Sick Kids and Cacti

This year has been absolutely wonderful! We have loved homeschooling and learning together as a family. And while homeschooling is everything I have hoped it would be, it can be very difficult. Sometimes real life just gets in the way! We have been VERY sick this week. The kids and I had fevers all week this week... Making school very difficult to complete. We definitely took a couple days off, but after that we were BORED! Thankfully, our curriculum is a wonderful distraction!  The main key to teaching sick kids is to make it fun, fun, FUN! Also, we made sure to keep it SHORT and take a lot of breaks.  The most fun day we had while we were ill was the day we spent learning about the cactus! The kids loved all the hands-on learning there was this day.

Poor Jonathan! He burst a blood vessel in his eye
from coughing so hard!

Our first project was AWESOME! Mother Goose Time provided the Styrofoam pieces and the dixie cups so we could make our own cacti. We were able to make the connection that we use water to connect the styrofoam and a real cactus has water inside too.

A finished product!

 The next project we did (after taking a break) was to make cacti out of play dough and toothpicks. We picked cards to find out how many spines we should put into our cacti. We were calling the spines "pokey things" until we did a little research and found out they are called "spines." This was an excellent lesson for Jonathan to practice recognizing his numbers into the teens.

Our final project was to make our own cacti letters. This activity was so cute! And great practice for the kids to recognize their letters and sounds. Mother Goose Time provided that letter cards and pipe cleaners for this project.

Our school days were definitely shorter this week, but still there! I am very pleased that we can learn even when we aren't feeling so good. Thank you Mother Goose Time!