Collage Friday: A Week Filled with Writing

On Monday afternoon the children went to another swimming lesson, then we stopped by McDonalds to get a small treat, and visited the library. 

Tuesday was co-op day and Kaitlyn got to attend a FREE charcoal pastel art class at our local library. She was a dirty mess when she got home. Ha! 

On Sunday, the girls performed with their Signs Choir during our worship service and on Wednesday they had AWANA club, and Tyler and I had youth group. If you work with children or youth, I recommend visiting Fun Ninja to find a wide variety of fun games. I use this site almost weekly to come up with new games to use with our group. 

This week, we worked on editing a lot. The children had written mini reports and notebook pages on Eisenhower, JFK, and they chose someone from the Civil Rights Movement to write about. Here is Lauren writing about Rosa Parks. 

Lauren is growing a lot as a writer. She wrote a rough draft on her own and then I work with her as an editing buddy. She was so proud of her Rosa Parks notebook page once she was done and I was too! 

Next week in history we will learn about President Johnson and possibly start a unit on the Vietnam War if a book I requested from the library arrives in time.

The children are becoming stronger in their independent subjects and know what needs to be done each morning so our afternoons are filled with read alouds, activities, errands, chores, and free time.

I'm linking up again this week with Homegrown Learner's Collage Friday.  Take some time to visit this weekend for some home educating inspiration and encouragement.

Collage Friday: A Week Filled with Extra Fun!

This week was filled with extra activities. Due to all our fun, our time at home was shortened, but sometimes we need to change things up a bit in order to break up the monotony of the regular ol' routine.

On Monday, the children had swimming lessons, which means they are halfway through this session of lessons. We hope to get them in another session very soon, but the thought of doing that in the dead of winter is not very appealing.

Co-op was crazy this week. A dear friend of mine was in the hospital and so we had to cover her two classes. I taught my speech and P.E. classes, and then I had to also help assist in cooking and art. I really do enjoy our co-op and am so thankful for all the servants in there who do jump in when they're needed to make sure our kids continue to have a fun time of learning and hanging out with friends. We have a great community of friends in this group.

This collage is kind of random. My husband started a science experiment with the kids to learn more about stalactites and stalagmites, Lauren enjoyed doing her grammar under the dining table with the dog, and she was also super excited when the mail man delivered her LEGO set she ordered with her own money.

The girls and I had a fun day on Thursday when we got to enjoy Suessical the Musical, lunch at Chick-fil-a, and then a trip to the library. Tyler was going to go with us, but was asked to work so he did that instead. An older couple in our church has needed more help with their yard work this year and hired Tyler to help. He has enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about lawn care and this couple has absolutely spoiled him with lunches out, a local county fair, and a trip to a beautiful garden where he could see some really cool coy ponds.

Friday School usually includes math, grammar, science review, and then it's family time. My husband is a pastor and our church graciously lets him take off a day during the week since Sunday is a work day for him and for years he has taken Friday off. Once we started homeschooling, we shortened our school day to allow for family time. This week we decided to visit a local apple orchard for a fun family outing. 

I'm linking up again this week with Homegrown Learner's Collage Friday. Click over and check it out. It makes for some fun weekend reading.

Learning About the Civil Rights Movement

We study history chronologically and currently we are learning about the civil rights movement. We are listening to the audio version of "Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry" and we watched a movie Disney made a few  years back called "Ruby Bridges." I cried off and on throughout this entire movie because I just cannot fathom all that cruelty and hate.

Here are some other resources we used this week for our civil rights studies.
Ruby Bridges Video 
Martin Luther King, Jr. Bio Page
Rosa Parks Bio Page

We are reading "In Search of the Source" now. It is a captivating book about Wycliffe Bible Translators in Papua New Guinea. This is how you'll often find my children during read aloud time. Kaitlyn will be knitting, Tyler will be lying down on the couch, and Lauren will be coloring. 

We had drum, piano, violin, and swimming lessons again this week and our co-op started this week as well. The children enjoy their time out of the house and hanging out with friends.

I am linking up with Collage Friday with Homegrown Learners again this week. If you need some encouragement and inspiration, this is a great place to visit. 

The Week We Went to the Swimming Pool

This week I overheard a conversation my youngest daughter had with my husband. She was sharing with him how busy she is. She has school, swimming, AWANA, violin lessons, and Girls in Action (a missions club). Heath and I have had a couple good laughs over a child's version of busy and we are so grateful for all these wonderful and fun activities she has been blessed to participate in.  

On Monday, the children started a 6-week session of swimming lessons at the YMCA. There are only two other children in their class, so they are getting a lot of attention, instruction, and practice. 

