School Today with a Trip to the Farmers Market

I tell you, it's not easy for me to get myself out of bed at an early hour so we can do our homeschool in a timely manner. I've become spoiled by my wonderful hubby for the past year or so. Since he works midnights and I am a bit of a night owl, he gets the kids up and fed breakfast after he gets home from work in the morning so I can sleep in. But, being the dedicated homeschool mom that I am, I've decided that it would be best for all of us if I haul myself out of bed no later than 8:30 AM so we can have breakfast and start school in the morning rather than sometime close to lunch. It's quite the test for me. So far, I'm passing, but for how long? LOL

Today, we continued with our farm and cow theme by putting together a lapbook. Tomorrow and Saturday, we will fill in the rest of the items in the lapbook. One of the items I put in the lapbook was a Hey Diddle Diddle copy work activity. Laural does quite well with writing her uppercase letters but she is still getting accustomed to lowercase. I wasn't sure if she was ready for copy work, but I decided to see how she did with it. At first she didn't even want to try it but I asked her to try a couple letters and tell me what she thought. She did an excellent job! I praised her for her great job on her letters as well as trying to begin with and that fueled her to want to do the rest of the first line. I only had to correct her a couple of times because she didn't leave enough space between words or she left too much space between letters in the same word. The only other mistake she made was not extending the lines for the "h" and the "t" high enough. Laural also did some matching work, and we learned some facts about cows, filling in some of the lapbook elements. (Pics of the lapbook will be added later.)

I introduced Micah to the letter A today, though I hardly had need to "introduce" him to it because he already recognizes all of his uppercase letters. I gave him a coloring page with a giant A on it and he did a good job of decorating it. He decorated the blank back page even more though. I gave him a plain piece of paper so he could draw some more how he wanted. One of our A activities is looking around the kitchen to find the letter A on various boxes, papers, magazines and such. We also counted to 5 on our fingers today. He can do each number by just watching me hold up my fingers. He doesn't need a verbal prompt anymore. He is doing much better with schooling that I figured her would. Though he is a month older than Laural was when I started her, he is not anywhere near the level she was at this age. She was already speaking very clearly in complete sentences and thoughts before she was even 2 years old. Micah is just now starting to put simple sentences together. Today, as I carried him into the bedroom where Laural was still sleeping, he said "Laural up." It was so cute because I didn't indicate to him why we were going into the bedroom (she was in my room this morning). It's awesome to watch (or hear) his language skills evolving right in front of us. At the same time, there is a touch of sadness because I miss that baby-ness. Anyhow, I decided to give the same lessons to Micah as I did Laural at this age and see how he responded to them. I was expecting a lot of resistance, but he really seems to enjoy it. He really is quite a bright little boy. I think, that with his very talkative sister, he just tends to be quiet and listen a lot to what is going on around him. If given the chance, though, he really shines.

After a break for lunch, it was nap time for Micah and Laural and I did some more work on our lapbook. She really loves lapbooks. I hope I can keep up with making at least 1 or 2 a month. I originally thought about one for each week's theme but that might be a bit too much for me to keep up with.

At 3:30 PM, we piled into the car and headed to Grove City for a visit to the Farmer's Market. Field Trip! This was an excellent way for Laural to see the products of a farm and reinforce our farm theme.  On our way to the market we saw this flying overhead:

 We were hoping it was headed toward town so the kids could see it better but then it turned and followed the interstate. Poor Micah probably didn't see it at all.

Once at the market, we visited each of the booths and looked over the variety of fresh fruits and vegetables that were available. We talked about how all of the produce we saw there was from farms that were close by and about how much of the produce that we get from the grocery store has to come from far away like strawberries from California. I explained that when we buy food from the farm market, we know it was picked fresh that day but produce we get from the grocery store is already several days old by the time we buy it. We bought a watermelon from an Amish farm, and beets, zucchini, a bell pepper (Laural loves these), a banana pepper (Laural insisted that she wanted to try one), red potatoes, an eggplant and a pie pumpkin from various organic farms.

 A view of the market booths in downtown Grove City.

 We also bought a dozen double chocolate cookies from a local pastry business which Micah absolutely loved! 

 The farm market regularly has a balloon artist present and we had to make a visit, of course. Laural got a big flower. I asked for a giraffe for Micah, expecting to get the typical twisted single balloon, but this is what we got:

How cute is this? He used 3 balloons for it. Steve thought it was supposed to be Odie. 

 But see, this guy has horns sticking up and not brown ears to the sides like Odie.

Before heading home, we stopped by Steve's place of employment for the staff picnic they have every year. It wasn't the greatest but hey, free food is free food! We had burgers, dogs, chips, deviled eggs, watermelon, brownies and water. A co-worker and friend of Steve's has a cotton candy/caramel apple/snocone stand that he takes to fairs that was also at the picnic passing out freebies. Laural has been begging me for a caramel apple for days now, so she was thrilled to finally get one.

When we finally got home, I was wiped out but Laural wanted to do more school. I had to break her heart and tell her she would have to wait until tomorrow. I hope her love of learning stays with her like mine has. It is truly an awesome thing to be ever increasing one's knowledge.