After a really busy week last week gearing up for the big birthday party this past weekend, we're ready to work on our lesson block. I'm doing a math block where we'll focus on place value, geometric shapes, doing a 100 number chart, skip counting by 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's, as well as addition and subtraction practice/review.
For science, we'll continue to discuss the changes going on as we move deeper into spring. It is the perfect time, then, to learn about the life cycle of seeds, trees and plants. We've started some seedlings already for the garden, and so I felt this would be a nice follow-up to learn a bit more visually what happens to those seeds...how they grow into plants and then become seeds again to start all over once more.
We've taken a break from animal stories and have been reading more from the Seven Year Old's Wonder Book. In it are great stories of fairies and other magical creatures as well as animals. I wanted to be a bit closer to the end of the book before my son's 7th birthday, but alas it was not to be. We're still very much enjoying the book, and find it is particularly delightful to read it before bedtime.
As this above picture shows, we spent some time using some watercolor paints. We had been given a coloring book some time ago, but my kids tend to prefer creating their own pictures with crayons, and I did not have the heart to throw the coloring book away, so I suggested we could paint the pictures instead. This idea was a hit, and was a fun activity to do while we had a bit of a rain shower blow through one afternoon.
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International travel plans, always so etheric to me since we're a year away from it, has been a topic of great conversation lately. We're getting to the point where we really should make some firm decisions about how we want to ship our "stuff", and how much "stuff" we want to ship. We've gone back and forth on this, let me tell you! We've gone to the very low extreme (packing on 20 medium-sized boxes - that's 5 boxes for each of us - and sending them via post to our final destination), to the middling option (getting a UBox from Uhaul, which is a 5' x 7' x 8' shipping container), to the high extreme (getting a 20ft shipping container to take 3/4 of our "stuff" (minus most of our furniture)).
We seem to be settling on the middle option of the UBox. It will mean we can include more things than simply medium-sized-boxes, but yet it will be less expensive and force us to simplify our "stuff" more than the 20ft shipping box would. It will still mean quite a bit of whittling down of our things so that basically everything we will own will be crammed into that 5' x 7' x 8' container. That means that we *MIGHT* be able to include a couple of bookshelves, a small table, and a few other goodies that we simply would not be able to include if we were simply posting our items to ourselves.
It will mean purchasing new furniture (or being fortunate to find a furnished place), but we're fine with that since all of our furniture is fairly old and getting run down for the most part.
I really do love the idea that I will be well-and-truly simplifying life in a way I've always dreamed of. I'll still be fairly limited in what I can actually bring, and yet there will be room for most of the truly sentimental items as well as (for example) some fabulous cast-iron cookware that I would hate to have to try to replace.
The challenge will be not to add on too many other items once we are settled overseas. If we don't find just the right place to rent right away, I want to be able to move with ease the next time.
I realize these moving details might be a bit dry and boring for some. I figured I'd not only "think aloud" here, but also I figure that it's possible by some freak chance of fate that someone else reading this will be considering international travel with their family. If my experiences (or even just my thinking aloud) can help someone else make their own dreams of international travel come true, then it was worth the risk of some potential boring space being taken up here!
May you all have a great Tuesday!
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