Girl Scout Camp - 2014

Reagan and Kennedy attended their first Girl Scout summer camp in June. They loved it! It was especially fun because they were able to go with several of the other girls in their troop as well as their cousin Heidi. The last day Aunt Dorothy and I went to watch the closing and all the skits the girls had created. It was pretty cute! :)

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My favorite story/rule that the girls came home with from the week was "If you kill a bug you have to eat the bug." Love it! lol :)

 It was crazy hat day so I had to take a picture of these two crazy girls...

Reagan, Kara and Kennedy

 Jackson kept picking flowers which Aunt Dorothy helped him make creations from while the girls were doing their closing activities.

 The girls are definitely looking forward to returning to camp. Reagan's only regret for the week was only being able to spend the night one week. This crazy girl is more ready than Mom and Dad to start week long over night camps! :)

Reagan - 7 years old

Reagan - 7 years old - April 21, 2014

Our not so little Missy Reagan certainly keeps us on our toes! She is one very bright little girl with a wild and crazy personality. As you can see from her picture, at the age of 7, she is also our toothless wonder. :) Reagan is extremely sweet young lady and a very thoughtful big sister. She is becoming so much help around the house by increasing her independence and capability to do things on her own like fixing her own breakfast or cleaning up messes. It's definitely nice to have a little helper I can depend on!

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Reagan's favorite activity is gymnastics. She finished up Level 2 in the spring and began Level 3 in the summer. Things have settled down a bit this fall but over the summer she was in the gym 3-4 hours each week day with a total of 18 hours per week. She LOVEs gymnastics! This fall that has been scaled back a bit with only 3 days (Tues, Thurs and Sat) a week for 4 hours and Friday for an hour and a half for a total of 13 1/2 hours per week. I do not know how families in public school keep up with the crazy gymnastics schedules! Reagan doesn't mind competition but she would be happy not to compete and focus on up-skilling. She is getting extremely close to her aerial (a cartwheel with no hands) and spends more time upside down on her hands than on her feet most days.

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While it is not Reagan's favorite activity she is very good at violin as well. She finished up Book 2 this summer and is moving right along in Book 3. She is currently working on the third piece in book 3, Gavotte in G minor by J.S. Bach. Reagan has such a good ear that she frequently amazes me with how quickly she memorizes her music. She has been showing a lot of interest and desire to learn how to play piano, but I'm not ready to take that on yet. I've shown her a little to get her going, but think this is a better project for Miss Reagan and Grammy to take on after Grammy retires and moves to Kentucky.

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Reagan continues to be an extremely good reader and thoroughly enjoys it. Her achievement tests in May indicated that she is at approximately a 5th grade reading comprehension level. Not only is her reading comprehension note worthy she is one little speed reader. There are times I can hardly believe how much she has read. This summer she discovered Harry Potter and is speeding through those books. I thought she would lose interest with Book 4 (it is huge) but she is zooming right through it as well. We may have to re-visit whether or not we let her continue to read the series. A number of friends had told us their children lost interest around Book 4 so I was depending on her choosing to put the series aside herself before the more serious later books. Guess we'll have to think on that one... In any case, I hope this love of reading stays with her throughout her life! We certainly intend to continue to encourage it!

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Reagan excels academically in general. She is pretty smart and memorizes information quickly and easily. Shortly before her 7th birthday she became one of the youngest (she actually might be the youngest I'm not positive) Classical Conversations (CC) Memory Master in Lexington. For those of you not familiar with CC it takes approximately an hour to recite 500 pieces of information which includes a chronological timeline of 161 events, 24 history sentences to add depth to the timeline, all 44 U.S. presidents, over 100 locations and geographic features in Europe, Asia and select parts of the world, 24 science facts (including biomes, planets, laws of motion and laws of thermodynamics), Latin verb endings of the first conjugation, English grammar facts (including pronouns {this was the craziest part to me - who knew there were so many types of pronouns? In case you're like me and didn't know, there are nominative, objective, possessive, reflexive, interrogative, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns and you have to recite all the pronouns in each of those categories}, multiplication tables up to 15x15 (for Reagan's age skip counting up to 15x15), common squares and cubes, as well as basic geometry formulas and unit conversions. She knew/knows all this information inside out. You actually have to know all the information inside and out because if you make even one mistake you cannot be given the title of Memory Master. Reagan is now well on her way to learning the next year of memory work as she is determined to become one of the youngest Super Memory Masters 2016. That takes being able to recite all three years of memory work so it's quite a challenge!

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Reagan is as full of spirit as she has ever been! This sometimes still results in an inability to control her temper. She works hard on this, but it is definitely a constant battle. She remains on the same path she has been since she was little which is that just about every time we think she has things under control we hit a rough spot again. Looking at Jackson, however, makes me realize how far she has come. I know if we keep at it this sweet girl will master this challenge as well and become an amazing young lady!

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We thank God every day for the blessing of Miss Reagan! She keeps our lives interesting and fun. :) She stretches us and challenges us in ways I never dreamed possible before becoming a parent. Thank you for being our precious girl, Missy Reagan. We know God has big things in store for you and we can't wait to find out what all that includes! :) 

 



Camoflauge Project

 All my posts have been social recently, but we were actually doing school last year too. :) It's so far past that I haven't necessarily wanted to take the time to sort through all the project pictures, but this one was neat enough I thought I would share it. The point is to help kids understand how camouflage works as well as the idea of survival of the fittest.

