Today is…Monday June 27 2011
After saying our good byes to Grandma and Grandpa (*sniff*—they are on their way back home to Texas) and our Daddy Bear (he’d only left for work), the boys helped clean up breakfast (the new routine) and then settled in for a good read:
(just don’t tell the librarian I let my baby flip through all our books).
I gathered them together for a Gospel Message on Gifts of the Spirit, from D&C 46:28-33. We talked about what we could pray for help with, and how we’d need to act if we wanted help from the Spirit.
Did I mention I was teaching this to the Tin man and his side kick?
Kooks.
After snacks, I had Giant pick a book with something he wanted to learn about. I’ve kind of dropped off the forced themes, feeling that I was putting out a lot of energy into something he wasn’t that into. Talking to some friends over the week, I got this idea of letting the kids pick the book/topic and going with it. So…
He found “175 Nature Experiments”, and picked his experiment:
He wanted to put leaves in dyed water and see them change colour. I think we’ve done this before…but not with Ettin.
So we hunted for leaves:
Sorted our finds:
Taped them upright in a container:
Carefully added some food colouring:
…and some water for the leaves to drink:
Cool!
Then we did some art work.
We tried leaf rubbings….
(Galoot really wanted to colour too! But mostly he just ate the crayons 😉 )
Leaf hammerings:
Wow!
And Giant made a label for our experiment:
“red water levs” and “Making leaf skeletons” (theoretically the green will rot away, at some point, leaving the veins intact).
Tah Dah!
After lunch we outside to play:
(Don’t they look so well behaved out there? Just for the record, I hauled them in few minutes later when they were all scaling our small mountain of dirt beside the shed. Yes, all (I may have a climber on my hands with Galoot) ).
After lunch (and cleanup) and the little ones were sleeping, Giant and I started out with a game of go fish with number cards:
And then we spent the next hour and a half building ROBOTS!!!
(daddy let us play with his lego 😉 )