Week 4 ~ The Week Flew By

What a quick week! We added in the layer of dance with a second dance studio and also chores this week. Anne was asked to be a teacher assistant to a ballet level three class. Helping teach this class will pay for her to add one more class to her schedule, bringing her total hours to 11 at the one dance studio. She will still be studying Cecchetti ballet about four to five hours a week at the other dance studio. She is over the moon with delight! She is only behind in one math lesson and one history lesson for the week and plans to make them up today. She is happy to do school seven days a week, if necessary in order to dance more. We will see if that feeling holds all year long. Honestly, I won't be surprised if it does. She loves dance that much.

Cecchetti Ballet Class 2017

We did manage to do a great deal more than dance this week. The children had an art class with Grandma on Claes Oldenburg. My mother goes all out with these classes and does hours and hours of extensive research. She loves art as well as researching, and it shows. She always does a great presentation. The kids listened to the hour or more of presentation and then created clay sculptures, using the Oldenburg style. We invited our favorite twins over as usual and they loved his art work. Oldenburg is famous for creating huge sculptures of everyday items, which are commissioned as public art works and placed in various landscapes.

Anne's super-sized flip flop creation dangling over a bridge.

Dean's scaled large sculpture of a Canada goose on a small island in the middle of the lake.

My sack of birdseed would be very large, lying along the pathway.

They placed their creations on a scaled map that Dean made earlier in the week of a local lake. The landscape model was created at a 1:50 feet ratio. We measured only about one-fourth of the lake we walk around once a week. This was a complicated math lesson for math-challenged souls like Dean and me. We were glad to have my husband along on Labor Day to help us measure out and convert the numbers into a smaller scale. It really did feel like labor doing those two hours of math. HaHa!

Dad and Dean doing the math for our scaled map.

This is the final landscape with our Oldenburg creations. One of the twins made a fishing pole
pulling a fish out of the lake. The other twin attached a tall lollipop to the picnic pavilion. 

In biology this week, we reviewed the chemistry that helps with biology. Not our group's favorite subject, and it stretched their minds more than they wanted them stretched. I knew they weren't going to care for the lesson, so I made sure to have a really fun hands-on project at the end. We pulled out the stereoscopic (dissection) microscope and explored how to use it. We even learned how to take screen shots and save them to the computer. I am sure both of our microscopes are going to get a lot of use this year.

We also started learning about George Eliot. My husband started reading aloud her book, Silas Marner. During story time each evening, Anne worked on and finished another puzzle while Dean sketched.

We also did all of our math, history, home economics, science, English and writing lessons. Dean attended his weekly art class with a local artist, physical education class and guitar class. It was certainly a full week. We even squeezed in a round of miniature golf. 

Lastly, the rest of life kept us busy. My new oven arrived this week. I have been without one for EIGHT months, almost to the day. I am so blessed to have one again. I can't wait to bake. No more crockpot meals -- at least for a few months!

We are busy getting ready for Irma. We are well into the mountains but still in her predicted path. She will probably be a tropical storm by the time she gets here, but with the size of her, they are still predicting 50+ mile an hour winds and 6+ inches of rain in a short period of time. We are securing our outdoor belongings and making sure the basement is super clean, so that if it floods, we can just sweep the water toward the sump pump and hopefully have minimal loss of belongings. In 2004 when we had back-to-back hurricanes, we lost water and power for a week. We hope that doesn't happen again, but if it does, we are ready.

Blessings, Dawn