Thanksgiving week fun!

I'm so thankful for everything God has blessed us with. Three wonderful children, family, a wonderful church family, homeschool, my husband and SO much more! This week with my 3 blessings we have had a lot of fun and sort of taken a break from the regular school work with some fun Thanksgiving activities.

Monday we made woven place mats whcih I laminated. We used fall colors, red yellow and orange. We had SO much paper strips left over that we made a paper chain and wrote things we were thankful for on each on. It's now hanging above our living room window.

Tuesday was my youngest princess 3rd birthday! I can't believe how fast she has grown. For our fun project we made Indian vests! We used paper bags and cut down the middle and made arm holes in hte sides. The children painted them and our neighbor boy joined in the fun!

Wednesday was the messy day! After a non messy activity of hand turkeys which they all enjoyed coloring, we had some science fun with a pumpkin! First they guessed how much it weighed, how big around, if it would float and how many seeds inside. Then we set to work with finding the real answers. Boy were we all surprised to find 437 seeds in our little 5lb pumpkin! They are in the oven baking now and the rest of the pumpkin will be baked and made into either pumpkin bread or some other yummy pumpkin treat!

For Thanksgiving day we will make hand/shoe turkeys, play Indian games and then head over to my husband's parents for Thanksgiving dinner and a little bi
rthday party for my little princess.

for some reason blogger isn't loading my pics so I will try again later. Have a blessed Thanksgiving and stay safe if you go shopping on black friday.

School update 11/10

As promised here is a recap of our schooling the past few weeks.

Bible
Memory verse;
Jesus answered I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father  except through me. John 14:6

History

Threw last few weeks we have stated to go over the fifty states for each state we have a page with their bird, flower and lots of fun facts on the back.

Science

To go along with the state birds  we have been learning about birds for science. All three kiddos had fun making their own binoculars and looking for birds outside. We made a pop bottle bird feeder and saw some feathered friends at it for the first time yesterday! Wasn't able to catch a pix of him there but here is our feeder.

One day I got the play dough out for miss princes. Ask of us started making nests and birds to go with them. It was a fun little impromptu sculpting class to go with our birds study.

Math

In math we had a visiter on telling time. We expanded from last year where the artist learned to tell time to five minutes. This time doing we eschewed that and then learned to tell time to the minute. At the end of this week we got into measurement with pounds and ounces.

English/LA

My little artist was struggling with sounding words out still so while at the library a few weeks ago I found joked on phonics for second grade. We flew through the first half of the green book at her request. Then slowed a bit after a few days. We gave finished the green book and one of the chapter books. This  program is helping a lot!

For english we are working through primary language lesions. Recently the book has switched to more writing exercises along with the other parts of the lesion. This book looks very simple but there's actually quite a bit  more to itryan meets the eye!

Music  and Art

For music we  have enjoyed songs from the nutcracker. I really want to take the children to set the ballet later this month! 

Modest women's clothing give away from deborah & co.

Deborah and co is giving away a $25 gift certificate. They make great modesty clothing for women. Follow the link to enter!

Phone app!

Yay! Wish I had looked for this sooner! There is an app for my phone so I can update even with computer issues! 
If you have an android phone or tablet look up blogger and you can blog on the go. Will update soon with our recent school activities.

Organizing Our Homeschool

It's been a while since I've posted! Kept forgetting to upload pics and my phone is being silly about sending emails out. Anyway, wanted to share our organization for our home-school. We don't have a dedicated room since we live in a small townhouse so space is limited. 

These 2 rubber maid type drawer sets come in handy! I have 1 drawer for each child with their workbooks and other daily items in them. On the other side i have one with craft/art supplies then the other 2 are basically stuff we have nowhere else for! On top we have our globe,pencil holder and my daily teaching books. 

Up above the stove in our kitchen I have a bunch of craft supplies and a few other things that i don't like to keep out all the time. 

For the bulk of our curriculum I have a crate labeled with weeks 1-34 (since that is what My Father's World is setup for). In each folder I have

The weekly lesson plan grid

• a list of supplies
• time line pieces
• worksheets for math and note booking
• sentence strips for Bible memory verses in the weeks we start new ones. 

We have a calendar wall for the children setup so we can practice days of the week, counting, weather and reading a calendar. It's a bit different looking now since it's been moved a few times but same general idea.

