Enjoyed the wonderful warm weather!!
Spent lots of time with friends.
This little girl lives behind us and has for years, but we just met her this month when she came up to our fence and screamed through the trees which provide a privacy hedge between our properties, "Hey, over here!! Hey you guys!! Come here!!" We all stopped in our tracks and looked at each other with the thought, "huh??" Then we shrugged and went over to see who was yelling. Since then she's jumped the fence nearly any time we're outside and it's been Bella's dream come true. A girl just her age whose as girly as she is. The first thing they do EVERY time she comes over is put on their princess dresses. Here the princesses are bobsledding. You can tell Bella's not as in to it at that moment. I think she really wanted to go to the Prince's ball, but the "prince" decided bobsledding would be more fun.
Christian has also started playing more with little friends. This is his best buddy CJ. They are adorable together. When they are in the car together, they will jibber-jabber back and forth and laugh at each other like they're actually having a conversation....I guess I shouldn't say it that way; maybe they are! In any case, it's the cutest thing you've ever seen.
And I realized as I looked through my pictures from March, I didn't photograph a lot of our crafts/math games/science projects from this month for some reason. I'll have to be better at that again. In any case, here's a few that we did:
Made a math game with cars. Math problems in the parking spaces, answers on the cars. Drive the car with the correct answer along the road and park it in the space with the corresponding question. I included addition and subtraction up to 3 digits w/regrouping and multiplication. Didn't include any division, but Benjamin got 100% without help and had a lot of fun. I was very happy. For Bella I adapted it to be a matching game between upper case letters and their lower-case equivalents. She had a great time feeling like she was doing "kindergarten work."
In honor of spring and easter, we did several egg and plant experiments, but the only ones I have pictures of are these:
Cool osmosis and equilibrium experiment. Remove the egg shell of 2 raw eggs by soaking the egg overnight in vinegar and rubbing the remaining grit off with a cloth under water. This way the membrane is still intact. Then put one egg in pure water and the other in a concentrated water-sugar solution. (Sidenote: also got to talk about density in observing why the one in water sinks but the one in sugar water floats - always cool when one experiment teaches lots of different things.) The one in water absorbs water and swells. The one in sugar loses water and shrinks. Really cool to see how big the egg gets compared to the other. Had planned to let them go one more day and then switch them and watch them change in the opposite way, but of course, this experiment required lots of patience, something my 5 and 3 year old do not have in abundance. So after waiting 24 hours for the vinegar to do it's thing and another 24 for the water/sugar glasses to do their thing, my kids were anxious to smash the eggs and get messy not wait for further changes. So no later stage photos on this one, but FYI, if you poke the water egg with a sharp point, the absorbed water shoots out like a fountain. Very thrilling. :)
Ever get tired of waiting for your plants to appear from under the ground after you've planted them? My kids do, so we did this instead. Put the seeds on contact paper and cover with a wet paper towel. Then stick it to the window and surround well with painter's tape so the water can't evaporate out. Within a day and a half, we had roots growing out of the seeds. In 4 days it went from nothing to busting out of it's space. The kids LOVED seeing the rapid progress. Then we could put them in dirt and let them continue to grow. We did this with sunflower seeds because my kids hate peas, but I've seen other websites where they did it with peas and the shoots grow upwards too, not just the roots going down. Sunflower seeds are harder, so the leaves were just popping out of the seed the day we took them off the window. The kids loved it regardless.
So there's March. Today we're living in our tent in the living room as is our tradition during General Conference. I printed out tons of coloring sheets and activities and had all sorts of ideas for what do to, thinking it would be so great. They finished everything I prepared during the first session and couldn't believe we had 3 more sessions to go. The second session was a struggle. I will have to change my plans for tomorrow!
