Homeschooling Friday - Week One

It has been an exciting week of homeschooling here! It's the close of our first full week, and our first week following Oak Meadow's curriculum. We learned all about the letter A. (Very picture heavy post!)
I found myself stressing over my lesson plan too much, like on Monday morning, I hadn't planned enough to do. So I took something from Tuesday morning, and we baked bread in the shape of A's and things that start with A:

And I had a minor panic that we then wouldn't have enough to do Tuesday morning. I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that; A - lessons are only supposed to be about 45 minutes at a time with lots of creative play, and B - homeschooling is flexible. I can change things last minute, I can improvise things.
This week, we did lots of things.
We wet paper painted:

We made a ton of that bread I mentioned earlier:

We made pine-cone critters and pine-cone bird feeders:

We hung them up right outside the kitchen window, so we can watch for any birds.
Note to self: remember to tie the string on before you let the kids add the peanut butter and bird seed, next time...Otherwise it results in a very long and messy 15 minutes of wrapping string around messy pine-cones...and for some reason, all of your little helpers have miraculously disappeared. Only to reappear again when it's time to hang the bird feeders up.
We painted pumpkins and made this awesome garland, for our nature table:

I love this garland! This fall on Nantucket is really unseasonably hot, and so the leaves haven't been turning at quite their normal rate. Thus, there are almost as many green ones as red and yellow. We added some green to the garland to really show the contrast.
We followed the directions for ironing leaves in wax paper found here: http://crafts.creativebug.com/iron-leaves-wax-paper-1323.html. (I found they didn't come out as clear as I had expected. Not sure what I did wrong.)
I also drew some leaves on construction paper, then had the kids color them and cut them out. Then we strung everything up with some pine cones. (There is no shortage of pine-cones on Nantucket, any time of year - can you tell? Unfortunately I can't find any acorn caps this year, which I love working with also.) I think the nature table is coming together quite well!
I couldn't let a week in which we were leaning about A's pass us by without making some Mini Apple Pies! (Great way to learn about fall too - or maybe that's just my excuse for making them. I cut the apples up into quarters and had the kids slice them smaller, gave them brown sugar and butter dots, and let them create their pies however they wanted.)

We went to music class at the library: (she's imitating a chicken, by the way)

We also got outside plenty. I pick up some kids after school and hang out with them for a while, which is built in playground time:

And we got to help build a labyrinth!

We got to the beach:

Plenty of nature walks happened, too:

We also went on a long walk and looked for all the A's we could find. We took pictures and made a collage out of some of them:

I am really proud of us and our homeschooling adventures this week! We did a lot more than what is included in this post, but it's already long enough! Plus, most of it is things we're going to be doing every week, and I need to leave something for next week.
What did you do with your home-schooler this week? Please feel free to leave links to any other homeschooling/craft type linky parties, or links to any awesome home-school websites.
See you all on Monday!

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