Weekly Wrap Up

In my life this week…

Snuggle Puppy turned 10. It’s hard to believe that three years ago I had only just met him and now my precious son is 10 years old! For his birthday dinner, he chose spring rolls, spicy Thai soup with shrimp, Mexican lasagna, salad, and double chocolate zucchini cake. He loves spicy ethnic food.

Fred and The Ferrari started back at school. Fred started grade 9 and The Ferrari grade 12. How did I get old enough to be the mom of a Senior?!

There were some other big changes. I am actual going to call next week Transformation Week and explain some of the changes going on in my life.

I recently wrote about our family’s experience with gluten free with regards to our son’s Aspergers. To that end, I spent all of Thursday making gluten free freezer meals with a friend. I will be posting more about that and sharing some of the recipes we used in a few days.

In our homeschool this week….

We celebrated our own Autism Week. Einstein has Aspergers which is a form of autism. Tomorrow, he and I will be doing the Autism Speaks Walk. The symbol for autism is a puzzle piece so the sensory bin was so easy to make. I put a plea out on Facebook for mismatched puzzle pieces and my friend A. responded with two big bags filled with all shapes, colours and sizes of puzzle pieces. I threw them into two bins and called them our sensory bin for the week!

We used the puzzle piece in other ways too such as making paper puzzles and cardboard ones. We discussed how Aspergers makes some things a challenge for Einstein and makes some things easier. We watched some YouTube videos geared at explaining autism to kids.

For our lunch on Friday, we made a special a la Einstein plate for everyone. It had the puzzle piece tribute in the form of cheese and it was all orange, Einstein’s favourite colour.

We started learning about human cells and we made one out of Jello and candy. Before we did that, the kids filled out this worksheet:

Our nucleus, nucleoplasm and nucleolus was supposed to be a plum, but I didn’t label the plums with a “science experiment” sticker and The Husband ate them! It was kind of funny to tell him that he had eaten our nucleus! In desperation, we used an avocado pit instead. The plastic wrap represented the cell membrane, the Jello was the cytoplasm, gummy fruit was the golgi complex, round sprinkles were the ribosomes, gummy worms were the smooth endoplasmic reticulum, gummy worms rolled in sugar were the rough endoplasmic reticulum, a gumball made up the vacuole, and the mitochondrion was a large peanut M+M.

We went to the Calgary Zoo as a family. It’s a wonderful zoo and their new Penguin Exhibit is now open, making Granola Girl very happy!

There was a zookeeper there who explained to the kids all about the different types of bears and had interesting things to show them such as claws, skulls and scat (droppings).

The kids thought it was super cool!

I’m reading…

The Lucky One

Codependant No More

My Life and Lesser Catastrophes…an Unflinchingly Honest Journey of Faith

I’m encouraged by…

the wonderful group of writers I’ve joined over on The Homeschool Village

I’m cooking…

Thai Noodle Salad, Snuggle Puppy’s birthday dinner, Eggs Benedict, Avocado Grilled Cheese, Tortellini

I’m linking with…

Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Homeschool Mother’s Journal.

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