Homeschool Life

This year both Chase and Joanna were due for achievement tests so I made an appointment for them to do their tests back to back and get them out of the way. We are on track to be "finished" with our school year at the end of April so I needed them to test before our evaluations. We went Friday morning and were finished around 11:30. They both did a great job so I treated them to ice cream cones at Oregon Dairy on the way home 😊

We got home and scarfed down lunch really quick and then went over to a friend from our co-op's house to celebrate Purim with them.  I have to confess that I did not know what Purim was when she invited me to celebrate with them and had to look it up. If Of course my kids were very excited when I told them about it and had lots of fun at the party.
They made "groggers": noisemakers to be used during the re-telling of the story of Esther to drown out Hamen's name when it is mentioned.

And decorated their own masks:

A good friend from our co-op, if we do this next year I must remember to dress up too :)

The kids helped make special treats and then helped eat them and enjoyed some sparkling cider as well.

Hamentachen:

Then we had a sort of skit with puppets while the story of Esther was told

I would love learning more about the Jewish holidays and traditions. The kids had a blast!
The other day Joanna was reading to Katy and it was so sweet. Jo loves reading and is doing so well at it! She often likes to read over my shoulder as I'm texting or typing out a blog post, which can be kind of annoying :P

This spring we pulled out our nature study journals again and are studying fish. We already studied trout and stickelback and this week we studied Sunfish.

We call them Sunnies and I know they are usually pretty easy to catch so I decided it was time for a hands on observation. The kids dug up some worms, packed their poles and live trap and off we went to a pond to see who could catch a sunfish first.
Jo won, and was pretty proud too :P

There are lots of different kinds of Sunnies, 17 in PA alone!

Looking at it's mouth: