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.

What We've Been Up To

Cody's order of turkeys came in.

Weekend trip to Mt. Bonnell



Hailey and Mom




Handsome boys




You wouldn't believe how dirty these guys get!




Yes, that is a lamb on a treadmill!

 We have been super busy around here.  It seems like we go through a period where there is absolutely nothing going on and we are all just staring at each other.  Then all of the sudden, BAM!  We are slammed with activities.  4-H is taking a good deal of that time.  The boys have gone to two shows so far with their lambs and they have another one in two weeks.  Cody got his turkeys, 15 of them, last Tuesday.  Two Thursdays a month they go to wood shop and to a 4H meeting once per month. Then you add in things like One Day Academy, church, friends, family and good golly its busy.

Finding Webs

Our challenge for today was to find webs.  We looked in all the usual places, our neighbor's yard the corners of the house, under the slide and in the playhouse.  We did find some cob webs in the playhouse where we sat to draw them and read an excerpt from The Handbook of Nature Study.  Then we headed down to the "trees" which is where our treehouse is.  We quickly found evidence of leaf-miners and galls which was our challenge for two weeks ago.  Brady found a broken egg shell then just "had" to climb the tree to find the nest.  On the way up the tree he did find a web, and the broken nest.  We figure it must be a mockingbird nest since we found a feather under the tree that would have belonged to one. 

The boys then spent time drawing the webs in their nature journals.  I think they really enjoyed this one, plus all the extra stuff we found.

Thought for the Day...

I read this today and I am currently mulling it over.  Letting it run around in my head because this is something totally new for me.  This is not a thought I generally can accept let alone put into practice.  BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE THE "LAW" PERSON.  I want to be the gospel kind of parent.

Every way we try to make our kids good that isn’t rooted in the good news of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ is damnable, crushing, despair-breeding, Pharisee-producing law. We won’t get the results we want from the law. We’ll get either shallow self-righteousness or blazing rebellion or both (frequently from the same kid on the same day!).  From this site

The End of the Salt Dough Map

I give up!  The fact that I just really don't want to do this has won.  Please remind me that I HATE salt dough maps the next time we are supposed to do this.

Here's our week in review:
B reading Golden Fleece

 M reading Hittite Warrior

 C doing a little recreational reading

 C's nature journal.  He really enjoys doing this and I love to see what he comes away with.

Boys making a flower press.  I had to make it cool by adding in the power tools!

 Little Miss working on Rod and Staff Adventures with Books

Finished!

The ongoing saga of Milkweed.....

I think we found some!  This happens to be the only thing living right now.  I am suprised at how excited I am over a silly plant but we really have spent time looking for this little bugger.  The people whose yard it was growing in probably think we are a bunch of loonies but its not really that far of a leap anyway!
In case you are wondering, this is actually what the ground looks like right now.

 Neat variegated leaves around the small flowers

The leaves grow out of it like they are unfolding from the stem.

The Habit of Obedience

I recently was reading some of Charlotte Mason's writings on Habit Training, specifically on Obedience.  This is an area I feel like we struggle in, among others.  So here is a little nugget that struck me:

To secure this habit of obedience, the mother must

exercise great self-restraint; she must never give a command

which she does not intend to see carried out to the full. And she

must not lay upon her children burdens, grievous to be borne, of

command heaped upon command.

OHC: Milkweed

Looking out on our yard all we see is a sea of brown.  The grasses are crunchy and the dirt is turning into dust.  We were skeptical when we started out on our nature walk this week if we would be able to find our challenge from our Outdoor Hour Newsletter of milkweed.  Usually it is all over the place.  We might even be able to find some monarch chrysillases attached to nearby plants.  But because it is so dry, I thought the best we could do was to look up some pictures on the internet.  We did, however, find one type of milkweed.  It was looking very sad, it had already bloomed, the seed pod was dried up.  We were able to find the seed "balloons", those feathery, cottony looking things that help the seed travel on the wind.  Which was pretty neat. 

So feeling a little better that nature hasn't completely revoked our privileges, we are going to make a project today that I will post about a little later.

Allison

Salt Dough Map

I confess, I really don't like making salt dough maps.  They seem like a great idea, it sounds like the kids will really have a wonderful learning experience.  It's all hands on, tactile, kinesthetic.  All the things that make for great learning.  But I still can't stand it.

That said, I have made the gooey mess, the children have made what appears to be Isreal and it is in the process of being painted.  We were supposed to have painted it 3 weeks ago.  We should be labeling the Judges on it.  I'm just hoping to get finished with labeling the tribes of Isreal.  I post this picture with trepidation -- please don't judge our lack of artistic ability! 

Next week we will add outlines of the tribes and hopefully label the judges. 

Art for the artfully challenged

Here's our first attempt at art.  Pretty nice, I'd have to say.  We used Nana's Free Tutorials.

 Mine

 4 year old

 10 year old

8 year old

Nature Walk #1

Our first nature walk, or at least one with a purpose, went amazingly well.  We stared off first thing in the morning because the scorching temperatures are really hindering our ability to be in nature much less enjoy it.  Following Outdoor Hour Challenge for August, we are studying ponds.  Our neighborhood has a creek that runs through it so we decided to walk the half mile or so down to it to look for animal tracks near the water.  On the way we found the most amazing thing....

That is the full skeleton of a snake!  Minus the head.  However, B did some searching and found part of the jaw.  It had smallish teeth so I am figuring it was some sort of grass snake.  It was caught up in some erosion control netting (cause of death).

Our trek to the creek did not produce the running, babbling brook of times past.  The boys did walk a ways down and found a smallish puddle full of tiny frogs. 

So, while I was sorely disappointed (but not surprised) to not find a creek, all in all it was a great experience.