Outdoor School

School moved outside yesterday with the gorgeous weather. Lily diligently editing while Gabe was taking a quick trip up the block on his bike in between subjects.

Spring Learning

These sunny spring days are inspiring us to focus our school work more on art, nature study and physical activity.  New artist easels arrived for Lily and Gabe this morning along with some new history audio books and DVDs.  So we declared an art and history day!  The easels were immediately set up and drawings of animals began while listening to our next three history chapters.  And now it has warmed up just enough to make softball outside sound appealing!

Lily's Art

Gabe's Artwork

We purchased a wonderful new art book called Big Book of Things to Draw. The kids are having a great time with all the ideas.

Cranbrook Airport

sculpture in front of the airport representing the relationship between Natives and Europeans.

 The kids and I went on a fun field trip today to our local airport.  It's quite small with only two terminals but that made it perfect for touring.  We got to see all the maintenance equipment, go out on the tarmac for a closer look at a private jet. Watched a medic flight come in and learned all about airport and specifically runway maintenance.

Gigantic broom which sweeps away the snow

Gabe climbing up into the cab of the snow plow (my photo software isn't working well and won't flip my pictures!)

School Books

A package of school books arrived first thing this morning. The kids were so excited to open it up and see the new goodies - we began reading the books right away!

Mapmaking

Lily and Gabe have embarked on a project together. They are making a LARGE map of British Columbia, filling in mountains, rivers, lakes, cities and whatever else we can think of. I initially just thought it would be fun for them to work together on a Social Studies project but it's really much harder than I anticipated. Drawing things to any sort of scale is extremely difficult even though we are using grid paper. And although we have lots of maps of Canada, several geography book - a couple of which are devoted exclusively to Canada - and seemingly lots of resources we are having trouble finding a good detailed map of BC.

On another note - I've been abysmal about updating this blog and now it really needs to be devoted to the educational endeavours of all three kids. So, I'm going to attempt to overhaul the whole thing. The goal was for this to be a log of Lily's schoolwork and I would still like it to serve that purpose -only for all of them!