Over Thanksgiving Break

We had a whole lot of fun over Thanksgiving break. The only school we did was keeping up with readers. Daddy built them a cardboard playhouse out of the big box we had sitting in the garage. Abby and Abram LOVED it!

Abby made the cheese ball this year for Thanksgiving. Mama only helped a little. She also helped me make the Green Bean Cassarole. She was delighted with herself.

We put the cheeseballs in a dipping bowl--so they weren't exactly balls, but were still just as yummy!

Today Abby read her Fun Tales book up on the kitchen counter while I fixed lunch. Abram wanted to be up there, too, and it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. They were occupied with something instead of bugging me about when lunch would be done, and I was able to listen to Abby in a more relaxed setting. She really enjoyed doing her readers this way, so I think it might stick with us. I'll start planning on her Readers being during kitchen time, whether cooking or cleaning. On another note, she is almost all the way finished with Fun Tales!! I am requiring her to read each 5 times in any order she wants. She's up to reading 5 different Fun Tales in a row and will finish in the next few days with what I'm requiring. She is already beginning her 1st grade readers at a different time each day and is doing very well on them also.

School as a Part of Life

My favorite part of homeschooling is when I really see learning and life combine in a sort of free dance. There are always times when school seems 'school-y', but the most rewarding part is when it flows together. The last few days have really been like this for us! Saturday, we visited the Science Museum and were able to see the special Dinosaur exhibit. The children really enjoyed this time--the Houston museum has really taken extra effort lately to make the exhibits child-friendly (they even had a sand pit where the children could 'uncover' dinosaur bones).

At home that night, the kids sat with Daddy at the computer playing ABC games on starfall.com. They stayed up a little later enjoying the game after shedding clothes here and there around the house for me to pick up later.



This morning while I was cooking breakfast, Abby and Abram sat at the table working on math. Abram's putting the numbers in order with Abby's help, and Abby's working on some workbook pages in her Singapore math workbook. This work continued even during breakfast as they ate toast and eggs. Learning and life really do smear together very nicely.

Then, later that day, after reading about the clothes that people in Medieval times wore, we watched a movie that portrayed the clothes nicely. We ate lunch during that time, and afterward Abby and Abram dressed up to match the movie the best they could find. How Fun!!!

Not all school that we do ends up this fun and natural, but when it does flow this nicely, I realize why I do this--why I will stick with it to the end! My hope is that when they grow up, they will not separate learning from life, but see life as a continual process of learning, a gift from God to us.

I thank God for the wonderful days that He's given me to encourage me in my efforts to please Him!

Art "lesson"

We have a book that teaches young children to draw very basic pictures using shapes. It's called Draw Write Now, and Abby's loving it. I don't actually have time to work with her on it, so I just hand her the book and let her do what she wants in the book while I'm reading poetry or some other 'light' material. This has been her masterpeice thus far!!!! Isn't it great?!! I thought she did awsome. Just wanted to show her work off a little.

Map Work

Abby loves map-work this year. Every history story, some bible stories, and even some of the Read-Alouds have maps that go with them. I make a copy of this map (allowed under Sonlight's IG copywrite), and let her color it with markers. First, before she free-colors, we identify the state, country, etc. that is a part of the reading. She colors that in red, and then freely colors the rest of the map as she wishes. She does this while I'm reading the story to her, looking up every now and then for a picture. This is one of her favorite activities right now.

The maps we have completed so far are:

The life of Martin Luther

The life of William Tyndale

The life of William Tell, The Apple and the Arrow

The life of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed

Abby's 6th Birthday Party

Abigail's Birthday Party was a BEAUTIFUL day! We all had a wonderful time enjoying the early fall weather outside. Abby had several friends come to the party and she had a blast!! What a great party!



Here's my little 6 year old, helping prepare to make cupcakes. She helped to make them and ice them too, although we didn't get any pics of that:

As you can tell, we had a Barbie themed party this year. We saved quite a bit of money making our own creative cake and buying all of the decor, including mylar balloons at the Dollar Tree! We were giving her a BIG present this year, so we HAD to be thrifty.



And her BIG gift was???????

Daddy thought ahead and bought a grey one, and added plastic stick-on flowers, so that we she outgrows her truck, Abram will also be able to enjoy it. She really loves it!! Her and her friends had a great time driving it around Nana and Papa's back yard, taking turns on who got to drive and ride along, etc.

Time to blow out the candle. Happy Birthday, SweetyGirl!!!! She really enjoyed being surrounded by friends to open her gifts. She loved them all and was excited about each and every one. She even got a new ballerina barbie that I bought especially for her cake.

And now, at home, she enjoyes dressing in her new shirt, and "flying" her new butterfly barbie around everywhere. That barbie was the biggest hit this year, doubtless.

Language Arts 1

Our Language Arts and Reading 1 package arrived yesterday! I stayed up until almost 1:00a.m. absorbing the material and what it requires. Where the K program was just too easy, I can see that this years material will be a good challenge. We will be taking it at her pace, so I'm not worried about it taking more than a year to complete. There are still a few remnants of the K program left before I can say she's graduated from L.A. K (like there are still a few more short stories and poems to be read, half of her very last Go For the Code workbook, etc), but she has finished all level based parts of the curriculum, like the copywork. I feel free to go ahead and start L.A. 1 at a slow pace while completing the last bits of L.A. K--kind of a rounding the corner thing.

I am so excited about what I see ahead in the Language Arts 1 program. Flipping through it, I'm drawn to the logical way in which it's organized. It keeps with basic phonetics, while still allowing for memorized "sight" words where phonetics doesn't help. It incorportates spelling that matches the level of reading that week. Copywork matches with the reading material and fun games and activities round out everything to mix and match hard work with fun learning. I really LOVE what I see. I am truly looking forward to experiencing this Language Arts 'year', or however long it takes her.