In between music lessons, school work, and chores, I found the girls doing a lot of fun things this week. They are still enjoying working with chalk pastels, Kaitlyn is knitting, and they had fun challenging each other in a cup stacking game. 

We have also been busy in the kitchen. Lauren made a pumpkin pie for her dad, but we forgot to put sugar in and we don't recommend doing that. Kaitlyn cooked Shepherd's Pie for dinner one night and it was delicious. The temperatures are dropping, which means enjoying mugs of hot chocolate while doing math lessons. Tyler said this week he feels sorry for all the children at school sitting at their desks and taking pop quizzes while he's at home drinking delicious hot chocolate. 

Menu planning and crock pot cooking are incredibly beneficial during the school year. I like to set my crock pot out the night before so when I wake up I SEE the crock pot and it reminds me to dump the ingredients in and get dinner started. Also, I pull out the recipes I need for the week so I'm not searching for them at 5 o'clock when I want to start dinner. 

We are studying about the Civil Rights Movement in history and after reading about Brown v. Board of Education, we found this PBS website about Ruby Bridges (one of the first little African American girls to integrate into an all white school) and also Homeschool Helper has some wonderful FREE notebook pages like this one for Dr. Martin Luther King.

Our co-op starts next week and we are looking forward to it. Tuesdays will be busy days, but filled with friends, fun, and learning.

How is your school year going? Are you enjoying any fun, enrichment activities? Do you have any tips to share to make getting dinner on the table easier on those busy days?

I am linking up again with Homegrown Learner's Collage Friday. Please click over and check out this fun community who gathers each Friday to share some cute collages and homeschool ideas and encouragement.

Sick Kids, School Work, and Youth Group

This was a week full of sickness, school work, and youth group. My church was gracious enough to give me the opportunity to serve as the director of youth ministry at our church. This means I get to plan games, activities, and weekly Bible studies for teenagers. I had so much fun on our kick-off night, which was Wednesday and judging by the amount of laughter in the room, I think others did as well. My oldest child is in the youth group and his sister will join him next year. Heath (my husband) and I have been involved in youth ministry for most of our 15 years of marriage and it is weird - very weird to be the parent of a youth now. It's a good weird though. 

Heath had the day off on Monday and Kaitlyn was sick, so we were pretty slow and lazy. We played games, looked at old scrapbooks, and just lounged around. 

Wearing vampire teeth makes reading more fun even when you're not reading about vampires, but Ella Enchanted. Lauren listened to the audio version of this book, but decided she also wanted to read it. I guess she likes it. The children are still breezing through their Teaching Textbooks lessons and next week I have got to get them started on some more challenging activities through Khan Academy. We really like Teaching Textbooks, but my kids often complain about the first few weeks being so easy and boring. 

In history this week, the children studied President Eisenhower and each wrote a paper for me. I found this online resource helpful and the older children enjoyed reading information on their own and the short video was an added bonus too. If notebooking is your thing, you might enjoy this FREE Eisenhower notebook page. 

My daughter, Kaitlyn, was sick most of the week, but still managed to get all her assignments completed. Today, she was not running a fever and feeling so much better we ran up to the library and got her registered for a babysitting workshop, book club, and an art workshop. Our family LOVES our local library and are so very thankful for all the wonderful programs and resources.

Next week we start 6 weeks of swimming lessons at our local YMCA, and we are looking forward to adding that to our schedule.

I am linking up with Homegrown Learner's Collage Friday again this week. Be sure and check out this fun link-up for homeschool inspiration and support. This week Mary shares how to find encouragement when you have a bad week. Be sure and check out other bloggers who link up as well.

Our First Week Back to School

On Monday, we started back into our school groove. This year was the easiest transition we have ever experienced and I believe it is largely due to the fact these three kiddos are older, more mature, and have a few years of practicing good habits under their belts (thank you Charlotte Mason). 

I liked the way our 1st day of school pictures turned out last year, so I did the same thing this year. It is so fun (and a little sad) to look back and see how much they have grown and changed in a year's time. 

We are adding more geography to our daily work after reading "The Core" by Leigh Bortins and some wonderful blog posts over at Homegrown Learners. My children know their U.S. geography very well, so I thought starting out tracing the United States would be a great way to ease them into this new activity. 

Lauren had her first violin lesson this week and was very excited. She actually described herself as "nervous-cited." Tyler is continuing his drum lessons and even plays in our worship service a couple times each month. Kailtyn is progressing well in her piano lessons as well. 

I am truly a blessed woman. My husband is so much fun to parent with. This week we had a lot of great family time and he is once again teaching science this year. He is using Christian Kids Explore Earth and Space and he has been pleased and impressed with this curriculum as he has been preparing lessons the past few weeks.  It is so wonderful having this subject taken off my plate. He is also going to teach a public speaking class at our co-op this fall.