The last thing not listed is the shelf in my closet. There I have all the other books that we will use throughout the year. Not on a daily basis or maybe later in the year. 

So hopefully this can help some of you with storage/space issues! We have gotten creative and tried to keep it from overrunning our house but as a homeschool family I guess it tends to after a while! 

Weeks 5-7

Haven't updated lateyl so here we got!

Science

Weeks 4&5

we learned about the solar system! One fun activity was learning how BIG Betelguese (pronounced beetle juice) is in comparison to the sun. My little cowboy is holding a 1 inch circle of yellow paper to represent the size of the sun. My little artist is by the pine tree. The distancc between the 2 is the diameter of betelguese!

They were also fascinated by the fact that they wouldn't be able to move because the gravity there is SO strong!

Weeks 6&7

Week 6 we learned about yeast! We tried putting yeast, sugar and water into a glass bottle and then a baloon on top. After a few minutes the balloon was filled with the gas from the yeast mixture. This took 2 attempts. Our first try had the balloon fly off! On thursday we tried again with salt instead of sugar to see if it would work but the yeast needed the sugar for food so it didn't make any gas this time.

 

Week seven was bread week! We made play dough on wednesday with flour, salt, water and cream of tartar.I've made play dough before without the cream of tartar and it came out so much nicer this time! Not a sticky mess like before.

 

 

 

Bible

Weeks 4 &5 we learned

John 8:12

"I am the light of the world, who belives in me will never walk in darkness and he who comes to me will have the light of life."

To go with this we decorated a candle and also made a sun to hang on the windows.

First Two Weeks

As the title suggests we finished our first two weeks! So here's an update. Next week is off for the Artist to do just that. She's going to an art camp. I didn't do much with the littles this week so I will probably do that while the oldest is at camp.

The Artist:

History

The first week was a lot of intro stuff. We went over the world and US map, found where we live and colored the maps after labeling the continents. We briefly discussed vikings on thursday.

The second week we talked about Christopher Columbus and added him to our timeline. The first section of "American Pioneers and Patriots" was read and we learned about Pedro and Catalina as they journeyed from Spain to the "new world".

On Wednedsay all three helped to make three boats, the nina pinta and santa maria.

We tried for a while to get them to stay up with the sails.

Finally emded up taking the sails off and just letting the boat float. LOL They still had a LOT of fun!

Math

Last week we started BJU Math 3. We finished the first chapter Thursday. It was mainly a review of the strategies for adding, subtracting and solving word problems.

(thanks to the little cowboy who decided to play with the camera for getting the pic! LOL)

Latin

This was new to us both but we started Prima Latina the second week. I wasn't sure how my little artist would like it but she seems to enjoy it! We talked about the alphabet, greetings and a few vocabulary words.

Science

The first week we talked about what scientists do and tried a little experiment with floating eggs in plain vs salt water. She was surprised to find that the egg in the salt water floated!

This second week we started Usborne's "Science with Air" On Thursday we tried an experiment to see if an empty bottle is really empty by pushing it down under the water in our kitchen sink.I was surprised at how much fun she had with something so simple! In the end my little Artist learned that there was air in the bottle even though it looked empty.

Language Arts and Reading

We've been reviewing cursive as well as manuscript writing so far just for some extra practice. Spelling will start nxt week and our Primary Language lessons I think the week after that.

 For reading I let her pick one of her chapter books. She chose a Scholastic one called "Pink Princess Rules the School"I FINALLY Figured out why she wasn't wanting to read though! I knew she had comprehension issues but just asking questions wasn't doing it. SO last week I wrote first, next last on the white board. After she read some to me (aloud) we stopped and I asked her to tell me what happened. We wrote a sentence on the board before continuing. After a few more pages we wrote another sentence and again at the end of the chapter. Then sort of worked together to summarize what happened. IT WORKED! Now she's reading fine for school. Wants to read ALL 3 books for bed time (each picks a story) plus anything that needs read for history or science! She's not sitting and reading on her own free time yet but she is reading whenever we get books out together! Woohoo! This is the child that for the past year I've been trying to get to read with incentives and a variety of other ways and nothing worked. Now she WANTS TO READ!

The Cowboy and the Princess

For the first week we talked about school, read stories about school and also the ABC's. We've sort of continued those books into this week but also started talking about the letter A.  I have some pictures on my phone of them making froot loop necklaces nad other things but my phone isn't letting me send/upload them right now so maybe I'll post them later.