Thursday, August 22, 2013

Is it raining?

Saturday, August 10, we had another fun family day. It was a beautiful morning so we took the convertible:

 to go to Steak 'n Shake to get chocolate chip pancakes (burger and fries for me, biscuits and gravy for Jake):
 and went to Lowes for another build and grow clinic - Gavin made an airplane from the movie "Planes" (with a lot of help from Jake - that one was hard!):
 We also hit up the Goodwill next to Lowes and found a cool bike buddy, a kid's bike minus the front tire that attaches to an adult bike to make a tandum bicycle.

 
 August 14 was our 13th wedding anniversary:
 
 It's still constant knights and castles around here. All available cardboard gets fashioned into all manor of medieval weapons and armor:
 Didn't Jake do a great job making this helmet from a sheet of cardboard?!:
 Had to go get his helmet while reading about knights:
 
The last couple weeks the subjects that have interested Gavin the most are: the weather (especially all types of inclement weather), knights, castles, archers, and airplanes. He also is really enjoying learning about geography, and quite frequently will start conversations about the different continents. He has become very interested in weather radar maps. Especially on rainy days he wants to check it all the time. "Is it raining?" he'll ask. "Look outside" I'll reply, and then he'll say, "No, I want to look on the map." Then we go to weather.com. We have this conversation frequently. What I am most pleased about is Gavin's interest in books. Especially non-fiction or "living books" as they're sometime called. He gets so excited by all the library books I get him about his topics of interest. Last night he pulled a book about military aircraft out of our library bag and exclaimed "Thank you, Mommy!" with a big hug. This morning the first thing he did when he woke up was to get his library book about tornadoes and wake Jake up to show it to him. I found this quote that could be our family's homeschool motto:
 
"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire." ~William Butler Yeats
 
Amen.