Week 2

Our week started off with a hot breakfast! This is something I am just not good at because let's face it I don't wanna get up and cook.

Then my big kids waved goodbye as they went on to high school! This year I have an 11th grader and a brand new 9th grader!!!

YAY DEVLIN!!!!

YAY DAMIAN!

There he goes off to face the world!
 For sign language they learned the leter c and the phrase how are you?  In science we started to learn about bones. Again this was a review for them as they have studied bones before.  

 Skyler with the hinge joint

 

 Fox playing with a ball and socket model

 

After a hard morning of lessons we decided to have a little snack to cool off, ice cream sandwiches, YUM!

 

Skyler then decided to take her reading to a more comfy spot because it is too hot to sit in a chair she told me.

After lunch they burned off having too much energy playing outside.

Tuesday continued well and this momma is thrilled! We started using xtra math again, I think summer made them rusty! Fox shocked me with his Winning With Writing lesson today. Instead of the same junky stuff he always comes up with he actually tried, I was so excited. He chose insects as his topic and even did research using some insect flash cards we have. He used scrap paper to have me correct then wrote the final draft in his book. Writing is something he HATES! I was so thrilled with his effort.

 

Skyler took her beta level lesson 21 test today and passed! Math is so not her strong point. She tries though so hard.

We are still going on with Spell By Color and the kids are doing well with it so far.

In history we worked on our Medieval Times newspaper from Homeschool in the Woods Middle Ages project pack.

Well that was our day and sadly I forgot art :(

On Wednesday Fox took his Delta level lesson 8 test and passed! His math is so catching up the past two years. I love Math U See!

Today was a day for the cat though! He just would not leave us alone.

Trying to take pencils, jumping up to lay right in their books all day long. He wanted to do school too I guess.

Thursday and Friday all blend together since the addition of the new baby!

He will be staying with us just for a little while until he is ready to go face the world! Mainly my yard full of trees and other squirrels. He was found in another town all alone in a parking lot.

We did an experiment in science from the Blood and Guts book, the thumbless survivor test.

She tried so hard to write! They decided their thumbs were very helpful.

I guess learning about bones was so fun even Donatello wanted in on the action.

My house is full of kids and animals. I can't pass up a helpless little thing for nothing. All in all it was a good second week and I hope it just gets better!

 

 

Wordless Wednesday

Our first week!

Well we had our first week and it went pretty good. It was very strange to not have Damian joining but I will have to get used to that I suppose. They are enjoying the CNN student news show every morning. They have also enjoyed learning sign language from this site. I am sure we have quite a ways to go but they are liking it. We are doing a letter and a word or phrases every other day. Fox was actually taught to sign when he was a toddler and I was pretty shocked when a lot of that seemed to come back. We were going through the dictionary and he was all, Hey I know some of this! That was cool.

They are liking Spell By Color so far as well. They have a notebook where they will do any writing work and writing the rules in.

Of course Skyler likes anything with crayons.

This week in science they reviewed cells, the endocrine system and reproduction. They had already done this so it was mostly review for this week.

Of course we did our school cones. This year it was a bit different as small toys and cute supplies are getting past the older kids so I made snack cones!

 They are filled with junk and drink packs for water bottles. All in all it was a good week and I hope that continues on into next week!

Wordless Wednesday

Our First Day Back!

My 4th and 6th grader! Don't they look excited? We actually did have a good day. This year is really new for us because my oldest son is now starting high school! He will be in grade 9 and I am so proud of him. We came a long long way together and once upon a time my biggest goal was getting him to sleep in his own bed! Now he is going to face high school and join my daughter Devlin. The years are passing by and I can still remember the first year we did this. It has been an exciting life, I hope I have some more years before these two leave me.

We started off our year with the day books.

The day books are binders with calendars and a lot of resource type stuff, kinda like a mini office. They have all kinds of stuff in there. They use them all the time. It is the go to book for looking stuff up.

Another new thing we added was the CNN Student News. Little 10 minute news clips with what's going on in the world. I guess you would call it current events. We also started sign language. I am using a free website for that. Fox has bugged me for years to learn signing. Every other day we will learn a letter and a word or phrase. Today we learned a and girl.

