Some front yard Landscaping

After our move in December and a very long winter, we were finally able to get some front landscaping down at our place.  We love it.  Besides not having our front step look like a construction site, it now also gives us a space to sit or play in the front.  As part of this we also added a second driveway entrance with some fresh gravel.  

Here is the before shot:

Here is the after shot

Couple more shots of the new second driveway (on the right side of the picture), and the lawn from the bottom of the driveway looking up towards the house as you drive in. 

Lava Butte

On Fathers day after church we with the weather clear and warm we took a drive just south of town to Lava Lands and took the shuttle up to the top of Lava butte for lunch and a short walk around the crater.  

Donaldson Family Treehouse

The kids have always wanted a tree-house so now that we have some space and some trees, we decided to build one this spring!  The hard thing about trees is that you can't move the tree... but the great thing is that if the house isn't exactly square... oh well... its a treehouse right?  We finished painting it this weekend with some extra paint from the house.  They have been asking when the second story will be installed... 

Here is a video that Abbie helped me put together that gives a tour.

Spring Performance and Project Night


The Spring Performance and Project Night was last night. The kids sang some great songs. Abbie is in honor choir and is in flower dress with a white cardigan. Noah is up near the top right in a green plaid shirt. Hunter is off to the far right in a blue shirt and you can see him with the shaker. Hunter is also playing the guitar at the bottom of the video.

In Hunter's class they designed and built a robot. The students over the course of the month integrated this into all areas of study. The driving questions were:

How can you use computer programming to modify your robot to better solve a problem for Benjamin Franklin?

How would taking this robot back in time affect the culture of the colonies in the late 1700's?

The students presented their robots and wrote persuasive papers. Parents then got to vote for what they felt the best robot. 

Abbie's class had to design a seed dispenser that would disperse seeds over a large area.  Noah's class did a study of the prediction of weather in the summer time. They surveyed parents and asked them their predictions of the weather over this summer.