NC Aquarium- Fort Fisher

We spent the weekend at the beach. While there, we decided to check out the aquarium that is nearby.
It was small, but the kids enjoyed it.

Father's Day

Colin made breakfast.


There were cards and presents.


Out for lunch


Colin made a cake.


Happy Father's Day to my wonderful hubby!

Swimming

The girls have made a lot of progress swimming. On our first day at the pool this summer, Molly was a little scared, but she was jumping in on that same visit. After a couple more visits, they were taking off their life jackets and really swimming. Their techniquie could definitely use some work, but they're doing great.

Here is Caleigh. She likes to swim underwater.




Here is Molly.


Colin

The Bee Tree

Over the last week, we have been studying the Five in a Row book, The Bee Tree. The setting of the book is Michigan so we started out reading some books about that state, doing a coloring page for the state bird and the state flower, and locating it on our map. Here is a picture of our story disk on our map.


We discussed and read books about gold rushes. We found the Yukon Peninsula on the map. Then we studied bees.

Here are our notebooks. 




Some of the lapbooks we did: where is Michigan, where is the Yukon, Yukon goldrush, life cycle of a bee, hexagons, types of bees, bee dances, and hive robbers.

Today we made bees for a snack.


They are made by mixing peanut butter, powdered sugar, butter, and graham crackers together and shaping into ovals. Then melt some chocolate chips to make the stripes and eyes. The wings are almonds.

Studying Plants

For the last two weeks, we've been studying plants. We learned that plants are living things, the parts of the plant, each part's job, what they need to grow, about photosynthesis, how seeds travel and their parts, and how insects help them.

To help the kids understand how a plant drinks, we put blue food coloring in a vase of water. We put a celery stalk and a white flower in the vase. Over the next few days, we observed the blue color moving up the celery and flower.

We also planted some seeds of our own and watched them grow.




Painting egg carton flowers


The finished flowers

NC Zoo

Chad had the day off from work on Friday so we decided to head to the zoo.

Washington, D.C.

Chad had to go to Pennslyvania for work so we went with him. We've been talking about taking the kids to Washington, D.C. for a while thinking they were probably old enough to get something out of it. We decided that on the way back down from PA was a good opportunity to try out a short trip.

On our first day, we walked a lot looking at all the monuments.













The next day, we visited some of the Smithsonian Museums.

Air and Space Museum




Museum of Natural History


Museum of American History


We'll definitely go back for another visit when we have more time. We'd like to go to the zoo and spend more time in the museums since everyone was pretty tired from the previous day's walking by the time we got to them.

Strawberry Picking

Here's my sweet girl trying one of the strawberries. She never liked them when she tried the ones from the store. Finally, we got her to try a fresh one that she picked last year and she loved it.


I have no idea why she makes these crazy faces.


The girls fills their buckets before Colin is even half way finished. He has to carefully inspect each one before picking it.


Finally a full bucket.


I think these 3 buckets were gone in 2 days.

Trip to Kentucky

We spent a few days in KY visiting family.

This coal house is actually in WV, but it's close enough that you can probably see into KY standing there.


My sister-in-law has goats, which the kids love to see.







We also went to the Breaks Interstate Park on the KY/VA border.






They have displays about coal mining in the visitor's center. We had to discuss those and refresh our memories from studying coal mining when we did the book, The Rag Coat, earlier in the year.



While at the Breaks, we did some geocaching. It was our first time and the kids had a lot of fun hunting the treasure. Here is Molly finding the last one.