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You need M&Ms and Skittles for this project. You sort the M&Ms by color and place them on a plate (I think it suggested around 50). You then put 5-10 of each color of Skittle in a bowl. Here is a picture of what you would be handing to your child/student.

 Next you tell the kids you are going to have them mix their M&Ms and Skittles and give them something like 20 seconds to sort them again. For fun I think it also mentioned you could tell the kids they do not want to "catch" any M&Ms because they are poisonous!

 Then you're off and your kids get to see first hand how camouflage works in nature as it is obviously much easier to sort the Skittles that don't match than the M&Ms that do. Pretty cool! :) We followed this up with a couple of books on habitats and how animals use camouflage to their advantage.

And here is another use for M&Ms one of my munchkins discovered... Not sure M&M pizza sounds very appealing to me but no one asked me either... lol :)

"Going Batty" in the Lueker Household - October 2013

Using the book "Going Batty" from the Magic School Bus series as inspiration, we spent a week in October having fun studying bats. We began our week by reading the book and then making some bats of our own.

 I gave each of the kids a sheet of black construction paper and asked them to fold it in half.

 Next I asked them to begin tearing their paper however they liked but not the folded side.

 Here are the somewhat unique bats we created using this simple technique :)

 Since we learned bats like to eat bugs I decided to let Jackson practice identifying numbers as well as developing his one to one correlation skills by using the bat he made along with our bug manipulatives for the week. I would give him a number and he chose the bugs his bat wanted to eat.

As you can see Jackson thought this math was lots of fun!

 He especially loved feeding his bat spiders.

 Another day we used sponge painting for some more bat art

 The kids all thought the sponges were so much fun. It cracks me up what they find amusing sometimes... lol :) Seeing these smiles makes me realize I need to find another project involving sponge painting for them. :)

 They each chose a couple of colors of paint which I gave them on a plate and they began to sponge away. There was a bit of confusion about whether they were sponging the black sheet of paper (yes) or the bat (ended up being a cool by-product), but once they (specifically Reagan) got it figured out the project turned out pretty well.

 By sponging around the bat image you end up with the black silhouette of the bat.

 We decided we liked our colorful bats that were sponge painted in the process nearly as well as the intended art project. :)

 One of the primary things we learned regarding bats is how they use their ears for echo location. To experience echo location for ourselves we played a game where everyone had the opportunity to use their ears to locate the "bugs" in the room. We created a makeshift bat costume for the kids to try out while pretending to be a bat. By blindfolding them they had to use their ears to find the rest of us "bugs" who were busy making noise with maracas and bells. Missy Reagan volunteered to be our first "Batgirl."

 

 This hiding place of Missy K's was the best. Reagan could not figure out where this meal was located. lol :)

 My own little "Batman"

 The Missy K "Batgirl"

 Among other books, we especially enjoyed this interactive book Grammy gave us some years ago on bats. The book is titled "Misunderstood BATS" by Child's Play.

This was such a fun unit study to do, especially during the month of October. :) I also have to say "The Magic School Bus" series provides such great inspiration for getting going on so many science related subjects. That and a little searching for activities on Pinterest and I find I'm on my way and having nearly as good a time planning as the kids are learning and playing! :)

Solar System Studies - Rockets in the Park - Fall 2013

Another beautiful afternoon after Classical Conversations we headed to the ball field again where two dads had built a couple of launch pads for the kids to launch rockets. I have to admit I was a bad mom and we didn't create any creative rockets. I also have to give credit to some of the other parents who helped their kids build some super cool rockets. Regardless of how the rockets looked they kids (and adults) all had a lot of fun! 

 Look at all those excited little faces!

 Kennedy getting ready for her turn

 After the dad's pumped up the launch pad to build pressure the kids pulled a string releasing the rocket into the air spewing water everywhere. So much fun! :)

 Jackson's turn

 The kids had a great time chasing after their rockets after they landed

 Reagan's turn

 Ms. Jeannette kept up with Miss McKinley while I was taking pictures for the group

 Here are a couple of my favorite pictures from the day - love these faces! :)

 

What a fun project and learning opportunity! Thanks to the dads and teachers who made this project possible! We do love our CC group!

Solar System Studies - Model Solar System - Fall 2013

Our Classical Conversations group headed to a baseball field one day this fall to build a to scale model of our solar system. This was such a fabulous way to increase the kids understanding of the size of our solar system. Here's Reagan and one of her classmates caring the "sun" to the baseball field.

 Getting organized and beginning to measure

 The little brothers had fun running around the baseball field while the big kids worked to put our solar system together.

 Getting final instructions on how to visit all the planets

 Here are some of the kids with the inner planets and sun. Golf balls were used to demonstrate the difference in size between the "Rocky Midgets" (including Earth) and the sun. Actually, Mercury and Mars were only the size of a marble!

 

The tutors (teachers) had cards for each planet that explained distance, size and other details about each planet.

 The kids traveled by class between the planets where the tutors explained the differences between the planets. Here is the first of the "Gas Giants," Jupiter, represented by a soccer ball. The kids also discussed and laid out the number of moons around each planet (using marbles).

  Getting a look at Saturn and it's rings

 

 Here the kids are creating the asteroid belt between the inner and outer planets using more marbles

A picture of the first five planets including the completed asteroid belt

 Moving out into the outer reaches of the solar system with a visit to Uranus 

   The entire solar system; Neptune is pretty far out there!

What a great way to explore and understand the size of our solar system! I'm so thankful for Classical Conversations and projects like this that the kids get to do with their classmates and friends!