The last 2 weeks: LEGO, letterboxing, and summer fun

It has been a busy couple weeks, so I'm combining last week and the week before. I'm sorry that this is such a long post!

We started with some LEGO fun on a Monday morning before we were going to a swim party with co-op friends.  I loved these LEGO tricolor gummy men that Almost unschoolers made.  I had the same silicone minifigure ice-cube tray laying around because I bought it for our lego co-op class last Winter.  Turns out I never used it for the class, so I was bummed that I had wasted the money on it.  But, then she started posting all these fun ideas like the melted chocolate-chip lego men
(which we did, but didn't get pictures of), and these gummy men, and even jolly rancher men (which we still have to do). I was so excited to find uses for this ice-tray!

 Our lego gummy minifigs.  This turned out to be such a fun activity in more ways than one.  Making gummies with these boys was a hit.

Alex with his gummy minifig

 This is the silicone tray.  Now I can think of all kinds of fun things to do with it.

They came out pretty good, and the kids just gobbled them up.

This was probably the funnest part.  After they made their gummies I let them make their own designs on a plate.  I had never worked with this gummy mix so I didn't quite know what I was doing, but now we definitely want to do it again.  The tutorial at Almost unschoolers was super helpful!

Aaron's fish

Then it was off to an afternoon of swimming!  We were invited by a friend at our co-op to their neighborhood pool.  They had a private party just for our group, so it was a lot of fun.

We don't get many opportunities to swim in outdoor pools.  These kids swam, and swam!

Alex's first time on a dive board.

He loved it...

The next day on Tuesday we had a birthday party which was at the fountain park.  More sun for us!

Alex playing duck duck goose!

kids at the fountain

Wednesday was a lot of K'nex building fun.

Aaron with his creations

He was really proud of this bird.

We also got a chapter of history in.  Aric colored these Greek paper dolls.  Yes, we are still on Greece, and not moving very fast through SOTW.  Hoping to make it up this summer.

We have been studying bees.  I found this fun bee honeycomb hexagon craft to make out of paper towel rolls.  Aaron loved it.  I'm sure if we hadn't run out of rolls he would have kept going.

We went away June 14th for a night to the coast without kids for our 15th anniversary.  It was a nice break from kids, and life.  The coast was beautiful.

While we were at the coast we bought this book that we are excited to do with the kdis.  It has some great adventures and things to see while finding a "treasure" (a box with a stamp in it, a lot like letterboxing) on the coast.

Which leads us to our next adventure.  The Monday after the kids really wanted to go out and try their new walking sticks that we picked up for them at the coast, but we didn't have time for a full hike.  So, I decided it would be fun to find a letterbox.  Letterboxing is a lot like geocaching, but you use clues instead of a gps to find the "box".

We followed all the directions, and almost didn't find it.  But, we didn't give up..


...and finally found it in a hole at the bottom of a tree.

 There it is!

 Alex was ready for an adventure.  He refused to give me the backpack.

When we were all done we headed to the store across the street for some chicken feed.  We didn't even know this little park was there.

The Lego movie came out on DVD on Tuesday.  We have been waiting for this day for a looong time.  My kids were pretty excited.

One morning was spent creating all kinds of perler bead patterns and pictures.  Here we have some creepers, a sailboat, and hamburger and fries.

My 3 year old has figured out how to climb our tree in the front yard.  He was so proud of himself!  Even told me to go get the camera.

That about wraps it up for the last 2 weeks.

Desiree

Summer reading program

We signed up for the summer reading program at Wilsonville library last week.  We just love their summer reading program because it has science too.  If the children do 10 science experiments/explorations they can also earn a science prize.  We love any invitation to do science!

April even signed up for the teen program.  She doesn't have the science part with the teen program though.



The boys are excited to get their 20 minutes in everyday.  They've seen some of the prizes in the display case, and are hoping for a chance to win one.  I'm hoping this gets them excited about reading.  Because my boys aren't always thrilled about reading.