I can't hardly believe my little girl is becoming so grown up. This program goes all the way from cvc words (consonant, vowel, consonant words), which she is very familiar with, to reading short chapter books. We're in to new territory now, and I'm nervous and excited all at once to see how it goes.

My SweetyGirl is 6 years old!

Good morning, SweetyGirl! It's your BIRTHDAY!!!! Her party's going to be on next Sunday, so I went ahead and gave her one present now. A dozen pink roses and an outfit for her special day out with Papa and Nana! I know you can't tell very well from the picture, but these are sparkly jeans.

Papa and Nana took Abby to Claires to get her ears pierced. She suprised us all when she chose the blue earings instead of pink. She didn't cry even one tear, and was so excited. I half expected her to have one pierced ear when we finished, but she was SO brave!!

Nana with Abby, in her new blue earings. Even though she surprised us with blue, she hasn't regreted it at all! She loves them. And they match everything, which is very important to my girly-girl.

Papa admiring Abby's new look.

Mama is very proud of how bravely Abby handled the whole thing. Abram's popping his head in for a better look.

Today's Copywork Assignment

I usually don't think much about reporting Abby's copywork stuff, cause it really makes for a boring picture. Today, however, she gave a really cute answer to one of the questions, so I figured now was a good time to write about Copywork.

Today's Copywork:

Tom rubs the van's hub cap.

(She copy's the sentence in her own handwriting).

Then she does the excercises for that sentence. Today's were as follows:

1. Circle the apostrophe. What does it mean? (she answer's orally--"That it belongs to him.") I'm not about to correct her that a van is not necessarily a him/her.

2. Why do you think Tom would rub the hub cap? (What I was expecting: "To make it shiny." What she actually answered was way cuter: "Because maybe they're going to a show to see who's cars the prettiest!" TOO CUTE!!!!)

3. Underline the wrods with the short u sound. (rubs, hub)

Fun Tales with Abby

Mama listening in as Abby reads me her book:

We're going to have to work on short "e" (she pronounces it "ih" a lot).

Abby's doing very well on her reading! She goes through anywhere from 3 to 5 of these little books throughout the day. The first one we read in the day is the one for the week we are on, than I let her choose any one she wishes to read. She can read all of them with no problem, she just needs practice in fluency. I make sure she reads each of the books at least 5 times before checking it off as done. By the 5th time she comes across it, she can easily read the sentences. Sonlight's K reading program doesn't get into many memorized words (other than 'the' and 'is', etc.), so Abby is really beyond this level. It gives her good reading fluency practice, but I'm looking forward to getting the Reading 1 from Sonlight so that Abby can go on to the next level of know-how in reading.

Hurricane Ike

I have been putting off blogging after Hurricane Ike, simply because I am overwhelmed by the amount of info I could put on here to explain what all we did. I think, instead, I might just load some pictures, and let them speak for themselves. We are fine, although I have shed plenty of tears (more for family and friends that were effected more than us). We are finally caught up with school. I was SO GLAD that we were ahead in math and Language Arts, so that all I had to do was focus on the subjects that we were behind on because of Ike. After almost a month of not doing hardly any school, we were only a week behind on the core, and after really looking at my instuctor's guide, I was still ahead on most of it. Abby was already half done with L.A. K and Math K! I hadn't realized that before the hurricane. Wow! I guess I just didn't think with how much playing and watching cartoons that they do that she could possibly be that far ahead. I was really, seriously worried about being behind until I took a hard look at where we were. Now I'm more worried about how I'm going to find the money for more math and L.A.s stuff to either suppliment or go on ahead. (I'll probably just buy a different kind of math, since I want her to be well rounded in the different approaches--she already has Horizons and Singapore. But the language arts for Kindergarten is just too easy for her, so I'll probably just go on ahead with that. I need to find out where she actually needs work, other than just fluency practice.) Anyhow, on with some pics:





Evacuation--all we took was a suitcase of toys for each child, necessities for our stay with Mamaw, files, and pictures:

Our stay with Mamaw was crowded, but very peaceful overall. We played games, watched the news, and let the kids play outside when they got stir-crazy.

On our way back to the house, we saw some really surreal sights. These are within 2 miles of our home:

Our next door neighbor's swing set was scattered all over this field. The guys pulled all the peices they could find back, but some of the peices (including the slide) could not be found. The children entertained themselves on the peices until they dragged it around to the front for trash pick up. Sad!

This is the inside of our home. Everything in the living room got wet, except the things up off the ground, like the tv and fishtank (laugh!). Our couches still smell musty, although they may be able to be steam cleaned, but the other furniture deteriorated near the bottom where the water sat against it for days. The carpet all molded and had to be taken out before we came back.

There was still a lot of work to be done once we returned. The kids had to stay upstairs in their room for a couple of days while we pulled up tackboards and anything else we didn't want them playing around. After that, we could no longer keep them back, and they helped with little tasks like sweeping and carrying out pillows. They got to see what the inside of a wall looked like and what sheet rock really was.

All of our food was ruined because of electricity outages. We went to the grocery store, but that was a joke. We found peanut butter and jelly, but not bread. It looked so bare! Then what we had in the basket we ended up not being able to buy because we had no cash. We ended up driving to the nearest distribution center and getting a box of MREs and some bottled water. It didn't take but another 2 days before some sausage and milk from nearby places started ariving at Walmart, and we got some cash out, but the MREs were a fun experience. I feel for the soldiers who have to eat that nasty stuff!

Math on a Holiday

Daddy was home on Labor Day, so we just relaxed and played most of the day. When they did get bored, however, I brought out some of their math toys to play with. Abby and Abram both love the pattern blocks, and ask to get them down pretty often.