This summer I decided we’re going to have a daily schedule (more on that later. it’s similar to last year’s only this year it includes chores!) and a weekly theme. I wanted to have this all ready before school ended, but alas I did not, so now we’re kind of winging it! On that note, this week’s theme is butterflies. We picked out a few books about butterflies from the library yesterday and today we did a fun butterfly coloring project. Eve wore her wings for awhile (taped to her back) then “hid” her butterfly on the chair, saying that it’s blue wings were camouflaging it on the blue chair.

Eve working on her butterfly.

My butterfly

Mine and Lex's, flying high. These are the camouflage undersides. Did you know that many butterflies and moths have camouflage on the outside and bright colors on the insides? It's a defense mechanism.

I didn't get a very good picture of his. I'll hang Eve's tomorrow and try to get a picture of all three together. They are pretty. I'm kind of proud of this project :)

They learned the differences between a butterfly and a moth, the various ways butterflies and moths protect themselves from predators (including camouflage), and what their predators are. We also talked about the life-cycle, which is something both of them have talked about in school before. Tomorrow I have a WW meeting and I just now printed some butterfly coloring pages and activity sheets for them to do at the meeting. I also found a few painting projects that we’ll probably do tomorrow afternoon and Friday. I love the Internet :)

I have a long list of other weekly theme ideas, including camping, construction, photography, nature, ocean, etc. I’m going to fit some of them in to weeks we already have plans and others will just fall into empty weeks. So far I have 15 themes in mind so we probably won’t get to all of them this summer :)

We made peanut butter and bird seed pine cones a few days ago to give the birdies a treat. As usual, everything gets done in stages around here so they were sitting on the table for awhile before we finally got around to hanging them today.

Don't they look like they are having fun?! :)

I can't reach any good tree limbs to hang them from, so instead I hung them from the porch and...

in front of the window. I hope we see some birds soon!

We were going to make homemade play-doh on Thursday. Lex, super excited, ran to his cookbook because he knew it had a recipe for play-doh. Turns out it’s a recipe for bread dough that you can play with. The title says Play Dough. He was bummed. But he kept looking and came across a salt dough recipe and decided he wanted to make that instead. So funny because we used to make salt dough as kids, but I never would have thought of it until he found the recipe. So we made up a batch and the kids had fun rolling and shaping and cutting. After a few hours in the oven it was ready to be painted! But, sadly, we only own washable paint. On Friday we went and bought some acrylic (aka NOT washable paint!) and Friday afternoon we had a blast painting our salt dough creations. They dried quickly so we were able to go back and paint decorations and layers and it was fun. I always forget how much Eve loves painting. It’s messy and not my favorite project, but she loves it. I need to paint with her more often. She put many, many coats of paint on each one she did. It was fun.

NON washable! (when it dries. fortunatly it comes off pretty easily while still wet!)

Want one? We have plenty to spare. :)