Weekly Recap: With the finished fence!

I've started picking up curricula here and there for the next school year. Is that really going to begin in three more months?!

Before

We've been staying busy. We slowly finished portions of the back fence, then one day it was completely done! HOORAY!!

After

We didn't want to build wood frames for our gates. I had seen a metal gate frame on a fence at a house in my parents neighborhood. I had no idea what it was or if it was something the homeowner made, but I wanted it. Luckily I saw the Adjust A Gate kit when we were at Home Depot buying supplies! We bought three of them and LOVE them. They are so much lighter than a wood frame gate, easy to build, and smooth to open and close. Hint - be very careful when attaching the 2x4s, drilling the screws into them can make the gate tilt if you're not careful. See the image below. In the image above you can see that we put panels on both sides of the gate. They work great both ways!

M was invited to be the guest pianist at Grandma's piano recital. I got my hair cut, and I went short again. I like it much better this way. For Mother's Day I had to speak in church. The kids have been finishing up various portions of their schoolwork for the year, so some of them have very short days! We found what we think were newborn voles under our trampoline. The cat was seen playing with something the previous evening, and we think it caught the mother. One of the babies was still in the caul when we found it. It was an interesting biology lesson.

School highlights:

History: We had more lessons on immigrants, one focused on what life was like in New York for many immigrants.
Literature: We learned about heroes, talked about the heroes in Hans Brinker, and finished our study of the book.
Science: A lesson on first aid.
Geography: We finished up our reports for our chosen South American countries. We had a special presentation by Grandma and Grandpa about Uruguay and Paraguay. Read about this and our other  Year 5 end of year celebrations here.
Art: A lesson on cowboy artists, focusing on Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.
Music: We learned how good music can bring people together.

This little one came up with a fun way to practice spelling words and typing at the same time! She made a word cloud with them.