A Carschooling Week!

Short post this week! We celebrated Ron's 6th birthday this weekend, which included dinner out with visiting grandparents on Saturday night, a Chuck E. Cheese outing with a couple of fellow violin-playing friends on Sunday night, and then he opened presents on Monday, his actual birthday. I was totally exhausted after a long weekend and so Monday we just did our music practicing and took the rest of the day easy. Here is our birthday boy, fully enjoying his status as king for a day:

We are trying to tone down our birthday and Christmas gifts in an effort to be better stewards of our resources and battle consumerism in our family. We now only give the kids three reasonable-sized gifts each birthday and Christmas; one from each set of grandparents, and one from us. Also this year, instead of having a big party and getting tons of gifts, most of which we likely would not need or use, our kids decided that they will instead ask family and friends to donate towards their "Birthday for a Cause" campaign through One Day's Wages. You can check out their campaign here!

We did appreciate this addition to our schoolroom sent by Uncle Mike, Auntie Esther, and Owen: check out this awesome world map puzzle! The pieces are made of a thick foam and are very durable. The boys enjoy building it and lounging on it! It has fit right in our emphasis this year on world geography!

This week, Harry is focusing on the ecosystem of oceans, and concurrently in science, we are doing salt experiments. Here is the current progress of our attempt to create salt crystals:

We added salt to boiling water until there was so much salt it no longer dissolved. We then let it cool down...

...and poured the mixture into a glass bottle, letting a paper clip affixed to a pencil hang in the water. 

By Day 1, we began to see some crystals form on the sides of the bottle, and more are to come!

But then on Wednesday and Thursday, we had two subsequent days of carschooling! I had to go to Moody Bible Institute on both days to record interviews with two Moody Radio shows (Building Relationships with Gary Chapman, the show airs on May 7th; Midday Connection, the show airs on Monday, April 11th). We live about an hour or more away from Chicago with traffic, so I just packed up the books and had the kids bring them with to do along the way or while they were waiting for me! But while we were on campus, they just had fun eating and enjoying the sights:

Sitting next to the platform with Midday Connection hosts Anita Lustrea and Melinda Schmidt doing their thing!

The boys all love Moody and say they want to attend college there!

Getting to eat lunch with Dad two straight days in a row was a nice bonus!

Dining at the Moody Commons, the boys' "most favorite restaurant on the planet!"

So it wasn't one of our most productive weeks, but still a memorable one. Hope to pick things back up next week and really finish strong in the time we have left! Thanks for stopping by!