A trip to the park to get in some nature

The kids still have colds and B is still moving a little slow but I really wanted to get out of the house for a little bit so I thought, it's Friday, let's go spend some time in a park with nature.  The kids seem to always enjoy doing this.  We brought all we needed to check out the nature around us.  We had the "bug looker",  binoculars,  a butterfly net,  our nature journal, paper and colored pencils, etc.  We had a nice time. I wish it was a little cooler but we did pretty well.

Brian tired very hard to catch a either a butterfly or a dragonfly but had to settle instead on a little beatle walking on the path.  It worked out fine.  :)


Little Miss J did pretty good drawing this flower for a 4 year old!  I was impressed!
We've only just started nature journaling this year.  I put everything in one binder for now.  I have divided sections for each of them and a pouch to hold stuff to draw with and to collect things with.  We'll see how it goes. I'd like to do this at least once a week if we can. We are doing KONOS Attentiveness next which is a lot of nature stuff it should be good.  Will be easier too getting out in the cooler fall/winter weather down here.

J got a scooter for her 4th birthday last month and we hadn't taken them out yet (away from the driveway in front of the house).  Today was the first of many time. I love how light and easy they are to bring along.  I get exercise too walking along with them in the park

B's Knights Lapbook

For the past few days we've been working on our knights lapbook.  This works along side our KONOS lessons and sort of puts together a lot of what we've been learning. It's great to have everything in one place!

B can take out his project and look at it over and over, remembering all of the fun things we did with this unit study and KONOS.

Lapbooks are very versatile.  You can usually find printables and information on the web for all subject, especially kids this ages.

Who doesn't enjoy cutting, and gluing.  I did help him 

cut a lot of the shapes but he did all of the

coloring/drawing, and most of the gluing for this project.  We just did a little every day this week. 

I went to a Tobin's Lab workshop at the last FPEA

 homeschool convention and she suggested that you should never try to complete a lapbook at once.  While you are working on a unit study, gather all of your activities, printouts and other stuff you want to add to your lapbook. She also suggested keeping all of the things you collect in a ziplock bag. When you are done with your unit, you then get everything out and start to build your lapbook.  This is what we did and B was really towards the end of the unit because he knew the information and was able to easily do the activities like label a castle and a knight.  

      

He is very much into medieval stuff now.  It's great  that we homeschool and the kids can really dig into a subject and stick with it.  They learn so much   more when they study things they like.  :)

This lapbook ended up being a few pages long.  I wanted to make room to add some more.  We always seem to have more to add to the lapbooks we've done.  I used 4 file folders total.

Our homemade king and queen costumes for KONOS

Today we went to my mom's house and made our basic king and queen costumes for KONOS unit Obedience.  We'll be having our medieval feast Sunday after next at a friends.  We still have lots of activities and recipes to do before then.  For the costumes went closely to how the suggest KONOS book, just some slight modifications to make it easier on us.  My mom has many lots of clothes so I just went with her ideas.  They look pretty good.  We'll take more pics once we have the crowns made.

J's neck line was a little big but my mom added a collar that helped with that.

Playmobil Fun Park

Today we went to Playmobil Fun Park which is about 30 miles from the house.  This was the first time we've been. It's $1 to get in but then you are tempted by the store on the way out. I let the kids get one thing and they wanted take a long kits.  We met up with some friends there and stayed for more than 2 hours.  It was a perfect escape from the S. Florida sun and time to have fun with friends.

Almost the end of our swim lessons

We only have 2 more weeks of swim lessons left and we'll be missing one of those to go to our local homeschool convention next weekend. We have loved learning water safety and the basics of swimming but it's a 12 mile drive each week that I'd like to avoid. I wanted J to be comfortable in the pool before we stopped that we've accomplished that goal. Very exciting!!! We have a pool in our back yard so we'll be swimming most afternoons this summer. We'll probably do some school work in the morning then swim and relax in the afternoon if we aren't out and about or with friends.