Word Games

I found this great educational website through Lola's teacher's blog. It has interactive games/puzzles, as well as some that you can print out. Since Lola is a big fan of word search puzzles, I found her some that had themes that she liked, such as Wizard of Oz, Dr. Seuss, recipe words, etc...She had great fun doing these puzzles and we were able to work on reading at the same time.

She also had spanish class today and learned to how to say the colors!

Diving

This past weekend, we were in Palm Desert at a hotel with a pool (thank goodness!). Lola and her sister played in the pool all day, the entire time we were there. Lola is getting super brave in the water and even taught herself how to dive off the edge of the pool! Hard to believe this is the same girl that wouldn't let go of the edge or even get off the stairs only a few months ago! Go Lola!

Spanish!

Hola!
Lola has started a spanish class, twice a week...She loves it!

Gardening Monday...

We usually stay home on Mondays because the weekends are so busy that we don't get much chores done. Today, we tended to the garden. I stripped the bottom inch off of a pineapple crown and let it air out. It will soon be ready for planting. In the meantime, we took out some of our veggies that had gone to seed & harvested some veggies that are still going strong. We picked lots of tomatoes, eggplant, chard & basil. Sounds like a great pasta sauce to me!!

Diamondhead

Today we took up a hike up to the very tippy top of Diamond Head. Scientists believe that the type of massive, but brief, eruption that formed the shape of the symmetrical crater is monogenetic, and therefore, they do not believe Diamond Head will ever erupt again.
It's about a 1.5 mile hike round trip and takes up to 2 hours. It wasn't very hard, except that it's unpaved and rocky. The hardest part was probably the stairs near the top. There are 74 of them!! Yikes! Lola was a champ and did the entire hike with me by herself and didn't require any help. She was so proud of herself when she got to the top! She took her own photos of the view. It was spectacular.

School had just barely started for Lola and we left for Hawaii for a week. Since we were already into the 2nd week of school, we looked for learning opportunities and didn't have to search very far. There were all kinds of new birds & plants we had never seen before and learned a lot about the various cultures that make up these beautiful islands.

Above photos are examples of the different ginger plants and plumeria trees we saw.

Also, Lola and I right before taking hula dancing lessons! We learned how to tell a story using hula dancing and, by doing so, learned a lot about the culture in Hawaii.

Back to School!

A very happy 1st grader on her way to the 1st day of school!