Simon really enjoys math and games.  I’ve found if I casually bring up a “game” that involves some math and we do it together I can get him to practice a concept for a while.  I found this post on Pinterest and thought I could make some of the materials easily myself.  We rolled a die with numbers 0-12 on it.  Each number he rolled was one number in a 4 or 5 digit number he was creating.  When all the blanks were filled he would read off the number.  Next he would take the 1,000, 100, 10 and 1 cards and put the correct amount underneath.  We took turns to see who could roll a bigger number.  Then at the end I put some of the place cards under the blanks and asked him to fill in the actual number.  It worked well both ways.  ps. see if you can catch the photo bomber fresh from his bath 🙂

Nothing makes my heart smile quite as much as when my boys find themselves immersed in nature and figuring things out for themselves.  We took a hike at Stringer’s Ridge on Monday morning after the boys got back from their big camping trip with Rick and Oma (Kathy, Rick’s mom) in Ga.  We were attempting to find a geocache site along the trail and walked all the way up to the overlook checking out wildflowers and such along the way.  We got to the top and found this patch of mushrooms.  Simon asked if I had my mushroom field guide, which I did (it was rainy the past few days and that often leads to good mushrooms).  They each looked at the mushrooms and book for a while, thinking they knew which ones they must be.  Admittedly mushroom identification is not one of my strong suits and I brought the least helpful field guide for it because it was the lightest weight one.  But as we were packing up to walk back down the hill I turned around and saw this shot!  Priceless!

We’ve had some crazy weather patterns down here the past week.  I took advantage of it and showed Simon how to graph the temperatures.  He loves setting the alarm/timer on the iPhone so he kept track hour by hour and plotted then temps for two days in a row.   Pretty wild stuff!



This was a very neat and simple activity.  Ice cream salt and liquid water colors.  Sparkly rainbow salt crystals recipe from two-daloo.  We plan to use them to make Sparkly rainbow gems.  Color mixing is one of the boys’ favorite activities!  They also both love gems and minerals so I thought this was perfect.  I am loving my liquid water colors from discount school supply.  So much easier to use than good coloring.



We had been waiting all winter for “real” snow and it finally came on Feb 25/26.  The boys enjoyed rolling the snow into very large blobs then carving into them or jumping into them.  We got to use our snow markers grandma and grandpa gave them for Christmas.  We had a few snowball fights of course.  It wasn’t very good sledding snow unfortunately but we still had fun.