Week 5, Tuesday

The whole residency renewal issue is such a bummer.   We are pretty sure that BASF will not allow us to stay in Spain if one of our children is undocumented, although quite a few people have suggested to me that it wouldn't be that big a deal.  In any case, as our time is running out and Bob is being pressured to come up with the school documents, we have to get Ciara registered as soon as possible.   Tomorrow afternoon I get to meet with the school director again to arrange for Ciara to be admitted into the school.

In the meantime, homeschooling must go on!  Today we did a little bit of geometry and learned how to calculate the volume of a prism.  As part of our math class we have started using BrainPop, which is a great website for kids (and adults) of all ages.  We especially like the math games.  

Ciara worked on her story that she is writing about an orphan girl named Katy who is adopted by monsters.  The past few weeks, we have been working on the plot, characters and setting.  Today she wrote the first page, and it was pretty entertaining.  Speaking about stories, I forgot to mention that Ciara and I just finished "Wonder" by R.J. Palacio.  We read together every night after I put the younger boys to bed.  We laughed, we cried and we were uplifted by this story of a boy who was born very different. We thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it for anyone grade 5 and up.

Here are a few pictures of other things we have been up to recently:

Some drawings for the board game Ciara is making

Here are the game tokens all painted

Ciara made a giant cookie

And an apple pie

Saturday walking along Puerto de Barcelona

The kids love to climb on the lions that stand at the foot of the Christopher Columbus Monument

Ciara decided to make postcards of her Littlest Pet Shops

Pretty cute eh?

Since we started homeschooling Ciara has been interested in gardening, so we are going to plant some pansies.  First we need to soak the seeds in water for 3 days. 

Week 4, Monday

Wow! We already made it to week 4 and we are still going strong.  Today Ciara finished an entire unit of math in less than 30min.  It was on number lines, and all 5 lessons were very short and easy.  So we moved onto our units 1-4 review and Ciara did quite well remembering what we had studied during our very first math unit (mega numbers and place value).

After Spanish, we decided to work on a board game that Ciara had invented a few months ago.  It was called the "Minty Game" (Ciara loves mints).  It was a pretty cute game, but needed to be reworked a little.  During our lunch hour, we took out some clay and made new game pieces.  Then Ciara rewrote all the instructions to the game and we started designing the game board.  It is really fun to work on this board game together and Ciara is learning a lot too: how to write instructions, how to design and sculpt, how to draw, how to measure, how to calculate the number of spaces between obstacles so that the game is not too easy or too hard.  Once the game is done, I'll post another picture.

Clay pieces drying and instructions