Trucking Along

I have to say, we are LOVING our Hearts of Dakota Creation to Christ studies!  I don't feel as if I am dragging the kids along.  I am not falling asleep while reading to the children, which, by the way, makes it hard to tell them they have to pay attention!  And I feel as if each week we come away with some thing.  We create some kind of tangible item that shows what we learned. 

Memorizing poetry:  Kids hated it.  I forced them.  They refused.  I yelled.  They still did not memorize.  I WILL hear Robert Frost's Road Not Taken from two unnamed children!

Nature Study:  making Valentines for the Birds

Just hanging out

Looking for Gall Dwellers

Picking apart a flower

This week I upgraded our family calendar from the laminated poster that we tacked to the wall to this much more beautiful version.

Week 16

We are back to our regular schedule!  We have finally had a full week of school and we were actually fairly productive.  We read about Nineveh this week and Mason is in the process of writing a short research paper on the subject.  We learned about King Nebuchadnezzer and Daniel.  Brady started his business math, opening a sports store, and he is in the process of ordering his inventory and multiplying it all out to find how much it's going to cost him. (not for real, just on paper!)


Hailey read:  Sam is mad at me.  She is loving learning to read and is picking it up quite quickly.
Tyler seems to be picking up new words like crazy. 



1. 5th in class  2.  3rd in class  3.  Answering questions for the Judge

4.  Artwork for the show 5.  Fossil?  6.  Cookie statue of King Nebuchadnezzer's dream.

This was Fun...

http://www.fallacydetective.com/mystery-of-the-missing-mask/

Christmas and New Year's

Christmas was great!  We celebrated with the Green's on Christmas Eve and the Morrison's on Christmas Day.  Next year we will switch.  We had a great time with both families. 

Legos -- a new hobby

Can't go wrong with pics of the kids!

The new coat he's been wanting

a phone!?!

Balls

Even the dog was happy!

The annual retelling of the Christmas Story

The day after Christmas we left at 5:00 am for Ruidoso, NM to go skiing with two other couples and had a blast!

Then on to visit family in Alamogordo, NM.  We got to ring in the New Year a different way than we usually do

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And Its Only Wednesday!

Last week we had our friends and their traveling zoo come to visit all the way from California.  We haven't seen each other in a little over a year.  Strange thing was, it felt like last week.  That's the thing about good friends, time and space don't separate you.  (Of course, Instant Messenger helps :-)! )  We had a great time playing and just visiting.  She also brought me a new curriculum (she is the curriculum Queen ) which I am using for the remainder of the year.

What we were using as our "Core" studies was very thourough, indeed.  But B.O.R.I.N.G.  I could hardly make myself read it everyday so I can't even imagine what the kids were thinking.  Not to say the material was boring, it was the Bible and we were studying some really action packed and adventurous parts.  The boys really loved the conquests of the Isrealites and the Judges and David and Saul's struggles.  But that's all the curriculum had us do is read (oh and the salt dough map mentioned previously!).  We need stuff to do.  So in future posts we will chronicle our weekly adventures with the new and improved curriculum.

This week is a light week.  We have put aside everything and are working on a Christmas Lapbook/Notebooking project from Hands of a Child.  We have read about how Christmas traditions started and their meanings, connected the prophecies in the Old Testament to the New Testament's account of the birth of Christ, and the coming of John the Baptist.  We will be adding more over the next several days.

This is what else we did:

We also practiced for the upcoming musical

Our church's Live Nativity

Bananagrams, one of our favorites

played some games

made one boy very happy by burning his completed math workbooks!

Quite a wonderful week.

Thanksgiving Week

Thankfulness:  We have been practicing an exercise in Thankfulness this month which we are continuing to add to.  At dinner, I hand everyone a leaf I cut out and we all write what we are thankful for.  We have the thoughtful:  good friends, each of our family members.  We have the silly:  James Monroe (perhaps skateboy is thankful for the new presidential placemat :)  And the downright sweet: "for Jesus is Alive", Little Missy is always thinking and mulling over what we talk about.

Our Thanksgiving was great.  Family and friends came to share dinner with us, the kids got to go home to spend a couple of nights with Granny, and the smoked turkey turned out to perfection (thanks, honey!)

Anticipation:  Now, on to waiting for my friend Shaunna and her children to arrive for a short visit.  And getting our new tile installed (thanks Granny and DDad!)

Week in Review

Hailey's learning to read and write

Loving Math!

Good Work!

Field Trip to Storied Firearms:  We also went on a very interesting field trip to a local gun shop called Storied Firearms.  First Cherie took us around the fully restored train depot that had been moved from Dumas, TX.  She talked about how the building was moved and some of the historical aspects of the 1931 building.  We saw the cigarette burns on the ticket window from when the ticket master would put his cigarette down, and we saw the segregated waiting rooms.  After that Carl pulled out the guns and gave us a lesson on the history of firearms.  They had examples of percussion guns (1700s) all the way up to Colt revolvers (1860s).  Of course they had modern firearms as well.  He even let the kids hold a gun that was worth somewhere around $17,000, a dragoon.  Then the owner of the store, who is a competitive Cowboy Action Shooter, talked to the kids about the fun and excitement of competitive shooting sports.  All in all, the kids learned a great deal and had a great time.