Volcanoes, Fun Spelling, Nature Walk, Swim... Week Three

This past week was busy and included lots of fun. We connected with several local homeschool families which was wonderful! 

I organized my first event for the local homeschool group which was a nature walk & scavenger hunt. I printed this free worksheet by Hearts and Trees for all the families to follow. We met at a local park, walked through several trails, found all the items on our scavenger hunt, and then ended our fun afternoon with some time at the playground. It was a beautiful afternoon. 

We went to the fun swim Friday afternoon and spent two and half hours in the water. We went down the big twirly slide together several times, swam in the deep pool and played a lot in the more shallow pool. We met another homeschool family there. Celeste played with the kids and I chatted with their Mom. 

Here we are, on our way home after the swim!

The rest of the week went nicely too. We had about two and half days filled with "school stuff". Celeste requested every morning to do her Teaching Textbooks Math. She completed five lessons and a quizz. I am so glad that she is enjoying it. 

We also started some of her language arts. The Growing with Grammar curriculum arrived and we started it this year. She has only done two lessons so far but has told me she does not like it. I answered that her siblings really liked it and she reminded me that she isn't like them! She is so right about that. It is so important to remember that just because her siblings did well or enjoyed something, it doesn't mean she will! Anyway, I don't give up on curriculum right away, I am pretty sure the alternatives probably wouldn't please her either. I think this is more an issue with the subject than the curriculum. 

We started spelling too. I am using Natural Speller with her since I already had it. We started with the lists of words from grade 1/2 and she is flying through those. The first day we did it, I handed her one of the small play blackboards we have and told her to write the words I gave her. She thought that was a lot of fun and kept asking for more words. We stopped at 14 words. On the second day, she asked if she could type her words on the computer on a blank page. She loves to practice typing. We stopped at 36 words! 

We continued with Geography this week. We learned about the oceans on Monday. We looked at them on the globe and the world map. We watched two episodes of Blue Planet on Netflix. We also finished painting our earth and sun that day. 

On Wednesday, we learned about longitude and latitude, the prime meridian and the international date line. Celeste didn't quite believe me about the international date line. It reminded me of my days in college when I studied Travel and Tourism. I will be doing Journey North Mystery Class with her this year and I think she will get more used to these terms then. On Friday, Celeste found out about the Pacific Rim. We labelled the map (like this one). We also talked about volcanoes. She was fascinated by them so we watched several videos of exploding volcanoes. I remember watching several documentaries about volcanoes when I was a child. I pinned one of them here.  The other one I shared on my blog Facebook page. The video was great because it included more explanation:

We continued with science this week, learning about the seasons and why they happen. We started our study on wind and we will be building our own anemometer next week. 
The rest of the week was filled with cooking, baking, playing card games, video games, watching movies, and just playing enjoying our time together. 

This wrap-up post is linked to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.