Lego Architecture

Lego Buckingham Palace

I spent the afternoon today working on my latest Lego London landmark: Buckingham Palace!

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I was impressed right from the start with the tiling that represents the street, the gardens, and the pedestrian access:

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There were tons of tiny pieces in this set. I also encountered some very unique building techniques, but it still came together rather quickly.

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As always, I was impressed with the level of detail in the set, including the fence out front, the double decker bus (my third of varying sizes!), the flag flying over the palace (I guess Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is in?), and the Victoria Memorial out front:

One of the best parts of the Architecture series are the instruction books. They don’t just include directions for building the model, they also include a history of the building, trivia, and some beautiful photos!

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I’m very happy with how it turned out!

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We now have Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace decorating our living room. The large-scale Big Ben will be joining them eventually (the smaller Architecture model is in our school room), and I’ve heard a rumor that next year, there is also going to be a Lego London skyline Architecture set, which I’m really excited about! The more London landmarks that decorate our home, the happier I am. Even if I can’t visit that city, I can admire its beautiful architecture, Lego style!

First Day of School 2016

As you’ve probably guessed by now, today was the first day of our ninth year of homeschooling! This year, I’ll be teaching two eighth graders, one fourth grader, and a cute little pre-kindergartener!

As I traditionally do, I prepared the school room before I let the children see it. I handed out the schultüte and all of their new workbooks, placed some of the books we’ll be using this year around the room, and displayed the Lego set I purchased for this year:

I love our calendar…we’ve been using it since our very first day of school in 2008!

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Of course I had to take lots of pictures of my students!

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We didn’t do every subject, but we did get to work on the basics:

Turkey, Bunny, and Ladybug worked on building their new Lego Architecture set, a model of the Burj Khalifa:

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Chickadee doesn’t have the fine motor skills (or patience!) for a Lego set like that, yet, but she did have fun working with the pattern blocks!

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Here’s a look at this year’s arrangement of our school room:

And even though it’s not something I’ve done every year, I had Ryan take a picture of me with my students:

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Today was a great start to what I hope will be a great year of school!

2014-15 School Year–Week Thirty-Two

Another school year is complete!

I’ll be honest…I kind of phoned it in this week. We had three field trips (St. Louis Zoo, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Eckert’s), only one of which was directly related to our lessons this year. They were all fun, though, and that’s all that matters at the end of the year, right?

Other than that, we did some religion, some math, some spelling, some writing, and some grammar. I think that’s about it. We finished the year strong, with everyone scoring 100% on their spelling tests today, which was nice. Today really was a great end to the school year in general, with a trip to Eckert’s to pick strawberries and visit the farm animals, and the assembly of our latest addition to our Lego Architecture collection–the Trevi Fountain.

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Overall, I think this was a great school year…sure, there were some bumps along the way, but we all learned a lot (even me!), and had fun doing it. We’re taking a break for a few week before we begin our Illinois state history summer school unit, and then we’ll be back in August, with two seventh graders (when did I get old enough to have students in Junior High?!?), and a third grader!

The First Day of School–2014 Edition

Here’ s peek into our first day of school. We did a lot of the basics (religion, language arts, math, and our latest read-aloud, The Hobbit), but we also had a lot of fun!

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One of our first day of school traditions is that the children always make a new cover sheet for their binders. Chickadee doesn’t have a binder yet, but that didn’t stop her from joining in the coloring fun!

They take their work very seriously!

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As an extra fun project, I got the Lego Sydney Opera House (the Lego Architecture set, not the newer, huge set), for them to build. I’m hopeful that Lego will make enough of these sets that we can have one from every continent (excluding Antarctica, of course), someday. So far, we have North America, Europe (several times over), and Oceania covered!

I think we got the 2014-15 school year off to a great start…looking forward to many more fun days of learning!

2013-14 School Year–Week Thirty-Two

The 2013-14 school year is over!

We didn’t have a lot to do this week. Everyone finished their math lessons, with just a tiny bit of new information for Turkey and Bunny…range, mean, mode, and median. Of course, there was one last test of the year, for both grades, and this one was a long test! I think it’s safe to say that everybody mastered the information in their books this year.

We finished Scottish history, with Georges III and IV. I have really enjoyed our trek through both English and Scottish history over the last year, and I’m really going to miss it. I’m glad that we took some time to learn about the histories of countries that aren’t America, and next year, we’re going to continue learning about the British Empire with Our Empire Story. If there were books that were on the caliber of Our Island Story and Scotland’s Story for other countries (especially, say, Germany), we’d totally read those, too.

