Adventures of Evie

  We're still moving through Evie's homework books today again but after she got a few pages completed I let her do some fun stuff too. We started this craft which is supposed to make a scarecrow for the fall season but Evie thought the balls made him look more like a snowman. So he's a snowcrow! She had a lot of fun putting him together either way though. She left off his hair and mouth to make him look more like a snowman and we added a fancy stripe to make his hat look fancy too. I have to admit he does look quite snowman like! After school we headed up to Nana's for family night. It's always fun to spend the evening with family. <3

  We continued talking about bugs today and for fun we made our own too! We talked about what bugs use their various parts for and then Evie got to put together her own using clay and some different bug parts. Hers had a lot of wings!! It was fun to watch her make the shapes and tell me why her bug had wings and only a few legs and he also needed sunglasses since he lives in the VERY hot.  Even though we haven't had as much time for activities recently with school, work, and sports it's always nice to take some time to just play and interact and create. :)

  Today we did some fun experimenting with "ghosts"! Since Evie was a baby we have been dissolving packing peanuts in water and its something she has always loved to do. I frequently get boxes of nail polish full of these dissolving peanuts because of my nail blogging so today since I had a whole box sitting around, I decided to set up a Halloween themed one! During her lunch break today I had her draw faces on some of the ghosts. She had a lot of fun making different expressions on them and coloring them in various ways. Then when she got home from dance class I gave her the box of them and let her dissolve them into this pumpkin full of water. She had a ton of fun with this and also with dumping the pumpkin bucket over and letting the peanuts splash around everywhere while she stomped and smashed them! It was a fun and free project! :)

  Today we did a little bit of STEM. It's been awhile since we did anything super out of the box and we had this kit that we got from my aunt which they used at Girl Scout camp. It has everything you need to make a little robot out of a toothbrush. We had a lot of fun assembling him! Once I got the wires attached to the battery Evie got to decorate him with pipe cleaners and googly eyes. He came out really cute and we had a lot of fun watching him bumble around! Evie also got to learn a bit about circuits and batteries. It was a fun break from homework! ;)

  Today we took a little nature walk to look for colored leaves. Evie usually spends her bus stop time challenging her fellow stop mates to look for feathers, sticks, leaves, and other things but on Fridays its just her and I so we spent our lunch time doing our own hunt for signs of fall. There are plenty of colored leaves on the ground already and we also had fun looking at the texture differences from the yellow to red to brown leaves. Evie is also working on her computer skills and we're testing out various online curriculum games to see if any will work for her as possibilities for next year if we choose to school at home. She spent some time on her Chromebook playing some games and just working on her mouse skills. We are very much looking forward to this weekend and getting into some fun! :)

  This morning when I got up for work I had a pop up on my phone about a fog warning. When I looked outside I could hardly see the neighbors house behind me and I just KNEW Evie was going to be excited when she woke up to see that we were in a cloud. Fog is one of her favorite weather phenomenon's. She just loves the idea that she is inside of a cloud that's on the ground. So this morning when seh woke up, even though it had already dissipated some we went out for a morning walk and she experimented with how things looked the closer or futher away she got to them. After awhile we came in for breakfast and I let her have some computer time. She chose to make some music and play with Elmo today. There are some really fun and educational games there and there is also a ton of art she can make which she loves. By afternoon it was sunny and clear again. Today is hat day at school so she got to wear her rainbow bucket hat and she was very happy about that. Of course we had to swap it...

  This week we've been working a lot on some review and easing back into more activities. Evie has been spending her morning coloring, making art, and riding her power wheel as the last days of summer start to trickle into fall. Once it's colder we'll be stuck in the house so we want to take advantage of these last mornings we can still run around and play. We did some number review this morning and then I had Evie sit down and do an assessment on the computer. She has over and over again told me how school is so boring for her and she "already knows all of this" so I wanted to see how accurate that really was. Most of her homework is definitely things she knows but it's also been a lot of just handwriting practice and a little bit of math. But surprisingly she rated pretty high on the assessments. She needed a little help setting up some of the larger problems (she still can't really read yet) but ultimately landed on a total score that put her at a secon...

