Friday, April 22, 2016

Spring Break 16

Day 1: Ikea



Day 2: Sleep, Zootopia, catching up, Henry to piano and soccer, and mommy and Thea time.

Day 3:Donuts and the Natural History Museum

 sorry Johann, it was the best one of the kids. 




(Gone with the Wind dress they randomly have. I was so excited!)

Leo's first trip the NHM
 His second trip, just under two years later. 




 My favorite part, learning about the desert tortoise. Also learned squirrels are not native but were brought as pets, and possums were brought as food. mmm. 

Day 4: Pasadena's huge fancy park and the Huntington Library 





 Henry carrying around Johann's binoculars, not a purse. He's quirky, but not that quirky.




Remember this cute picture from a year or so ago? We thought we'd give it another try...
...
 ...
 ...
 Yeah, didn't happen.

Day 5: Checking out trails in Yucaipa, lunch at the park and the downtown Yucaipa antique shops.




 In this area we saw an owl and hawk fighting it out over territory. It was pretty intense, especially to see an owl during the day. The owl won. 




Weekend: Conference, and resting before heading back to day to day life.

It looks like Elder Oaks doesn't think Thea's Capt America costume and cowboy hat are a good match.

One afternoon I came out from changing Leo to find Henry and Thea taking the whole lunch making business into their own hands. I love they felt they needed aprons for using the microwave. 

Why didn't anyone tell me?

I have a hard time finding contemporary LDS artists that I really like. Why didn't anyone tell me about J. Kirk Richards?  I went to an RS activity last night and saw some small prints in the hostess' home, and had her tell me about them, and who did them. I'm so excited! The only problem is gathering a few thousand dollars so I can actually get one of his originals.


A few I really like




So for anyone holding out on other not quite as well known LDS artists, share!

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Some Homeschool Helps

My last homeschool post was pretty Debbie-Downer. I can't help it. It's in my name for Heaven's sake. Since I'm behind on my goal of 4 post per month for this month, here's a not depressing homeschool post on some of the resources I've been using lately or recently discovered.

Podcasts:
We have been listening to more podcasts lately, and were looking for some family friendly ones. Johann found a few, and these are our favorites so far.

Tumble Science Podcast for kids
The link will take you to the blog for the podcast. I really enjoy this one. The last episode about the explorers club was really fun. One of the beauties of homeschool is that after listening to this podcast, and hearing how you can find meteors in your own yard, we just went and did it. I'm not always spontaneous, and I'm sure that causes some learning opportunities to suffer, but this was just so easy we went for it, and had a good time finding some bits of meteorites then viewing them under our microscope.

Brains on! 
This is also a science podcast. Henry's favorite episode was probably the one about life on other planets, and learning about the 'Goldilocks zone'. Annoying theme song, and the reading of kids' members' names gets old, but other than that it's solid. The mystery sound is also fun, and I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.

From the Top
So this may not also be Henry's favorite, but he has enjoyed some of the performances, and it's good for him to hear some kids practice for HOURS a day, when I'm only asking for thirty minutes most days.

As a head's up, we tried Storynory, and we're not impressed. The first two stories we tried to listen to were about murder and ghosts. My kid get freaked out enough already, so we haven't tried those again. If anyone knows of any more literature or history based ones let me know. Still haven't tired out Short and Curly, so looking forward to that.

Apps:

Kids' Book Finder- An app from BYU that helps you find books for kids based on grade-level, topic, genre, and award. I mean, Amazon does a pretty good job, but grade-level helps a lot.

NASA-Henry has fun watching some of the videos.

MadLibs-Working on parts of speech? Henry didn't even realize. Sucker.


That's all for now. I need to get back to giving myself an hour or so a week to just go over resources because they can make such a difference. We also have had a better go the last week or so. Today was fun going through Sunset's Western Garden Book, coming up with questions for what we should base our plant selection off of, and finding out if the plants he liked met that criteria (no), and then doing more searching. He finally decided on 'penstemon ambiguus' or Beardtongue. Tomorrow we'll pick it up, and we'll plant on Friday for Earth Day.