Okay, well we have been disciplined enough to do school, and that should be enough. I'm not going to lie, I never seem to get to do everything I want to. There's never enough time. Mostly because there's FIVE of them who need one on one. (I thought Maxwell wouldn't need me at all by now... I thought wrong.)
Also all their extra curricular activities take away time. They LOVE them though, so I figure it's all worth it, so If we don't get enough of the "necessities" it's just a season. A season where they're getting more than enough extra classes.
One thing that's taken time in the extra curricular world this week is Hyrum and Daniel doing tryouts for the drama class they're in. They're doing this play about monsters, and even though they are for sure in the play, the director wanted to find out what part they should have.
Hyrum did a monologue about Minecraft, and Daniel did one about Spiderman. This is where they excelled. They had tons of energy and slap stick humour.
Then their songs. I know this is weird for anyone who knew me when I was growing up....but I've never attempted to teach my kids to sing. I don't have my boys sing. Maxwell's pretty much tone deaf, so I just gave up early I guess. Anyway, I just had them choose whatever song they wanted, and Daniel picked a Minecraft parody song:
Hyrum did the Lego song, but he included all the talking that's done in the movie, so it was more like a second monologue than a song.
We'll see what happens in a few days!
Another thing that took up some time extracurricular this week was the "Person of Eminence" day at Westwind. Maxwell chose Brandon Mull, Hyrum chose Abraham Lincoln, Daniel chose Gandhi, and William chose Mark Rober.
I swear we went through the facts they learned about their person, but when it came time, I really had to help them. Whatever.
The best thing about the experience was Daniel's costume. Check it out:
Don't you love the bald head? Daniel insisted on it.
Also, Hyrum had Abraham dress up instead of dressing up himself which was fitting:
Cutest Abraham Lincoln I've ever seen
The boys have been LOVING Westwind which started last week. They come home inspired. Hyrum really got into this multiplication game, and made trophies for next time's events:
How cute is that?
And as far as extracurricular that I'm in charge of, science is going great. THERE ARE SO MANY KIDS! There were 20 (TWENTY) kids in my older class one week. That's as big as a "real" school!
One day we did a club about the three states of matter. They were pretty cute when they tried to blow up a balloon that was in a glass beaker. They turned very red in the face:
The kids' favourite day is, of course, polymer day where we play with oobleck (cornstarch and water) and make our own slime. We also put pencils through plastic water bags and skewers through balloons among other experiments.
And this week we did the changing states of matter which had exploding film canisters, lots of ice-water-steam demonstrations, and the BLOWING UP OF A MICROWAVE. yep.
Well, my microwave is actually still intact. But the plate I put in it is shattered. I was trying this experiment:
But I didn't watch the video in preparation, and I thought I would just put this entire bar of soap that's at least 4 years old in my microwave and that it would work. Yeah, it didn't, so I thought it needed more time....then more time...that bar of soap is all dried out and just shattered my plate which sounded like the microwave exploded.
But at least blowing up balloons with baking soda and vinegar worked (Just look at the delight on William and Abraham's faces!)
As far as history is concerned, we didn't do anything too exciting for dinosaur activities, because we went on that field trip that had activities anyway, and we are going on another dinosaur adventure this weekend. So I just bought some dinosaur eggs from the dollar store that I thought had a skeleton inside that you put together. No. It was just a tiny Dino in the egg.
See the Dino? No? yep.
But we've been learning and inspiring enough to prompt artistic renderings of Dinos.
Abraham is always doing art. Always.
We learned about cave paintings and early man, and made our own cave paintings:
We learned about Mesopotamia and Sumer and weaved a bag:
And now we're learning about Ancient Egypt. Of course we started with mummies!!!
And if all our extras that we do isn't enough, my kids create their own extras. William has been on a mission to take about every electronic thing he can get ahold of and figure out how he can play with their parts in a new way:
And Maxwell, without any prompting from me, has decided that he wants to learn Spanish and has been learning on Duolingo like crazy. He loves to be at the top of the scoring charts.
And one reason I'm so late in writing this post, is that we were gone for over a week. Yes, we went to the coast to see family, and it was oh so wonderful. We saw my sister, whom I love:
And she took us to Craigdarroch Castle, which I've never gone to. 100 trips to Victoria, and never seen it.
Well, we've seen it.
She also took us to butterfly world which was Awesome. THANK YOU DANETTE
We also went to things like China town and the petting zoo and just enjoying how gorgeous it is there:
But the main thing we did was just spend time with family.
I had a women's retreat towards the end, which was Devine. We talked a lot about meditation and mindfulness. I really needed such a zen day.
We stayed on the coast longer then anticipated because there was a freaking huge storm in Alberta, and we had to wait it out. This is what we came home to:
But my Vanuatu boys were actually quite thrilled about the snow.
So much for fall. That didn't last long. The snow came before the trees had a chance to turn colour, which means dead trees next year. :( But before we went to the coast, we celebrated fall and had a cider party. Every time we have a party there's about 50 people there. People that we really know and connect with. So different than isolated Vanuatu.
Well, tomorrow's another day of 50+ people at our house. Thanksgiving here we come, wish us luck!
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