  We had a cake, and a couple of her little friends dropped gifts/cards off that day.  Later on during the week, I took Esther and her friend to an indoor play structure for the morning, where they had a blast.  She loved her week and I was glad that we could make it special for her in a variety of ways.

We have been outside a lot, as weather has permitted.  I am so pleased about getting out again with the kids. My daughter took some pictures of the blooms and flowers that are starting to unfold.  We'll use a few of her pictures to sketch on a rainy day.  And she just enjoys experimenting with different ways to take pictures. We took note of all the new changes in the nature around us as we walked up and down our street and around our backyard.  I love how they notice things: like how the back yard grass grows more quickly then the front (and why; more sun back there), and how the stages of the trees and flowers have their times.

We played a lot of math games this week.  Our program (Right Start) incorporates math games as a way of solidifying math concepts taught throughout the lessons.  We worked with exponents this past week.  My eldest dislikes showing her work, she does it in her head so quickly and right that she doesn't see the need!  She felt she didn't have to write down each part of the equation in order for it to be 'right'. :)  She also doesn't understand why learning about all this is beneficial.  I can hardly blame her, I had similar thoughts at her age.  The difference between her and I is that she is a natural at math and I was not.  My hubby was home and heard us talking about it so sat and chatted with her about the importance of showing her work.  He also talked to her about how incredible our universe is and how God wove math together to create the vast cosmos and life here on earth.  I found myself being in awe of this as he spoke about how God was so orderly and math is an expression of this order.  He's so great with the kids, doing science and math easily with them, in an every day sort of way, bringing it to their level of understanding while at the same time helping them to see it in a broader sense too.

We're coming to a close with this month's book for book club (A Wrinkle in Time).  Book club is Monday, looking forward to that and I will be posting about it the following week.  Heather will be doing a book review on Dragon Chronicles Series for Book Sharing Monday.  She worked on her book report for it this week as part of her grammar assignment.  She did a great job, just needing to fine tune it a bit here and there.

Nice week all around, despite my struggle with bouts of headaches due to the rapid changes in barometric pressure.  It's always a struggle for me that way when the seasons change.

Esther - playing with some lego on her birthday.

One of the pics my daughter took of the evidences of spring.


We are linked up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap Up!