  Today Evie woke up really tired and a bit cranky. I had some worksheets for her to do but she wasn't super interested so instead we did some sight word practice and then she drew me some pictures. Drawing has been a big hobby of hers lately and I love getting to see how her interests and hobbies are growing and changing . First she drew me a bird.... ...and then she made a penguin for me as well. She made the penguin pink because pink is her favorite color. She is getting SUPER excited for Halloween. She currently has about four outfits specifically for the week of Halloween at school and she really cannot wait. So today I wove some fun Halloween surprises into her lunch box. I can't wait to make more themed lunches. It's one of my favorite parts of the day to watch her face light up when she sees what I've made her.  From school we went straight to dance and since she was already tired she wasn't really feeling it today. Miss Natalie gave her a big hug and was su...

  This week Evie has gotten her first actual homework assignments from school. At first she was really excited about it and then when she realized what it was like she immediately changed her mind. Yesterday her homework focused on her writing the word "is" and she really struggled with making her  s's. So this morning I left her a sheet of tracing for them and she actually sat down and got started on them all by herself. She did really great at it and after she finished she really wanted to write some more words... So I set her up with a sheet of paper and she wrote some more things. Then she decided to use my calendar sheets to write her name. She did pretty good! We also used the chalk board a bit to practice some sight words and she wrote the word "is" a few more times. It's starting to come along now and I love that she not only jumped right into learning this morning but she also wanted to keep going and practice and learn more! :) To finish up our nig...

  Fall is coming! Today was pretty chilly so we spent most of it hanging out in the garage and playing. Evie is still really loving zooming her power wheel around and making up fun stories to play about where she is going and what she is doing. Over the weekend I picked up some Halloween themed snacks to start weaving into her lunches. Today I gave her some cherry cotton candy, gummy eyeballs, and sprinkles for her treat portion of her lunch. I snagged a few Amazon deals over the weekend as well and one of them was this fun Sprinkle Art kit from Crayola.  For $5 it felt worth it to try out. Essentially you color the pictures with glue...   Then you choose your sprinkle color and it feeds into the covered box, and you shake it up...    Then you just repeat with other colors until your picture is done. She had a lot of fun with this one but even with the cover it can be a bit messy. I'm glad we kept this one in the garage! I think the tray will come in handy for o...

  Today we learned about the climate of the Philippines and we also learned a few Filipino words which was a lot of fun. Evie was very interested in how they manage to speak so many languages there. I asked her, knowing that it's an archipelago, and knowing the climate of another archipelago (Hawaii) what she thought the weather might be like there. She quickly said "HOT! Tropical!" So then we got into what kind of natural disasters a tropical climate might bring. She guessed it would be hurricanes and while she is correct, when hurricanes occur in the Eastern Hemisphere we refer to them as typhoons. So we did some learning about typhoons today and how they could affect Filipino people. While we talked we made some shaving cream typhoons. This was really fun because Evie got to play in the cream and the paint, there was a surprise reveal and then she got to just play with what was leftover which made her very happy. First we dropped paint into a bin of shaving cream... .....

  Today we did some science to learn about how storms form. We used red warm water and blue ice cubes in a bin so that we could see how they would react when they hit each other.  We put the red in first so it spread pretty quickly and then we added the blue ice cubes. While the reaction was happening I explained to Evie that when warm, moist air hits the cooler air it gets pushed upward. Once the warm air cools down it starts to form clouds and when the clouds are too heavy it will start to rain. When it's really hot out the clouds can get very tall and sometimes, the movement of air can even cause tornadoes! During the experiment, Evie got to see how the blue cold water pushes the red warm water up to the top corner. You can also do this experiment by adding warm and cold water to a bin of room temperature water to watch the blue water sink under the red! It was fun to watch and we recreated it a few times! We had a lot of fun this week learning about climates and the weathe...