Hembree Park

We were afraid our weekly hike would be rained out today but we decided to take our chances on getting wet and met our friends at Hembree Park. It turned out to be a great day to be outside.

We had just started down the path when the kids found a patch of honeysuckles. Thomas and Jacob got their first taste of honeysuckle nectar. Both of them thoroughly enjoyed it!

Thomas wanted to bring one home to daddy. I convinced him to let me take a picture of it instead.

We stopped for a minute to look at the fountain pond surrounded by flowers. (and to get rocks out of Thomas' shoe)

Later on down the path the kids found a retaining wall to climb on.

The hike ended at the playground where we had a picnic and the kids had fun playing on the swings and slides. Another mom, not from our group, showed up with her son and his Power Wheels Escalade. They let all of our kids take turns driving it around the playground... until Quinn got run over.

After the battery-operated distraction left the park we tried to settle the kids down with a book.

Pond Circle is a library book that Thomas and I have been enjoying so we wanted to share it with our friends. It's all about the circle of life in a pond.

Jacob and Quinn worked together to refill their water bottles at the water fountain.

We got lucky with no rain but we could not avoid the creek.

The older kids found a turtle to play with and Jacob found an inch worm. I love that our kids would rather play in nature than on the playground!

On the way home we had a math lesson in the car. Thomas is having fun with the concept of zero. Any time we run out of something or I say we don't have any, Thomas likes to point out that we have zero. He took off his shoes and said, "Look mom, I have ZERO shoes on my feet". I asked him how many shoes were on the floor, how many shoes on Jacob's feet, how many feet in the car, etc. We counted different combinations of things in the car then I gave him some addition and subtraction problems such as "You have two shoes and Jacob has two shoes. How many shoes do you both have? Two plus two is ...?" He would answer me then make up a problem for me to solve. We went back and forth like that all the way home. When we got home he went straight to the computer to the math section of starfall.com and Jacob worked on puzzles.

I finally stopped by the library today to pick up some books we had on hold. Our library is awesome. I can search for books online and have them sent from all over Atlanta to our local branch. I get an email when they are ready and they are sitting right next to the checkout so I can just pop in and out without even getting the kids out of the car.

We've kept a lot of the same topics we had last week, just adding some new books. I went ahead and got a couple of books about Memorial Day since that is the next major holiday. We are going to the zoo this week so I made sure to get plenty of animal books. I didn't get any easy reading books but we've been having fun playing reading games with our magnet letters and on the computer.

Science:
birds
food chains and ecosystems
herbivore / carnivore / omnivore
microscopes, magnifying glasses, and germs
rainbows

Social Studies:
Memorial Day


At bedtime Thomas and I read three books about microscopes and several different sections from the Earth book including the Cambrian time period, the center of the earth, and how coal is formed and mined.