spring fun

We've been so busy these last few days... gardening, painting pictures, visiting with grandparents, doing math and writing and phonics. Now that it's springtime, I can see another wonderful benefit to homeschooling: you don't have to be inside all day in school! The kids have been playing outside each day for hours at a time, loving the water, the dirt, the grass, and even the bugs. Z has been having fun picking up worms. E is still warming up to them :-)

On the weekend, we were digging up garden beds in our front yard. This is a picture of him and Z getting ready to plant the rose bush that my dad gave us. It's a climber, and we're thinking of putting up a nice cedar arbour over the gate for it to climb up. Z had a great time digging with dad. For the rest of the evening, him and E played in the other big hole daddy dug (for a willow), making their own little play fort with sticks, a skipping rope and some little bulldozers. I'm constantly amazed by how much fun they can have with a few simple things.

Today, we visited my parents, and the kids had a wonderful time playing in the dirt 'helping' grandpa mix up his soil. Even H joined in this time. When I looked at her hands a while later, She had four very dirty fingers and one perfectly clean thumb!! (Good thing... since she sucks her thumb all the time LOL.. I guess a little dirt won't hurt her.

After that, we went to visit my grandma, and that is always a treat. E did her writing lesson there and finished up the last of the lowercase cursive letters (x, y, z). (did you know they call them 'lowercase' because when the printers would do everything by hand, they would keep the more frequently used letters on the bottome shelf for easy access so they were 'lower' and the big ones were the 'upper' ones).

Below is a few pictures that E has painted in the last little while. She was inspired to paint after she went with her other grandparents downtown to an art fair where different kinds of artists were demonstrating their work. The first picture is of 3 nuns walking towards their church at nighttime, and the other two are just 'artistic'.