St. George's Island - October 2013 - The Beach

Grand-Dad, Tim and McKinley posting for me on the way to the beach in front of our beach house.

On the way with all our gear :)

 We had almost as much fun in the sand as we did in the water :)

 

 Kennedy pretending to be a sea turtle with one of our floats

 Toes in the ocean

 

   My "Little Mermaid"

St. George's Island - October 2013

Last October we took a trip to St. George's Island for a week with Grammy and Grand-Dad. We had a amazing time at a beach house that was across the street from the Gulf. Here are some of my favorite pictures of the kids playing in the water throughout the week.

 Fortunately for us we missed the bad weather, but there were some big storms rolling through the weekend we arrived and the girls had a fabulous time riding the waves the first couple of days.

 

 Love this series of pictures of Tim and Reagan lol :)

 

 At just 8 months old, this was McKinley's first trip to the beach

 

 I love revisiting all these big smiles and can't wait to head to the beach again with my crew! :)

"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! :)

Apple Gleaning with the Girl Scouts - October 2013

I have again fallen behind, but for once it's not entirely my fault! :) My computer has been on the decline for a while (getting progressively slower and next to impossible to use). It pretty much completely quit working a couple of weeks ago and after Tim spent several nights trying to figure out what was wrong we finally took it in this week. It turned out my hard drive was going bad. After replacing that it looks like we're back up and running! Time to make some progress posting pictures again! :)

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I decided to begin with a quick and easy post regarding activities from last fall. One Saturday in October we headed out to a local orchard for Apple Gleaning. Gleaning basically means that the orchard allows us to come and pick any fruit from the ground (which they are not allowed to sell or use) and donate it to charity. Along with help from some Boy Scouts and parents we managed to glean 1100 pounds of apples for God's Food Pantry here in Lexington in just a couple of hours! It was such a great activity for the girls to participate in since it was something they could actually do to help others vs just asking for money. Here are the girls with a fellow Girl Scout and a load of apples ready to go back to the truck.

Thank you Grammy for coming along to help us glean apples!

Hard at work under the trees

Kennedy was a little more interested in the slugs and making sure they had food than collecting apples for the hungry. lol :)

Missy K getting back to work after finding the perfect apples for her slugs :)

I'm thinking this little apple tree is going to be an amazing producer someday. Look at all the apples on this little sapling!

Miss Reagan worked hard at finding good apples. She found what she considered the perfect, and most enormous apple ever, and asked if she could take it home. They gave her permission to take this one and it was delicious!

Thank you to our Daisy leader for arranging this outing. I am so thankful for the fabulous Girl Scout troop our girls are a part of!