We just finished a unit study on Plants. The boys made "lapbooks" to display all the topics they learned.

The pictures show the outside cover and some of the inside little "mini books". Each mini book contains information they studied throughout the unit. The red one is Thomas's. The blue one is Daniel's.

Edited to add: The free lapbook template came from HomeschoolHelperOnline: http://www.homeschoolhelperonline.com/lapbooks/plants.htm

I finally made it back to the blog! I don't know if I'll ever be a good blogger, but I'm going to try again.

We are finishing up Weaver Volume 1, Chapter 6. We made a big ocean mural. The boys are having such fun with it they don't want to stop, so we're going to continue a couple of more days.

www.learningpage.com has the mural pages, the animal cutouts, animal fact files, and tons of activity worksheets that are all really great.

Here's a picture of our mural. I should take another one though because the boys added even more stuff to it after I thought they were done. Anyway, here is what it looked like when they first called it "done."

We decided to start today! I wanted to get a few weeks of school in before the baby comes (due end of September), and then we can take a break when baby gets here.

Can I just say AAAAHHHHHH!!! It wasn't really that bad. There were a couple of "moments," but overall I think we had a good first day of school. We didn't do everything I wanted, but we got a good start. The 6 year old whined a few times that he didn't like homeschool and he wanted to go back to public school, but I figured out it was just because he wanted to go back to Kindergarten and didn't want to learn anything new LOL. The map concept was a little difficult for him as he wanted to draw the things in his room in a 3-d view (drawers on the dressers, etc.).

The 9 year old thought the map making was really cool. We don't live in a "City" so I have to teach township (no government and no official boundary lines either, just a dot on the map), city (nearby cities), county (our local government), state, etc. We don't have city blocks either, so I just had him map our "neighborhood" which is a dead end road with family all around, no other roads coming off of it. He did a great job, even including the wells/pump house sheds, barns, etc. The DBD said this should be a 2-day objective. He finished it already and doesn't want to color it on Wednesday (he hates coloring). He suggested drawing a map (or floorplan) of our whole house like his brother did his room, so I think that's how we'll finish the objective.

The house was a disaster by the time we finished, but we have it all picked up now so hopefully DH won't be shocked when he walks in after work LOL.

The only math we did today was to evaluate which level of the Math U See program to order. I have to get it ordered now. And I didn't read anything from resource books either. I have a huge stack of books, including an entire Childcraft children's encyclopedia set at my Mama's (next door), but I didn't get them in time to go through them and find anything. The 9 year old did read from his current Chronicles of Narnia book he's working on, and I did read a couple of little books to the 6 and 3 year old. I'm going to do Saxon Phonics 1st Grade with the 6 year old, but I don't have that to start yet either. But we're getting there...