Seems are little rats wanted to join school too! And of course the cat cannot be forgotten or he will grow up stupid as my son tells me!

We did all he normal school stuff. Math, grammar, writing, spelling and even art. We studied Giotto.

After school we headed off to the river. It looks like root beer!

 

 

We found teeny tiny frogs

And a sticky as my little one calls them.

Today was good and I hope they stay that way!

Dinosaurs!

Have I mentioned I LOVE DINOSAURS! I decided to read the Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Before Dark and of course I had to add in the fact tracker book and before you knew it we had a whole study going with a lapbook of course. We added the Magic Schoolbus Science Kit and movies and more books and it was pretty fun.

This is Skyler with a little printout of the characters in the Treehouse books. She seemed to like it and it held the boys' attention fairly well, they probally got more out of the fact tracker book though. We used the Journey Through Learning Dinosaur Lapbook for this. I also added the book What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs so the kids could get the Christian point of view and Skyler really liked hearing that once upon a time everyone was nice. I added the lapbook pieces from homeschool share that went with that book.  Instead of the whole lapbook with the file folders I used a folder with pockets so they could add all the extras they did.

This is from a How to draw dinosaurs type book from the library.

These are little images of dinosaurs showing certain ones lived during certain times.

We did all the fossil projects from the kit.

They watched online videos of course we found quite a few

They played games

Over all I would say we learned quite a bit about dinosaurs!

Skylers finished folder

Resources Links!

Books
Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Before Dark
Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Fact Tracker
Magic School Bus Time Of The Dinosaurs
Dinothesaurus  
What Really Happened To The Dinosaurs?

We also checked out a lot of encyclopedia type books to look stuff up

Movies
Magic School Bus The Busasaurus
Magic School Bus Gets Cold Feet

Projects/Printables
Magic School Bus Kit
Journey Through Learning Lapbook
Homeschool Share Dinosaurs  

Websites Games, videos etc.
Dinosaur Called Sue
Dinosaur National Monument
Dinosaurs For Kids
Cool Videos
More Videos
Funschool Dinos
The Dinosaur

So it's summer.....

     This school year is pretty much over, making plans for the new. We are still doing math, handwriting and some spelling. I also decided for whatever reason that we would start reading our way through the Magic Treehouse books. I figure if I toss in the fact tracker books as well it will be good little mini lessons. Right now we are doing book 1 Dinosaurs Before Dark. I have added in some library books and a few other things. We haven't just been doing nothing though. We did take almost all of May off. We made a garden and an eco column though. I will say the garden was hard hot work. The kids had fun I hope. The flowers are starting to bloom, we planted a lot of just stuff. Humming bird, butterfly flowers, and just random stuff my kids picked out.

     Fox had to plant sunflowers and they are really getting big. They had fun making stepping stones as well. 

Skyler did most of the actual making of the eco column. I did all the cutting and drilling of course! She enjoyed digging dirt up for it lol.










Here she is after it is all put together. We had crickets in the top, worms in the middle and the aqua part has snails. Sadly all the snails died within a week. Not quite sure what we did wrong but Skyler had to bury them. The crickets and the worms lived just fine and were released into our yard.

 

I did manage a decent pic of the crickets!

Now for the garden we made.

This was the corner of our house.                      

Pretty yucky! All that overgrown stuff was stickers by the way. It fought us BIG time pulling it all out.

It was NO FUN!

We decided to use tires for planters so we had to scrub them clean before we painted them, my kids have to add some color!

You can tell these were kid created for sure!

 

Well it looks a whole lot cleaner!

They made some concrete stepping stones to go in as well. You cannot have a garden without stepping stones after all.

This is Damians

This is Foxs

Of course this is Skylers she had to cover every surface possible!










This is the garden after the kids had it all set up Ignore my dirty house that is in bad need of a pressure cleaning!

 

 

 

 

This is the garden after some sprouts! The sunflowers in the blue tire to the left are BIG! Fox cannot wait for them to bloom up. I think they have a good job taking care of their plants. For whatever reason the sprouts in the tires in the back have not grown as big. So that is what we have been up to lately. For more pics you can go here. We also added an adorable little rat to the house! Her name is Waffles.