Beginning of Brick houses

We started out by making lots of brick shapes out of clay. 

 Then we glued them to our wall structures...

 Tomorrow when they are all dry we will put them all together and have our brick house!

Learning is Fun

We recently (at the beginning of the school year) joined an online charter school. It requires a lot of us. I like it because it keeps us on track. But when we slack off a little, I feel like we are just doing boring worksheets and skipping all the fun. I decided that we need to bring the fun back.
So, for the next week, I am trying my best at doing the fun projects and not just the mandatory things. I figure since we school all year long, it will work out.
I'm hoping to take pictures of some of the fun we are having. So expect short post with fun ideas/pictures!!!

Today, we went on a shape nature walk. We went out and found different shapes we are learning about in nature. We noticed that some leaves are oval shapes. We noticed that there were diamond shapes in the bark of trees. I love using our imagination and thinking outside the box..

Today we are also making buildings. We made bricks out of clay yesterday and are going to use the dried "bricks" to build a house! I'm excited and will make sure to take pictures to post!

My motto has always been "learning should be fun." Sometimes I forget and it's so hard for even me to do school. So.. Here's to fun!!

What are some of the things that you do to make everyday learning more fun?

Thanksgiving...?

Thanksgiving. To me, it's harder to teach about Thanksgiving than about, say, Christmas or Easter. Do you teach your kids about the real Thanksgiving, or about the happy Thanksgiving that we learned in school? Or both? Thanksgiving's hard, dude.

The Boy and I made these Thanksgiving puppets last year:

And then we sailed them around in a pretend boat, and the pilgrims and Native Americans were happy little friends. And we talked about gratitude a little, but we talk about gratitude year round--so I don't think The Boy really got the connection between gratitude, celebrating Thanksgiving, and pilgrims.

I think he'll be able to grasp this stuff better this year. So I'm going to do a little bit of the history and focus more  on the gratitude. I really want to do a gratitude tree. (Like this one, but the leaves will have things we're grateful for on them.) And for the fun stuff, I'll hit up my favorite free sites for some Thanksgiving-themed activities, of course.

I'll let you guys know how it goes.