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Have you ever opened your calendar to work on some scheduling and felt like you were smacked in the face with the fact that two months have gone by and you're not sure where it ran off to? Sigh. Even though we got hardly any snow this year, the end of winter just wouldn't go away and we all felt it. We tried to fight it off with lots of reading and library visits and a weekly visit to the bakery where we sat and ate donuts while trying to focus on math. Some days we were successful, and some days we definitely were not, but we kept at it, and the last two weeks we have finally started seeing the beautiful spring weather we have all been staying the course for. Yay!
We finished up our KONOS stewardship unit at the end of March with all kinds of new information learned. Stewardship is defined as using, not abusing, all that God has given us. We started off learning a bit about nutrition. Because of my long-standing food restrictions, my kids are already very aware of many nutrition aspects and ideas, but it was fun going more in depth about the food groups. We spent lots of time sorting all of our play food into the different food groups and talking about why we can't eat sugar all day long. Haha! Anyone else have to explain this one more times than you want to? We made lists of healthy snacks and prepared a few together, and made tropical drinks with festive little umbrellas in them that now have my kids asking for an umbrella in their drink every day.
From there we moved onto exercise. My kids love GoNoodle and have been using it for the last year as a fun way to get their bodies moving, especially during winter.
Next was the topic of rest. A hard one for littles to understand the value of. How many times have we thought to ourselves, one day you are going to wish you could lay down and rest for two hours in the middle of the day with no worries or thought to anything else that needs to be done. But alas, hindsight is always 20/20, so teaching them the value of it now seems important to me. We have always had quiet afternoons in our home. Even after the kids give up their naps we take 90 minutes of quiet time where they can listen to audiobooks, do craft type activities, color, read, play with Legos, etc. It's a reset for the kids and an absolute life saver for me. We also talked about dreams, listened to lullabies, and discussed what sabbath means.
Okay here's the fun part...after we learned about the value of rest, we learned about the value of having FUN! We played loads of games, and told jokes out of some library joke books (has anyone else's kids started trying to make up their own knock, knock jokes? Haha, so painful. But fun to see their little brains try!). I also taught the girls how to play Twister and we did more puzzles than I can even count. So much fun to incorporate this into school.
We talked about prevention of sickness by learning about germs, doctors and all their tools, ambulances, and caring for our teeth. In the midst of learning about this we made a visit to the dentist to have the girls check ups done. I also taught them what 9-1-1 is and when to use it.
We learned about managing money and possessions by introducing the value of coins and watching the old classic Scrooge McDuck video. We touched on careers and read all about Daniel and the many talents God gave him and how he used them.
A bigger part of this unit was spent learning about how we measure time (years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds) and learning how to tell time. Along with this we talked about budgeting time and what our priorities should be during the day. The kids are still at ages where they don't have a great concept of time and how long it may take to do something so we spent some time there guessing how long it would take to do something and then timing ourselves to see how close we were. It seemed to be eye opening to them and maybe gave them a better understanding of it.
Lastly we touched on taking care of our earth by watching a few short videos on how erosion happens and learning about why it is so important to not litter, both small things that seemed to give them a bit of understanding about this huge topic.
In the midst of this unit my parents came to town for a visit and my mom did an awesome art project with them about Wassily Kandinsky.
I love when they come for many reasons, but it's so much fun to see them enjoying art with my mom and seeing my dad give Ivy ukulele lessons.
We also took a fun drive out to Fossil, Oregon on spring break and dug for lots and lots of fossils to bring home and examine.
But you guys, this was the best part of this long winter...we got chickens!
The kids have been so excited to care for them. The girls LOVE catching them and walking around with them. It's been a great way to incorporate science into our school days, and in another month we are hoping to start seeing some eggs!
We learned so many new and fun things over the last two months, and now we are currently in the middle of our last unit study of the school year before we break for the summer. We will be finishing up our school year the last week of May and I am just so darn thankful for the year that we have had!
Links below to resources I used for our KONOS Stewardship study:
*The vast majority of these ideas were straight from the KONOS curriculum.