Thankfully, we celebrated Hannah's birthday as a family a day early, because the morning of her birthday she came down with the FLU! Poor kid! We had such a fun filled, exciting weekend planned and it all had to be cancelled and her party postponed...
Here are some pictures from our family celebration
In three weeks I'll have pictures from her delayed party...
Instead of traditional PE, the Montessori elementary kids take various kinds of lessons. Their first ice skating lesson was on Tuesday, and Hannah LOVED it!
The skating instructor explains some things to the first graders before trying out their skates. Hannah is at the top of the photo in the lavender jacket.
The 1st graders learn how to move around on their skates (and how to stand up when the fall down!) before moving to the ice.
sorting by color
word building
Career day luncheon
teen beads
Yoga
Word building
Tangrams
sewing
Color names
Map of the world
Field trip to pumpkin patch
hayride
Everyone picked out their pumpkins!
cornfield
hay bale maze
MUDDY!!!
Sleeping on the bus ride home...
Evansville has a huge street fair every year called the Fall Festival. Every year Montessori has a booth that sells Icky Licky (cricket suckers), Scorpion Pops and Chocolate Crickets. The new item this year is Quackwurst (duck sausage). In previous years they have sold Gator Taters, Kangaritos, and who knows what else :)
This year Mr R asked Hannah and Elijah help out promoting the booth. He provided lederhosen and duck calls, and we'll be going to a radio station or two on Monday morning.
Guten Tag! Wir verkaufen Duckwurst!!
Sind wir Enten oder Kinder?
Now ist die Zeit, als wir tanzen!!
*My apologies for the probable lack correct German grammar... It's been a long time, and I'm relying on internet translations :)
In this video you can actually see Hannah! She's just to the left of the post in the middle of the room (wearing white pants).
Today is the UN's International Day of Peace, and many Montessori schools around the globe sang a special peace song today.
Elijah came home and sang it for me.
Here is the whole school singing. It's quite long, but let it load and then skip to minute 5. That's where the camera pans to Elijah, he lifts his shirt and rubs his belly... That's my boy! Hannah is standing right behind the post in the middle of the room, so you can't see her at all.
They were on the news tonight too, but I haven't seen any online clips of that.
Hannah wanted to make slime out of cornstarch and water, so we did.
Elijah, who really doesn't like to get his hands dirty, was fairly unimpressed (I don't blame him!)
Hannah, on the other hand, had a great time with it!
Just look at that delight in her eyes :)
Since the leaves are starting to fall, I decided it was time to create my new garden for next year. I'm doing a combination square-foot and lasagne garden. The lasagne garden is just layering leaves and grass clippings right on the bed to create compost to plant in. We have SO MANY LEAVES in the fall, this shouldn't be too hard for us. I'm going to plant it like a sqare foot garden, because that just makes the most sense to me. My container garden just didn't produce like I had hoped it would... Gardening is definitely a learning experience! Oh, I almost forgot... the supplies to build my garden bed were free! The previous owners of our house left the wood and bricks... though I did go and buy some peat moss to get started.
Next year, I think I'll fill the bigger pots with flowers and let the kids take care of them.
Hannah's class took a Planet Walk, and I'm pretty sure Mr R got the idea from here. It's a to scale walk of our solar system where 20 inches = one million miles. The walk is 1.2 km which is about .8 miles. Parents were invited, so I jumped at the chance to see Mr R in action. I even opted for the bus ride down to the river with the kids.
"Setting the stage out by the Kuiper belt. K demonstrates that at our scale, he can easily step a million miles."
"Can you just make out our grain of salt? That's poor, forsaken, little dwarf planet, Pluto. Had we wanted to be completists, we would have had to walk more than twice the distance to include the slightly larger Eris, the troublemaking newcomer who started all of the controversy."
"The outer planets are separated by immense distances, averaging 300 meters or more."
I'm the tallest person in a ball cap in this picture, and a miserably hot and thirsty Hannah is next to me.
"A mushroom fit the bill nicely for Saturn (minus the rings)."
"With each stop, we'd group together, pull the appropriate object from the picnic basket, and share what we knew about the planet at hand."
"More walking... more measuring..."
"...and still more..."
Jupiter
"Almost there..."
"A kernel of allspice was just the right size for Earth. Yes, it's a stretch for a picnic supply, except in the sense that it's edible. Sort of..."
"A few more million miles, and we made it to the sun."
"A great day for a picnic... "
"...and some air conditioning for our paper plate suns."
- I borrowed the captions from the class blog
Here Hannah is showing off her 'snaggle tooth'. We are both ready for that tooth to come OUT! You can see how long Hannah's hair was... After the 3 of us got our hair cut, and all of my comments on how tangle-free Leah's hair was now, Hannah decided to get hers cut as well.
She got about 8 1/2 inches cut off!!
This one shows her hair better, but the last one had a better smile :) We are donating her hair to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths (Locks of Love isn't as great as people think)
AND while Leah was at preschool, I was able to put together a bookcase (finally)!!!