We love playing at the Wilsonville library too.  They always have something fun out to play with, especially right now with the summer reading/science program going on.  But, really it's just another typical day for us at the library.

So, we have done 2 official science experiments this week toward their goal of 10.

The first one was inspired by Almost Unschoolers.  We played with popping balloons over a candle light.  Then we filled one up with water, and observed how it didn't pop with water in it.  I had the boys make predictions as to what they thought would happen.  Aaron was Mr. Smarty pants though, he had already done this experiment in his co-op class a year ago.  Alex (3) ran away when he realized what was happening, and that the balloon would pop.  He doesn't like loud noises at all.

We had some extra blown up balloons laying around so I let them each take turns popping them.  Boys and loud bangs are always a match made in heaven.

Finally, we got to the water filled balloon.  They both had fun holding it over the flame for a while.  We never got the water warm though.  It must have been too much.  We only had big balloons, although I could have only filled them up a little. For complete instructions on how to do this experiment you can visit Steve Spangler science.

The next science experiment we did was LEGO science: an ice excavation experiment.  This was a lot of fun for my boys, and goes right along with some other LEGO movie stuff we are doing right now (posts to come soon) since we bought the movie today.

I said to the boys (just as she does in the blog where I found this idea) that they are archaeologists, and they have found something interesting in a glacier while looking for fragile fossils.  They had to excavate these fossils as carefully as they could, and find ways to get the ice melted or chipped away to get to their fragile fossil.

They had some salt, water, and a dropper to start with.  I told them they had to come up with their own ideas on how to CAREfully get the lego mini-fig (fossil) out.

They slowly got some utensils from the drawer, and eventually they got some hot water.  It was interesting to see them have patience (or not sometimes) with this.  They did really good.

We talked about how hard it would be to really have to dig something fragile out of a huge glacier in real life.  We talked about what a glacier is.  We talked about how the salt can be used, and how they could focus on just the area around the "fossil" rather than the whole block of ice.

Aaron finally pulled out one distraught Emmett.  He must have been pretty cold there in that ice for a while :)

Desiree

Our week: with hike pics

Last weekend we went on our first camping trip of the season, and we took a few really nice hikes up in the Molalla wilderness area.  These pictures are from Michele's phone, and I was happy he took them because I forgot to take my camera.  It was a beautiful hike!

I loved this hike because it was on a trail that isn't well traveled by people or "kept up".  It's all natural, and uneven, and has a lot of interesting things to see.  We didn't see anybody while we were hiking until we were on our way back to the truck.  It was at the end of a very, very long dirt road.

 
I loved seeing some interesting flowers just in the middle of the trail.  I'm pretty sure these are Orange Mountain Dandelions.  It's the closest match I could find.  I wish I could go up and get a better picture, but I'm glad to have this one.  As soon as I saw those orange flowers I wanted to see what they were.

We saw lots of little baby pine trees along the trail

We never made it to the top, but this was pretty far up, and it was a pretty view!

The whole trail was so pretty

April's keyboard is getting well used!  She came to me this week and showed me that she now has 2 broken keys. One has been broken for a while, and she has been using tape to make it usable.  Now she has to use tape for 2 of them.  We are thinking about a real piano if we can acquire one and actually fit one in our house.

Poor keyboard!  Or, maybe poor April because it's really annoying to play with 2 broken keys.  Hoping we can fix it soon!

We made some lego minifig twist-and-match tubes.  These were made by April and I.  The boys never really made any, but they like playing with the ones we made.

I made some yellow playdough.  There's nothing like a fresh batch of playdough!

There's been a lot of graduation talk, graduation announcements and pictures lately.  So it wasn't too surprising when my 5 year old made these "graduating" playdough heads.  Can you see the cap?

We went to Al's Garden kids club on Saturday to end the week.  It was a lot of fun.  The kids planted flowers in summer sand buckets.  They turned out pretty cute.

This was our first time to the kids club at Al's garden.  It is a fun opportunity, and the kids are looking forward to going back next month to do blueberries.

Three summer buckets with flowers complete!

That's about it for the highlights of the week.

  Desiree