As year-round home schoolers, we usually just keep doing lessons (regardless of season) unless pleasantly interrupted by trips or visits from relatives. Recently, the girls and I were getting restless and realized that, since Covid-19 cancelled all our trips and visits, it's been four months of steady homeschooling! No wonder my crew of adventurous nomads is getting antsy! So, we declared this past week a no-lessons week. 

We planned this break just in time, and I'm so glad we chose to spend a lot of it outside! On Friday, Hawaii announced new restrictions--the beaches and parks are all being closed for at least a month. This week, however, we hit up our three favorite playgrounds and two closest beaches. Highlights included: a donut breakfast at a playground with some good climbing trees, running into a friend from youth group at one beach (I finally got to meet her mom!), snorkeling and sand castle building at another beach, sushi & chocolate covered mac nuts while we get the car's oil changed (that's an hour long outing at least--"express" is not a thing on island time), inventing new games to play with neighborhood friends (they found a whole gaggle of girls their age who 

also like to play outside!), and still plenty of time for reading books and working on projects at home (Lion rummaged for supplies to make woodland creatures and planets, Bug figured out how to make paper beads and helped me with a couple of sewing projects, Monkey drew pictures and worked on her coding projects). 

  

Other notes:

• Our youth pastor figured out how to do in-person youth group during Covid! Hooray! He's divided the youth into houses (Hogwart's style) then into middle and high school sub-groups, so there are fewer than eight kids per group. Eight sets of parents are volunteering to each host a group and lead a game/ice breaker activity, then the youth pastor will present a message to all the groups simultaneously via Google Meetings. Afterwards the host parents lead a discussion in each home based on questions from the youth pastor (who will be leading an online discussion for the kids who can't attend an in-person group due to illness or other restrictions). Everyone will have to wear masks and be screened upon entry, but we're excited for this to get started in a couple of weeks!
• Lion got to have an online piano lesson with Aunt E! Lion's new piano teacher is not being as cooperative in helping Lion learn hymns as we were hoping for, so Aunt E helped her figure out the rest of the cords for "Blessed Assurance." 
• We're in the midst of our Shakespeare studies. I actually have a book that retells the plays as short stories that's serving as our primary text. So far, we acquired a couple books about Shakespeare's life and times, read the Hamlet short story, watched Lawrence Olivier's version, as well "happy Hamlet with animals" (aka The Lion King) followed by a good compare/contrast discussion. Finally, we'll be looking at the most famous lines from the play to talk more about what they mean and how they fit into the story. 
• We finished Story of the World's volume about the Middle Ages. Next up: The Early Modern Age!