We continued on with our botany lessons in science. There was obviously no way we were going to finish that text, since we just started it a few weeks ago. We have finished the first two chapters though, and started a fun germination project that we’ll be measuring for a few weeks…we placed seeds in a sunlit window, the refrigerator, and a cabinet. We’ll be studying which ones sprout, and how much they grow. We’re going to add botany to our baseball summer school lessons, too, so we’ll get through some (but not all), of the book before next school year.

We also finished Mr. Popper’s Penguins this week. It really is a great book…I’m glad we read it again! I’m hoping to get through a few more read-alouds over the summer, but we’ll see how they fit in with our summer school, plus all of the other plans I have for the summer.

For our fun, end-of-the-year activity, we built the Lego Architecture Eiffel Tower. The children have been looking forward to this ever since they heard it was coming out, and even though we didn’t learn about France this year, you can never go wrong with such an iconic building! I’m hoping to buy and build the Trevi Fountain sometime in the next year, as well…we already have landmarks from England, Germany, France, and U.S. on display in our schoolroom, so an addition from Italy will be nice.

After we take a break for a few weeks, it will be time for our annual viewing of Liberty’s Kids…all of the children are already asking when we can start watching it again! And after that, it will be time for summer school. I’m really excited about looking at the history of baseball as it relates to American history this summer…I have a feeling that our special summer school units’ days are short, at least with Turkey and Bunny, and I really want to enjoy it while it lasts!

2012-13 School Year–Week Thirty-Three

That’s a wrap!

After approximately 186 days of school (probably a few more…I sometimes forget to record field trip days!), we have finished the 2012-13 school year!

We did a lot of work this week (unlike, say, the public school, which appears to have been on vacation for the last two weeks of classes!). We had to finish up American history from Nixon to the present (a lot of fun stuff to explain in there!). We had math lessons to complete, and reading lessons for Ladybug, who finally made it through the whole alphabet, and all 27 of her “Fun Tales” readers! Turkey and Bunny also finished their spelling books, and one last writing assignment. We haven’t finished our read-aloud, but we can continue reading that for fun every day!

We also had some fun this week! On Thursday, Bunny, Ladybug, and I went strawberry-picking at Eckert’s, which seemed fitting since we went apple picking during our first week of the school year. Turkey, unfortunately, was sick, but he wanted us to go anyway, which was very kind of him. We had a fun time in the strawberry fields…it was the first time any of us had picked strawberries!

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Today, after our last two tests of the year, we had a tea party for Pentecost. We were supposed to have it on Pentecost itself, but I ran out of time, and since it’s still Pentecost week, I figured I could still use red as a theme!

P1270178We also built the Lego Brandenburg Gate, a special project to tie into our studies of WWII and the Cold War/fall of the Berlin Wall. Since we waited until this afternoon to work on it, Moose got to join in, too! I love the Lego Architecture series, and can’t wait to see what other Landmarks they may come up with that I can use for school!

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It’s been a great school year. There were tough times, trying to figure out how to balance three students in two grades, with an infant (and then toddler!), besides. There were challenges as I had to look for new materials to use for Ladybug when some of the things I used for Turkey and Bunny didn’t work for her. There was the difficulty of trying to teach long division! But the good times and the successes and fun events far outweighed any problems we came across. We’ve finished five years of homeschooling, and I’m already looking forward to year six…see you in August!

The First Day of Third Grade

Today Turkey and Bunny went “back to school.”

For today, anyway, the school room is organized, books are on the shelves where they belong, the table is free of clutter–a week from now, it’ll probably be a completely different story, but today it looks good!

Turkey and Bunny are very excited about the things they’ll be learning this year, especially American History and writing in cursive. Here’s a brief rundown of our daily schedule:

In addition to all of that, we also have elective Fridays, where we’ll be learning about musical instruments, (we’ll be going through Those Amazing Musical Instruments, plus a coloring book), and composers, (we’re still using the Classical Kids Collection volumes one and two CDs), as well as horses, with Beautiful Feet’s History of the Horse. Plus we’ll use Fridays for playing educational games, such as Reading Roadway USA and the Scrambled States of America, and even the occasional Lego building activity, like the Lego White House from the Architecture series.

It’s going to be another great year–I’m so excited to get started!