Bridging Ceremony and on the mend

Looks like people are finally on the mend today.  After Dad's doctor visit yesterday and starting on antibiotics he is getting better.  All the kids are feeling better and Skylar even has most of her voice back.  Andrew still seems to be lagging a little but I am hoping it is because he was sick for so long.  He finishes his medicine tomorrow.

We also had our bridging ceremony for the troop.  Cairn bridged up to a Junior.  Skylar will bridge to Brownie next year.  It is nice that I only have to buy one uniform a year.  It was a nice ceremony.  (I didn't get to take any pictures because I was the MC - hopefully a friend will send me some)

After we got home from the ceremony, I got a text from one of the mom's.  She was telling me that a couple of the older boys were being mean to Andrew and her son had stepped in and stood up for Andrew.  He is 11 and the other boys were 13/14.  He was telling his mom because he was very upset about how they were treating Andrew. I am very sad that boys in our homeschool group are being mean to other kids but it was a good learning opportunity for me with Andrew and the girls.  We talked about how nice it was of our friend to stand up for Andrew and how proud of him I was and so was his mom.  I asked the kids if they wanted to be the mean kids or the one that had stood up for someone else.  They all agreed to be the nice kid.

After lunch, everyone worked on school.  Cairn is working on decimals, the Renaissance still and recognizing alliteration, onomatopoeia and personification in poetry.  She was very excited about it because just last week she had attended a class on it online and so she breezed through the lesson because she already knew it.  I knew it was coming up so when I saw the class offering I made sure she went.  We had talked about these in the past too but they didn't seem to click until this time.  Cairn's writing is improving tremendously.  I don't know if she has gained some extra confidence or I finally broke through the barrier but she writes with ease now.  It used to be an hour fight to get her to write one sentence.  I think part of it is that I have her typing many of her answers in One Note so when she does have to write she hasn't used up all her writing energy.  The last 2 assignments I sent to her "teacher" for a grade she has gotten wonderful comments.

Skylar is finishing up her unit on addition.  We read the Elves and the Shoemaker today and she is doing better with listening and understanding the different elements of a story - setting, cause and effect, predicting. She is almost finished with her China lapbook.  She seems to really enjoy making the lapbooks as she gets right to work on it everyday.  So today, she learned how to write the numbers 1 through 10 in Chinese.

Andrew floored me last week with his recall of stories that I had read to Skylar and his understanding so I have him working with us when we do stories now.  He knew all the answers before Skylar so I had to have them take turns because Skylar was getting pretty frustrated but it also pushed her to pay attention because if she didn't know the answer she knew Andrew knew it and she didn't like that.  He also named all the letters on a box the other day.  I didn't know he knew some of the letters so today we started working on how to spell his name.  He thought it was pretty cool to see his name written and be able to name the letters.  As soon he can name them all in order, we will start working on writing them.  

Cairn has been working on different ensemble pieces for one of her songs for piano.  Today she wanted to start putting them together so she asked me to come play the triangle.  I had Andrew do it instead because he is learning how to read music too.  He got it right away.  He loved being able to play Cairn's music so then Skylar had to join in and she did really well too.  So the three of them played a piece together.  We will practice some more and then I will get it on video.  We just have to have Cairn slow down a little so they can keep up.  It was fun to watch them all play a piece of music together.

Award Ceremony

Our final Girl Scout meeting was today and it was an Award Ceremony.  We held it at a park since it was so nice.

I sewed all the awards on my girls' uniforms before the ceremony so everyone could see what all the awards looked like.