How-to, Why-not, What-for.....: Another week....

I think our activity schedule for the fall has been set, at least for now.
Monday: Free Day, Football practice in the evening.
Tuesday: Free Day, Football practice in the evening.
Wednesday: Cooper and Max have Karate in the morning, rest of the day is free.
Thursday: P.E. most of the day, Math Club for Chandler, and Football practice in the evening.
Friday: Free Day, Cub Scouts for Cooper and sometimes Football practice in the evening.
Saturday: Football game, monthly Mother Teresa Club for Chandler (community service group for middle schoolers), and whatever else we can squeeze in the day.

Of course, Free Day means those are the days we should be home during a full day of school work. But it could also mean we are going on a field trip, meeting friends at the Park, running errands after school work is complete, or whatever other opportunity appears.

Chandler started Math Club this week. It was not his idea and he wasn't too excited when I told him about it. I think his exact words were "Math Club is for nerds! Only nerds would get together and sit around doing math problems!!".   There are about 20 children in the class, all 6th-8th grade, so I am doubtful they could ALL be classified as a "nerd" by anyone's standards. I think he secretly enjoyed it, although that was not something he would ever admit.   Chandler excells at math, but I thought the Math Club would help him with a little extra "twist" on how to look at Math problems. Plus they go to Math Competitions, and Chandler loves anything competitive, so I am insisting that he participate this year.

Cooper began studying the Pilgrims and their voyage on the Mayflower.   We finished up our read-aloud, Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims. He really enjoyed the book and usually asked for another chapter each time we read it. He also watched a short video on BrainPopJr.com about the Pilgrims. This topic will be continued a second week as we were not able to finish due to a short school week.

Max began working on the letter "N", with the theme of Nests. We read several books about nests, and watched a short video on UnitedStreaming.com about birds making nests.   This topic will continue another week as well due to our shortened school week.

Overall it was a short week of school work, as we had family visiting on Thursday so we worked hard Mon-Wed, and took the rest of the week off.

Friday we went to the Sky Top Apple Orchard.   It has a beautiful view as the orchard sat atop of a mountain.   They had several varieties of apples, but we ended up with alot of Golden Delicious and Skyman apples. It was a very warm day and climbing up and down the orchard hills ended up being alot of work! We tried apple donuts. They were good, but didn't really taste the "apple" part of them.   There was a little bamboo forest the boys enjoyed running around through.   It was a fun experience, and we want to go back in late October when the Granny Smith apples will be ready.   We have ALOT of apples in the kitchen, and now I need to figure out a way to use them all up.

Grandma and Grandpa Swisher were visiting, and stayed at a hotel. The boys enjoying getting to know their Grandparents (we haven't seen them in several years due to distance and health), and loved swimming in the indoor swimming pool.   We took them to the pool three times over the weekend. Great way to burn a child's endless energy.

Chandler's football team lost again. It doesn't look like it is going to be a good season for the team.

And that's the week in a nutshell!

                                             Cooper's P.E. class learning soccer skills.