Weekly Wrap-up: The Updated Blog Edition

It started out so simply: I noticed that a friend had a social media gizmo on her posts, and I wanted one too. But it wasn't working. And pretty soon it was a full-fledged blog re-design. I haven't checked it on any other computers yet, so if you run into bugs, let me know! And while I like the header, I don't love the header, so it's probably not done yet. But the basic idea I'm pretty fond of. And Blogger makes things so simple that it didn't take a whole lot of time, and most of that was tweaking photos & graphics, which I really enjoy.

This week, probably the biggest excitement was the Trunk-or-Treat. Monkey set the theme, with an Anakin costume. We went with a Clone Wars version. I decided that Raven should obviously be Yoda, if Monkey is Anakin. And threw together a Luminara costume for myself. Sadly, Daddy was out of town and thus uncostumed. AND, in the last minute rush to get to the party, I forgot my camera, but blurry phone photos are a whole lot better than nothing!

Monkey as Anakin

Raven as Yoda

We also did some homeschool this week.

Phonics is going extremely well. Monkey is making some very good progress. We're mostly drilling with his Happy Phonics games, but checked in with the Bob Books late in the week, and he's getting much more fluent in his reading of books. It's very exciting! Monkey's loving the letters in the shower, but we had to banish them to the upstairs shower because they go down the drain and clog it downstairs.



We did really well on Nature Study this week too. I blogged the first trip to the park here, which was particularly notable for finding milkweed. It'd been there all along, but this week I recognized it. We'll have to try to figure out what it looks like in Spring and Summer now. When we went out again the 2nd time, Monkey remembered the milkweed & pointed them out no problem, which made me a happy Mama!

Kumon was fun this week too:


We skipped the Kumon writing book this week, because Math included so much Writing. Math Expressions actually has consumable workbooks we could buy, but so far I'm disinclined to get them. My teacher's book shows a picture - these two pages would have been a single page, with each drawing getting only 1/4 sheet of paper: pretty small for the point Monkey's fine motor skills are currently at. But the exercise was fun, and I just love Monkey's cats. (Bottom left) I helped with the second triangle to make the stars, but otherwise, he did all the writing. He wanted to. He's come so far in this in such a short time!