I am linking this post up with Homegrown Learner's Collage Friday. You should check it out. It is always a fun place to visit on the web for encouragement and ideas.

Collage Friday - laundry, games, and story tacos

I'm not a strict and rigid scheduler, but I do thrive under a good routine. This was the first week in a long time that I feel like things have been normal around here. I also came to the realization this week just how much more my older two children are working responsibly and independently on much of their school work.  

Collage 1

Kaitlyn had fun playing around on Microsoft Word making a collage with her spelling words this week for a more creative way of studying. Lauren did a great job folding a load of towels while watching something on Netflix. I also made some math notebooking pages for her about some concepts she's been struggling with lately. I am hopeful they will serve as a good study guide and resource for her to get these math concepts down pat. 

Collage 2
Lauren did a story taco for one of her Boxcar Children books this week. It's a cute idea I found on Pinterest and modified it a bit. Each ingredient of the taco represents a story element and she labeled each one and wrote the information about the book on the back of each page.

On Tuesday night our whole family was home and at dinner, Kaitlyn gave each one of us a personal, hand-written invitation to a family game night. We played Uno Tippo, regular Uno, Scrapes and Scabs, Pictionary, and one family wrestling session. It was so much fun!

Our new read aloud is Caddie Woodlawn and Tyler and Kaitlyn have started reading Old Yeller. In history we are reading about several "go-getters" in our nation's history like cattlemen, oilmen, men who sold things by catalogs (Ward and Sears) and men like Thomas Edison. My husband started something new with the older two children this week. Each Friday he is going to have a quiz bowl of five questions prepared for them and the first child to get to 25 points will win a prize. Tyler took the lead this week with three points, but Kaitlyn isn't far behind with one point. 

I know not every week is smooth and uneventful like this week, but I will give thanks for the good and give thanks for the flexibility homeschooling offers when life throws in things that veer us off our routines. How was your week? I'm linking up this week again with Collage Friday, which is hosted by Mary at Homegrown Learners. You should take a minute and check out a few of the link-ups. It's a fun way to take a peek into the lives of other homeschool families. 

A Week for Birds and Basketball

We slowed things down quite a bit the month of December, took a nice 11 day Christmas break, eased back into our school routine last week, and this week we did a full 5-day school week. Wowsers! I never thought the week would end. We had a good week, but I remember thinking on Tuesday that it surely had to be Thursday! 

On Monday, all three children were due for a math test. Kaitlyn thought Cody might help her out, and Lauren insisted on taking her test mounted high upon a kitchen bar stool. Tyler and Kaitlyn began their Easy Grammar lessons this week and Lauren also started "English for the Thoughtful Child." Kaitlyn was also excited about starting up with her piano lessons this week, after having a couple weeks off so her teacher could enjoy the holidays. 

This week we wrapped up our science unit, which means we'll be shifting back to our history studies next week. The children thought it was fun to squeeze an egg as hard as they could in the palm of their hand and watch it....wait a minute...they didn't break! God's amazing creation is evident once again. How else could mommy birds incubate their eggs if they broke easily. Well, eggs break easily, but not when pressure is applied evenly.

We love taking our Christmas tree out and propping it up against a lilac bush to give the birdies some cover and protection during the winter months. We made sure our nearby bird feeder was full and we also made homemade bird feeders using toilet paper rolls, peanut butter, and of course, bird seed. So simple and fun!

We had a nice day of sunshine on Thursday, so we got outdoors and played some basketball together. I would just like to share that if you were on my team you won each game. It was kind of chilly out playing, but it was fun to be out in the sunshine and get in a little fun exercise. When we were done, I had the children do some shuffles and walking lunges because I'm mean like that.

How was your week? I'm linking up once again with Collage Friday, hosted by Homegrown Learners. 

Collage Friday ~ First School Days of 2013

We enjoyed an abbreviated school week. I took Monday to do a little cleaning and cooked some special New Year's Eve treats and I rested a lot since I felt a serious cold coming on. My husband had Tuesday off, so we enjoyed a lazy family day, and we set the alarms before going to bed so we could resume a somewhat normal schedule on Wednesday. Doing school Wednesday-Friday was a great way to ease back into the school routine around here. I like to call this method a "slow start." We did a lot of silent reading, finished a read aloud, reviewed and progressed in our math lessons, wrote in our journals, made thank you videos and wrote thank you letters for Christmas gifts. I am actually looking forward to spending some time laying out our lesson plans for next week as we hit things full force.

