New Happenings

Its been a month or more since our families last post. Life gets away from you! We have been very busy with trips to the park, movies, science museums, and of course a few trips to the YMCA. The boys have all graduated from their swim lessons and home zone courses.

Wesam has finished his first round of guitar classes and the second round of cooking! Did I tell you? His group took first place in their cooking contest! We are all very proud of him. He is now working on reading Howard Zinn's book "The Peoples History of the US".

Adnan was able to attend the Jungle Book play at WWU in Bellingham with his friend Arthur. He has had numerous sleep overs at another friends house as well. Adnan is also embarking on a new diet discovering his allergies and is now on the road to recovery.

Boo and Yusef continue to grow bigger every day, and continue to amaze me. They still enjoy playing on the computer, reading, and doing more art projects than I can keep up with. They were lucky enough to join 6 different art classes for preschoolers and kindergartners over the last month or so. They spend their days outside exploring the yard and all the creepy crawlies that live there. Today Adnan helped them build cocoons using pine cones and leaves!

Today we also read a great story called Mouse Shapes which turned into a great art project using different shapes to create different creatures and items! Some pictures of their creations and the book we read are posted above!

Abduls Art!

Some of Abdul's latest creations! The second picture is a bat on a hill and a tree, and the first is The ghost of witch number 5. Good luck watching it every time!

EMP? Think twice!

Ok, second trip to the EMP, and really, truly had enough of this museum! We were disappointed the first time since there really is a huge lack of any Seattle music scene exhibits there, except of course Jimi Hendrix, now today I head out for free Thursday evenings to find out that they don't include special exhibits during the free nights! It isn't even mentioned on their website about this policy! So today, no Nirvana :( and we are debating whether or not we really want to even support this place with any money to see Nirvana later this week! And I wouldn't recommend this place for anyone, not after two visits, and two bad ones to boot.

Days go by...

Seems like days disappear before they even come to be. Time is flying so fast its unreal! Syria is full of unrest that we are praying for a quick end to. Boys are growing and learning so much! We are finding so many resources and ideas for next year I am not even sure where to quite begin!

I did find one resource today that I thought I would share for science! http://www.nature-watch.com/ Absolutely amazing!

We have also discovered http://www.criticalthinking.com/index.jsp

for general curriculum we plan to start using for the boys over the summer and into next year!

Today Abdul Rahman and Yusef worked on finding treasures in a sensory box filled with beans and rice. I originally had it made it for the small kids to do some number recognition, but in the end even Adnan found he was loving it. They sorted black beans and garbanzo beans, found the numbers from 1-5, and even built mountains and castles. They practiced scooping, dumping, and filling. It never ceases to amaze me how much fun simple things like sensory boxes are.

Wesam started guitar lessons and has been keeping up with his minimum of 1 hour daily practice and has nearly mastered one of the power chords from Metallicas "Enter Sandman" song!

Today we also played a math game with the big boys! I wonder how many of you can figure this out:

"You are given 5 beans and 4 bowls. Using all the beans, place an odd number of beans in each bowl. Explain your answer."

Good luck! And here are some pics of today!

Children's Music

Songs for children is a great way to get kids into early literacy! Heres an amazing musician with a ton of great songs, finger plays, games, and more! Enjoy!

Our garden

This is the beginning of our garden!

Earth Science

Today has been all about the science! In particular Earth! We planted seeds and some plant starts to begin our garden and we also took layers of earth and learned how plate tectonics work to make mountains. We even got to watch our own home made earth quake! Here are two videos about mountain building and earthquakes the boys made.