2012 Photo Challenge: March

Because of this year's challenge, I stopped and asked strangers to take a family pic of us (something I don't normally do) on two separate outings. Hurray for two more family pics that I wouldn't normally have! 

Spring (officially and unofficially)

Happy first day of spring - officially! 

(Somebody needs to tell Georgia, though, because it feels an awfully lot like summertime around here!)

After Dinner Entertainment

We had a little impromptu after dinner entertainment last night. All the songs were made up on the spot, and include titles sure to become famous like Popstar Mummy, Clappy Hands, Chicken Head, Dudettes, and more!

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
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Apart from the whole thing just cracking me up, here are a couple of my favorite things to watch for in this video:
1st song - Watch Kerri when Emma Lee says "I have nothing to say."
3rd song - I love that Emma Lee switches to her "country voice" for the chicken song, and of course, you just have to love the head bobbing and sound effects that go along with this song.
4th song - I love how you can't understand 90% of what Kerri says in this song (and I'm pretty sure she made up quite a few words in it!).
5th song - The entire song just cracks me up, but I think my favorite thing is the voice changes.

School Recap: February

I felt like I was dragging through February. We got all our work done, but none of it was extremely exciting. For whatever reason, my camera also spent most of the month in its bag, so a couple of these pictures are from this week but showcasing work we did last month.

Some days this is what school looks like around here: pjs and on the floor.

Other days, I let the girls choose their own outfits (please don't tell me I'm the only mom who usually won't let her 7 year old go out in public dressed in an outfit of her choice....) and seats (clearly, the tabletop is a much better learning space than a plain old chair!)

Our extra focus this month was poetry. We read all sorts of poems and created a lot of our own. The girls made acrostics with their names, wrote poems about themselves, wrote, found, and illustrated a lot of similes and metaphors, and had fun with alliteration. One of their favorite poems they wrote together is about penguins (and I believed was inspired by the watching of Mr. Popper's Penguins the night before):
On our way to Pennsylvania we saw a penguin.
It was a pretty penguin.
It was a panting, pretty penguin.
It was a painting, panting, pretty penguin.
It was a perfect, painting, panting, pretty penguin.
It was a pink, perfect, painting, panting, pretty penguin.
And its name was Polly.

Well, Shakespeare they're not, but they had fun!

You can click on the pictures for a better look

We also made foldables for our poetry vocabulary with the terms on the outside and the definition and example on the inside.

The opened word here is alliteration

In grammar, the girls have been practicing building sentences in either an A Adj SN V Adv or  A Adj Adj SN V Adv Adv pattern by choosing the appropriate words from a word bank. They did some alphabetical ordering (and loved it when we used conversation hearts!). They also learned when to use a question mark or a period as an end mark for their complete sentences, and they learned when they should use an instead of a.

alphabetical order from awesome to you rock

Fruit on the A Tree includes a lemon, a pear, a plum, a coconut, a banana, a peach, and a cherry. Fruit on the An Tree includes an orange, an apple, and an apricot.

In math this month they've been doing a lot of adding and subtracting. We've used these "power towers" to help us have a little more fun in our review time. They also learned how to add double digit numbers and can tell you how many dimes and pennies it would take to equal that amount (ex. 54=5 dimes and 4 pennies). They've also had some extra practice with telling time, problem solving, and even/odd numbers.

Reading, writing, and spelling are all going well. Emma Lee knows how to write just about anything in cursive and has been using it a lot on her own throughout the day (because we made a deal that she could do less worksheet practice if she practiced with it more on her own). It's amazing how much happier she is writing whatever she wants to on her dry erase board or in one of her (many!) notebooks instead of copying a certain sentence on a worksheet. It works for me!

We tried out a new (to us) art project - "painting" with shaving cream and food coloring. It was a huge hit with Kerri (who loves to be messy) and not much of a hit with Emma Lee (who got Kerri to do the messy part for her, so she didn't have to get her hands dirty). They swirled food color around in shaving cream and placed cut out hearts into the mixture and then pulled them straight up for a marbled "painted" heart.

We also had a fun Valentine's day party with their cousins and took a trip to the Children's Museum in Atlanta. We had a great time, but sadly I forgot my camera. I think that about sums up February. We've already had an exciting first week of March, so I'm sure I'll have lots to share next month!

BFF

I love that they beg to have "sleepovers" even though they already sleep in the same room. (I love it even more when they actually go to sleep and I don't have to be the bad guy and send them to separate beds!)

 Nothing beats having a built-in BFF!