School and a trip

I love that we can take a vacation and work in field trip style learning. It's such a win win situation. We do our normal school routine Monday thru Wednesday and took our school on the road for the rest of the week.

Cricket is really progressing with her reading, and I have enjoyed using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with her. 

She is especially loving reading her password each day

Word Wall - Left side mastered words and Right side still working on

Cricket is getting better at following directions and staying in the lines, but she's also throwing in her own flair!

 

Cricket is still steadily progressing with her Kindergarten level math, and we are both pleased with the mix Horizons provides.

The visualization and different colors helped Cricket with counting more consistently.

 

We choose not to focus on a country this week, but instead we explored a different region on our vacation. While visiting the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee we covered mountain ranges, animals of the area, a little history, and reviewed "me on a map" as we returned home. 

Cricket was beyond thrilled that we got to see a couple of bears, and while hiking in Cades Cove to the Elijah Oliver place we got to see a small herd of deer. 

Cricket observing the deer with Daddy (one of the deer is far right).

Also during our trip we went to the Tennessee Aquarium, and Cricket fell in love...with the sharks. We ended up spending a long time at the shark tanks at her request and even caught a great scuba diver led educational segment. 

In addition, to observing all the incredible fish she was able to pet a sturgeon, identify and observe butterflies, and learn about the architecture of turtle shells. We all had a really enjoyable and educational day. 

As a bonus, Cricket was super excited to see the blue dart frog that we had just learned about in Expedition Earth. 

Cricket is still in love with painting. She chose to waterpaint her u is for unicorn page. I got these super cute letter pages from Flipflops and Applesauce. She has really enjoyed all of these so far, and I am just letting her pick the letter she wants to do each week.

She also free painted a rainbow and I loved her color mixing that she did. I only gave her primary colors for this. 

In addition to walking the entire aquarium by herself Cricket also hiked with us some in the Great Smoky Mountains. I was super impressed by her endurance and enjoyment of all the activity. We also went to play putt-putt together for the first time. Cricket enjoyed herself, but she wasn't at all focused on the task at hand. she typically did decent with her initial shot at each hole, and then it would just all fall apart. I don't think there will be any golf dates with Papa in her future though.

Thanks for visiting,

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