Connecticut, Week 1

The Awana games were held on Saturday. Our team (er, I mean Olivia's team) took 2nd place. It was really fun to watch! Some of the games were really silly, and some required a great deal of speed and good balance. I got some really good shots, but most show the faces of her teammates well, and I didn't know if the parents would have a problem with me posting here. So here is a lovely shot of the back of Olivia while she's playing balloon volleyball.

This week was relatively normal, thank God! We were able to dive back into our Cantering the Country program and start working on Connecticut, the 5th state to join the Union. We did a brief overview this week, including coloring and labeling our state map; working on the state coin and learning about the Charter Oak and about the state flag.

Our famous Connecticut native this week was Tomie dePaola. The girls love his books, so they didn't mind a bit learning more about him, and reading more of his work. Our library also had a wonderful video of Tomie live in concert, which was really fun for us all. The girls watched it and worked along with him as he did an mini art lesson.

Books and videos we used:

Tomie dePaola, by Mae Woods
The Art Lesson, by Tomie dePaola
Tomie dePaola's Book of Poems, by Tomie dePaola
Tomie dePaola The Pied Piper of Children's Books, Live in Concert! (VHS)
Connecticut, by Dennis B. Fradin
Connecticut, by Nancy Furstinger

Olivia finished reading Our Kansas Home, by Deborah Hopkinson. This was the third and final book in the series. She's decided to move on to the Little House books now. Both girls are moving through their core subjects wonderfully. Lindsey is starting to sound out much bigger words than her "readers" have her doing. For example, she read the name "Massanutten" this week without help....so I need to bump her up a bit!

Now on to the GREAT news! Standardized tests are done, scores are back and I'm so proud of Olivia. She earned a perfect score on the math section!! If you recall, we had some REALLY rocky times with her in math and to get such a great score is such an awesome turn around! She did great in language arts as well.....but MATH wooohoooo!!
The Performance Awards dress rehearsal was held Friday evening. Isn't she precious?

Immediately (and I mean IMMEDIATELY) after dress rehearsal was baseball practice. Thankfully the park was directly across the street from the rehearsal site. We swapped clothes super fast....and here is what you get when you mix ballet and baseball in the same day. (I noticed she's even standing in first position.)

While Olivia was at practice, Lindsey said she wanted to do something special, so we walked across the road and roamed around the city park. Lindsey found lots of things to investigate, and by the time we left, she had yet another little boy stuck close by her side.

Today was co-op. The weather was yucky so recess was held indoors and everyone was wide open! We only have 6 more weeks, and then our tour of duty there is over.

Be sure to go the Weekly Wrap Up to see how everyone else's week progressed.