I wanted to squeeze in a fun photo collage from Sunday. We got a good amount of snow on Saturday, so my husband decided to pack up all our snow clothes and sleds and take them with us to church on Sunday. As soon as church was over, we changed and went sledding at our church because there are some awesome hills on the property. When we were done, we treated the kids to lunch out (which is a rare Sunday treat). It was a super fun afternoon.

I believe thank you letters are important. If people were kind and thoughtful enough to bless our family, then the respectful and kind thing to do is to write a simple thank you note. For a homeschool mom like me, this is also a sneaky way to get in a little extra writing practice as well. I believe a lot of kids are not being taught letter writing or how to address envelopes anymore because of all the electronic communicating we do. I found a cute little graphic (for free) to download and use on our Christmas thank you letters. Instead of writing thank you letters, we made a few thank you videos to send to our faraway family members. The children had a lot of fun. I'll attach a video at the end of the post if you're interested in seeing how we did it.

My son received books 1-4 of the Cooper Kids Adventure Series for Christmas and he is reading them quickly! One day I had to wait for him to come to the table for math because he HAD to finish the chapter he was reading and I'm fine with that since there was a time I wondered if the boy was ever going to learn to read.

My 10-year-old daughter got a Kindle for Christmas and I snapped a picture of her this morning. The computer was all ready for her to slide over and do her Teaching Textbooks lesson, but like her brother, she HAD to finish the chapter she was reading.

How was your Christmas break (if you took one)? I enjoyed ours very much, but am looking forward to the fresh start January helps give us. I am linking up again this week with Collage Friday hosted by Homegrown Learners. 

Here's a video the children made for some Missouri family who sent them some gifts. We thought it would be fun to make some videos instead of writing letters to some of our family members.

Christmas Thank You Video

Collage Friday

We had a busy, fun, and memory-making week around here. On Sunday the girls sang in our church's annual children's Christmas choir. Kaitlyn also played a piano piece for the prelude and both girls had tiny solos in "How Great Our Joy." Later on Sunday afternoon, Kaitlyn spent some time decorating a cake for our Senior Pastor's birthday and our staff Christmas party at our church. She always has fun coming up with decorating ideas. She still says she wants to own a cakes shop and call it "Kate's Kakes" one day. She is dressed in all red and white in the picture below because it was candy cane night at AWANA and she was ready to go. 

Monday was an "out of the box" school day. We went into the office with my husband, due to the staff Christmas party, but instead of sitting in a room at church to do school work, we decided to go to Starbucks, drink warm drinks and work on spelling, writing, and math. We also made a stop at a local library we like to visit when we are near our church. I shared this with my mother-in-law and she asked me if the employees of Starbucks were okay with us taking up a table to do school work. I don't mean to sound uncaring, but it honestly doesn't bother me to take my home educated children outside of the home Monday-Friday during school hours. I answer questions as they come and make no excuses for why we do things the way we do and usually have very encouraging conversations with people in our community. How about you? Are you comfortable getting out of the house during school hours or do you prefer staying closer to home?

On Monday afternoon, after the staff Christmas party, we took our daughter to her weekly piano lesson and then headed to Hershey, PA. We planned on visiting Chocolate World like we do every year at this time since moving to PA, but they closed at 5:00 and we pulled into the driveway at 5:15! We were all very disappointed and my husband and I felt foolish for not checking the times, but every year we had gone in the evening. However, there is only one week during December when they are open until 9 pm. I guess we scheduled our trip a little too early this year. We saved the night by promising the children to return to Chocolate World when their Grandma and Grandpa come to visit because they wanted to experience Chocolate World too. We ate dinner at Red Robin, visited a cool drive through light display, and then stopped by Bass Pro on our way home. Even though the night started out with disappointment, we still had a lot of fun!

This week in Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, we read about "Matching and Hatching." The children LOVED this activity you see pictured below. I LOVE the expressions on Tyler and Kaitlyn's faces! We cracked open an egg, dumped out the contents so we could feel the air pocket inside and also peel away the inner membrane. The kids had so much fun, I think we cracked open a half dozen eggs!

This week the older two children read "Christmas in the Trenches" which I intended to read aloud to them, but they found it in the library basket and read it before I realized, which I'm okay with. I learned about this book from Sarah Clarkson's "Read for the Heart." When I read the description of this book, I knew my son would enjoy it because he loves reading all things military. We finished "The House Without A Christmas Tree" this week. This is a sweet story, but I do have to warn you there are at least three curse words. This was a read aloud, so I was able to substitute more appropriate words. Next week we are going to start "The Family Under the Bridge." 

How was your week? I am linking this post up with Collage Friday hosted by Homegrown Learners. It's a fun community where we share about our weeks and share fun photo collages. I encourage you to check it out. You will be sure to find ideas and encouragement.