Amazing Grace, Eggs and Summer plans!

Last Sunday Maddie sang Amazing Grace with the children's choir. They did a really good job! They only meet for about 1/2 hour each week before the service and do not always have everyone for practice so I'm always impressed with how well they do. We all love to see them when they sing, who could resist such cute faces?

While waiting Maddie was snuggling her friend Katherine who had an ear infection. They were so cute! Then we went to the first swim class of the new session. They started out with a swim test. Maddie is doing really well and, at this lesson, went all the way under the water for the first time!!

We planned a Jumping Jack A Thon for our 4H group. The kids asked people to pledge a certain amount of cans for every 20 jumping jacks they completed in a 15 minute time period. I think we have to make our sets bigger next year! The kids did 220 jumping jacks! They did a great job! Next week we will take our donation to the SICM food pantry and learn all about the services they offer to the community.

One of Maddie's math lessons this week was about dividing with a remainder. She got the concept very quickly so we took a picture. I'm all about whatever encourages her in math!

I'm busy at the moment trying to plan out fourth grade and gather materials. At the same time I am making plans to keep Maddie busy over the summer and those brain cells working! We've learned that if she gets the whole summer off then its much harder to get back to school in the fall. So we are planning some fun projects. I have several theme units that we will use...crunchy cookies, pizza party, magnificent moon. We will also work on journals to keep writing and grammar practice going. I saw a great post on The Pioneer Woman about summer journaling and Miro notebooks. I requested a price list from them but they aren't set up yet! Instead they sent us a sample journal. I chose white thinking Maddie would like to decorate it and pink gilded pages. It arrived with a small pocket journal and a bookmark. I will order another one from Amazon once they are set up on there so we both have journals. If Maddie would prefer blank pages then we will get that for her and I will use this one with lined pages. I think she will do better if we do it together!

We also have an egg project going! One of our day care families raises chickens and offered to bring us eggs and help us with the chicks once they have hatched (as in find homes!). Maddie is thrilled and so are the day care kids. It is going to be Maddie's fair project. She can't show the chicks but she is documenting the progress of the eggs as we go along and keeping track of all the work she has to do. We turn the eggs every morning and evening. The day care kids get to help with the turning once a week. Unfortunately they can't do more than that because they are so very careful and go so very slowly that we let out too much of the warm air.

Tucking the eggs into the incubator! April 20

Today, April 28, one week later we took some of the eggs out to "candle" them. This means that you put a light under the egg to see through the shell. We were so excited to see a dark dot and web of blood vessels just as the book said we should! We did not look at all the eggs but did look at 3-4 which all had the same result! Maddie is super excited! She drew a picture in her journal and wrote under it "THIS IS SO COOL!!!". I took some pictures and you can see that one side is dark although you can't really see the detail we saw in person.

Working with Daddy to turn the eggs and pick out a couple to candle. Thanks so much to Sarah, our 4H Coordinator for finding a candler that we could use. I think that catches us up! We have about 3 weeks of school left then we will be finished with third grade!