Museums, Camp and more…..

We’ve definitely had an interesting last couple weeks.  Daddy was home from work for the end of the year shut down and the girls were also home from school for winter break.  Somehow we still managed to run “Mommy’s School” part time as well as enjoy some great activities as a family  (and yes, they were educational too!!).

  A fun Family trip to Fry’s Electronics.  This is how we let Daddy “roam” for a few minutes alone 🙂

One trip we all really enjoyed was the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.  The exhibit there right now is Genghis Khan.  Even though our oldest is learning about him in history right now (it was perfect timing!!) I was amazed to see how the other kids loved looking at all the artifacts on display.  I have to say that the Dinosaur Bones were a HUGE hit with the younger ones though 🙂

Another activity we did was TaeKwonDo camp.  2 full days of intense training to earn a new belt.  Since I was taking the camp as well (did I mention we are a full TaeKwonDo family??), I was able to watch 4 of the kids while they worked.  Our 9 year old had no troubles working hard.  He LOVES the sport and is working hard to get to his black belt.  #3 worked real hard and managed to do full curriculum training.  Being his first time learning so much he did great!  #4 worked hard.  She is 4 years old and is kind of in limbo between the beginner level and the first Jr level.  Her belt is Jr level but her age and size is the lower level.  She loves going and did really well despite getting sick on day 2.   But what about #2???  How did he fair having to focus for so long?  AMAZING!!!!  I’m not sure if it was because I was there or if it was the threat of not getting the new belt that did it, but he worked hard.  So the question is, Why can’t he work like that at home on his school work?  (Actually he does work hard when I get him to work!)

Our 5 little Ninjas.  They all enjoy classes and work hard to earn their belts!  This was taken before belt testing in December 2012 and is already 2 belt colours wrong for 4 kids!

Today was our first full day back to normal.  The girls went to school after almost 2 weeks off and the boys had to open up their books with no one to complain about bugging them.  We also had our first tantrum of they day during school time.  Who would have thought copying off the whiteboard would cause so much heartache!  One of the things we are doing differently with #2 is how we get our writing assignments done.  With the help of the education counselor from Calvert (where we get our school work from), we’ve come up with the plan where after I take dictation on the whiteboard, he copies half the work out himself and I finish the last half (for now anyway).  He takes a really long time to copy things out that a simple 8 sentence  assignment can take up to 3 days to copy out.  The process of actually remembering the words and how they are spelled is very hard for him.  He has to copy letter for letter, hence the time it can take him!  Today, we broke our assignment up and he had 17 words to copy over (yes, I counted!!!).  17 whole words.  We had a tantrum over those 17 words.  15 minutes later, the tantrum was forgotten and his work was started.  I have to say that breaking the work up between the two of us actually worked wonders for him today.  Not only were the 17 words done quickly, it was also done neatly.  It was a record for us.  Who would have thought tag-teaming on work would actually make a difference?

So now that we are getting back to our normal routine, so are the normal tantrums and frustrations along with the awesome smiles and excitement that comes with finishing up test papers and hard projects  (Oh, after finishing up our writing assignment today, we also marked the completion of out test papers we have been working on!!).