Last week Jack and the neighbor were trying to have the neighbor throw the ball to Jack while he was swinging and Jack would catch it with his feet. It took a while.
Eventually, though, they figured out a strategy and made it work. Jack wanted me to tell everyone I know!
We are currently rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, so Friday we had an apple party with some friends!
We made apple butter and apple pie playdoh for party favors. (Alice is giving it a good sniff.)
The kids tried tossing apple beanbags into the basket.
Alice helped get things ready so they could bob for apples.
It's a good thing we are having such warm weather, because the kids got pretty wet.
Later everyone sampled different varieties of apples. Everyone except me, that is, because I don't like apples. I'm thinking we should have a peach party next time.
The kids also made caramel apples.
Multiply this by six kids, and there were a lot of sprinkles on the floor! It was definitely worth it, though. Thank you to our friends for coming to our party!
We went on a field trip to a small apple orchard last week. It was killing Jack not to climb this tree.
When we got there, the owners told us a little about the apples and the chestnuts they also had.
The chestnuts are supposed to fall out of the pod when it opens.
Sometimes it doesn't happen quite that way, though, and you have to watch out for the prickly pod.
Alice had a good time picking up the nuts. We have a bunch of them to roast.
They had some Arkansas Black Apple trees.
Most of the apples on that tree had apple scab (sounds lovely, doesn't it?), but there were a few that looked nice.
Their Golden Delicious tree was doing well, though, and all of the kids got apples to taste.
Come back soon for pictures of our apple party!
'Cause I know that you,
Jack came in in the middle of the night and handed me another tooth. At this rate, I'll need to liquify his meals by Halloween.
Last week we used the HomeschoolShare unit for Armadillo Rodeo. Jack has read enough Jan Brett to recognize her books as soon as he sees them, so he was excited.
Jack used the instructions from Jan Brett's site to draw his own armadillo.
We did another sink/float experiment (because armadillos cannot swim and will sort of inflate themselves to get across deeper water) and were surprised with some of our results. 
Some of the vocabulary from the story along with a custom boot design!
We read a few go-along books, too. When we read Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch, I was impressed that Jack picked up on the parallel construction.
I picked this book up at Half-Price Books last year and we love it! It has tons of information and experiments and activities. Jack likes to look through it on his own, too!
One of the experiments was to see of you could get water from the soil like animals in dry climates do. We were partially successful. I think that if I had gotten the saran wrap down tighter it would have worked better, but it was a windy day and the hole was big enough that we needed to use two pieces, so it was hard to get it tight.
In math, we discussed standard and non-standard measurements. I picked up this book at Mardel to use as a review, since this was not a completely new concept. We talked about how horses are measured in hands (a hand is actually four inches) and measured different things in hands and figured out how many inches that would be.
Boot cookies!
We took a trip to a local museum which has a wonderful kids' room! They got to sit on a saddle and try to use a lasso and there was even a fake campfire and reading area, complete with a copy of Armadillo Rodeo! Unfortunately, photography is not allowed in the museum, or I would have a picture here of Alice sticking her head in the fire.
A little over a week ago, Jack showed me that his top front tooth was loose. Since he has lost the other two fairly quickly, I got him out of bed and took a picture, just in case this one came out as fast.
It took a little over a week, but it came out Tuesday morning. He was eating a Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit and he thought it was a piece of bacon. It had cheese all over it when he handed it to me.
Alice was pretty interested in his new smile. Last night the tooth fairy left him $1.24--not as much as the $1.25 for the first tooth, but more than the regular $1.00 for a normal tooth. Jack is pretty sure he saw her, too--a yellow light in his room last night!
