BOX DAY!

DONE!

So, other than a block of advent posts from 2008 which I will eventually get to, I am finally done switching over my homeschool blog to this address. I look forward to blogging our homeschool adventure much more regularly and hope to be able to link up with other blogs and share ideas. This journey is certainly rewarding, but it is also incredibly exhausting. What a great "age" to live in where we can all be so connected and ideas so readily available!

Gallon Guy

I'm usually really bad about doing crafts. I try to have one slated per week, but so many times they end up being ones we're doing "just to do them," and with 4 kids 5 and under, I'd rather not deal with the mess, time and hassle of that. However, this one made sense to me. I could see the benefit to doing it. So we made Gallon Guy: You need one large piece of paper, 4 smaller rectangles, 8 smaller squares and 16 even smaller squares (hint: start with the smallest squares and work your way up!) We used different colors for each so they would stand out.

There he is! I maybe should have labeled the pieces AFTER Matthew glued them all together - some of them you can't see the words anymore, but it adds character. And he's serving his purpose! Daddy asked this morning, "Matthew, how many quarts in a gallon?" Without hesitation (and with Gallon Guy nowhere in sight), Matthew answered, "FOUR!"

(Matthew loved Gallon Guy so much, he made a Gallon Guy mii on the wii.)

One Month Down...

So one month into the school year and we've only had one really awful day. I think I'll take that! We're really enjoying this Core from Sonlight and have finished our first chapter book! The kids really loved The Boxcar Children and thoroughly enjoyed transforming our little "set" that we built as the story went on. I'll have to take some updated pictures, but we added pine straw beds and some more grass and shrubs over the tracks, etc. I'm guessing we'll be reading more of those books as the months go on. They're not completely enjoying the book we're reading now for our "rug time" - it's got a TON of Old English-type vocabulary, etc. and that's just something they've not been exposed to in their young lives. But they still come running (most of the time) when I say it's rug time. I've found that it works especially well if I let them have a cracker or something while they listen. Then they leave each other alone and I can read :-) Andrew is now 6 months old and can make the school day quite challenging. But since they're young, we can get most of what we need to get done during his nap time, provided they're all ready to sit and listen during that time. I often use lunch time as a time to read anything that I still need to read - history especially. Again, they're eating so their mouths are occupied! Of course, this often means I go without lunch until much later in the day, but it helps ease some of the stress surrounding school. We've recently started attending a new church and are excited for the enrichment opportunities it offers. It's neat, too, that Sonlight is a pretty missionary-focused curriculum and Matthew's class at church is studying missionaries right now. That about sums up our life right now. Overall, it's been a good first month of school!

Edible Science

Today for science we were studying the various layers of the earth. I was supposed to hardboil an egg to show the various levels (shell = crust, white = mantle, yolk = core), but last night was a rough night with the baby and I didn't want to heat up my house today boiling the water! Luckily, we had apples in the house, so I cut one down the middle and improvised (skin = crust, pulp = mantle, core/seeds = core). When we were done with the lesson, we of course had to eat the apple so that it wouldn't go bad

Matthew took a big bite and said, "Mmmmm! This mantle sure is yummy! And some magma just squirted into my mouth!"

Kids are fun!

First Day of School

So it's upon us! The start of another school year. Matthew and I went out by ourselves yesterday for a special shopping trip for some last-minute school supplies. It's rare to get out with any of them, let alone one-on-one time with them since Daddy's working 6 and 7 days a week now. So we enjoyed it and tried to make the most out of it. Got some good deals, too!

The kids were very eager to get started this morning.

We read the creation story this morning and made a melted-crayon earth to mark the beginning of our timeline.

They enjoyed their rug time reading with the Boxcar children and acting out the chapter with the little "dolls" they had made last week. The girls need lots of work on listening and not interrupting, so we're trying to focus on that during rug time.

Our science reading was about where rain comes from. After each part, Matthew would color the corresponding part on his water wheel.

When he was finished he put his two pieces together and could spin the back one to see the water cycle in action!

The girls did some freestyle coloring during all of this.

Then we took an impromptu trip outside to check out where the rain water on our street goes.

We also made a rainbow on the driveway with a glass of water. After this picture we got a really good one with bright colors. Ashlyn was the most fascinated with this experiment, while the others were more excited to run around the yard

They were excited about their new (cheap Target find!) lunch items.

Thankfully Andrew took a good morning nap today! Once the girls went down for their rest time, Matthew did his spelling work. It's supposed to take him a week to learn the words, but he spelled every one of them 100% correctly the very first time I said them. I'm really trying to find a good Language Arts fit for him but it's not working too well! With Sonlight, the grammar is way above his head while the spelling and reading are beneath him. We'll keep trying to find a good fit.

More Prep

In trying to add the girls in to Matthew's more advanced readers, I knew we had to do something to make it fun and keep their interest. So, since our first book is The Boxcar Children, we made a little figure of each of the children and also made the boxcar. The kids had so much fun doing this that they were wanting to play with them all day!

You can't tell in the pictures but we also made a railroad track that the boxcar is sitting on. I hope this makes the story more fun for them!

Matthew decided he can't wait until the 31st so he wants to start school this week. So tonight we took the kids for a back-to-school-bash ice cream treat from the dollar menu at McDonald's

(some kids don't need ice cream to be happy )