Weekly Wrap Up - Filled with Crafts!

Our school day is divided up in two parts. In the mornings, I spend time with the children individually and work on math, handwriting, spelling and language lessons, and this is also the time when I do reading lessons with my youngest. While the children eat lunch, I read to them from our fun read aloud book. After our lunch break we work on the subjects we do together as a family like Science and History. So far, this schedule is working for us.

This week we finished up studying birds and mammals. Starting next week will take a break from our Considering God's Creation book and do a unit study on Seashells to prepare for our trip to FL we are taking very soon. I purchased "Sunny Seashells" from Download N Go, and it looks like it's going to be so much fun! This will also be our FIRST lapbook, and I'm not even scared!

Both children completed their book jacket book reports and I made a slideshow to show you both of their completed reports. You can see the slideshow by clicking HERE. I tried to get the slideshow I made in Photobucket to post in this post, but I could not figure it out.

We had some fun doing some fall crafts this week. This is our third fall living in PA and each year we have gone apple picking and taken a picture of the children under an apple tree. We make cards and send them to our faraway family and friends who all live in MO. This year we drew a tree on the front and then made finger print apples on the trees. The girls and I had a lot of fun doing this together. T (my boy) just doesn't care for arts and crafts, and frankly, I don't feel like pushing it, so he just encouraged us by telling us we were doing a good job . We also gathered up some sticks from our yard and put them in an old glass jug and used it to make a thankful tree. I also think it will make a nice Jesse tree at Christmas time. What do you think? My friend, Sandra, used a leaf template with her boys and I asked her where she got it and she sent me the link to abcteach.com. The Internet is such a blessing in how you can find wonderful, free, printable resources to use! I am NOT artistic, so I NEED printable things! So, I printed off the leaves, the girls colored them, we wrote down some things we're thankful for, and I tied them to the sticks. We'll be adding more leaves between now and Thanksgiving, and then make the switch to a Jesse tree when it's time. If you'd like to see a slideshow of our crafts you can by clicking over HERE.

My five-year-old and I are continuing to work on her reading lessons and she is making progress and gaining confidence. She also started working on writing her name "the big girl way" as I call it. Instead of writing in all capital letters, she is working on writing her name using the correct lowercase letters. She is doing great! One day for math, she spent some time measuring things around the house with a ruler. She thought it was a lot of fun!

I got a nice surprise this week from Diane over at Cabin in the Woods! I won The Life of Fred Fractions she was giving away. I have heard a lot of my homeschooling friends talk about Fred, and I can't wait to take a look at this curriculum. It will be a little while before we're ready to use it, but I can put it on our shelves and share with others in the mean time!

To read more weekly wrap-ups, head over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.