Our First Month of School!!!!

       Our first month of school!!! It was busy busy and no time was had for weekly reviews so I am doing a monthly one! Starting school, field trips,spirit week and Wonderland week along with everything else made this a full month it seems! We started our school with our party of course. More party pics here.  

                                    Friends, food and ice cream!!!!

In math Fox has worked up to lesson 5 in the math u see epsilon. We both agree fractions are NO FUN at all. Skyler is slowly reaching the end of the gamma book. Poor kiddos math is not their greatest strength. You can for sure tell they are mine. 

In history we started out with the beginnings of the civil war and will just work our way forward. We are using a mix of books, videos, notebooking and lapbooks. 

Labeling the different areas of the states during the civil war. 

 Copying some quotes from some great men during that time! Great way to throw in that cursive practice, yes I am a "cursive" believer. 

Working on some lapbooking pieces for our civil war study. I am mostly using the dynamic moms unit. Of course Fox is mostly enjoying this as it is about war!


To go along with our Civil War study we visited Dudley Farms reconstruction era.  The Reconstruction Era event is an immersion into history, during which visitors encounter living historians from 1868.  These living historians portray the reconstruction era, and tell the story of Florida’s post-antebellum and post war.  Were foreign immigrants competed with ex-soldiers looking for jobs; cattlemen tried to rebuild their herds; scalawags tried to make a profit off the suffering of others.  Take a walk back in time to see a part of Florida’s past.

It was an amazing trip! My kids loved it. It is very authentic and enjoyable. You truly felt as if you were stepping back in time. Granted we haven't worked our way up to the reconstruction you gotta go where the field trips are happening! 

This guy was a cow hunter. You can see him on the other side of the horse. He was hunting cows!! 

This is the Dudley family. They are the family who originally started the farm and ran it. Dudley Farm is an early pioneer farm established before the Civil War. Currently it covers 325 of the original 640 acres that were operated by the Dudley family for three generations. An authentic working farm, the homestead consists of eighteen buildings. These are restored - NOT recreated - and include the family farmhouse with original furnishings, an 1880's kitchen outbuilding, a general store and post office, and a cane syrup complex. This is truly a wonderful place. 

This is the dining area it is part of the kitchen outbuilding. Did you know why kitchens were built separately? It was because in the event of a fire the whole house would not burn. I never knew that! 

This was of course a favorite for Fox. He has this crazed obsession with all things checkers or chess. This is in the old General Store and obviously hand carved. He begged to take it home LOL As if they would sell it! I as usual took a billion pictures but of course you cannot post them all on a blog but I have a link to way more woohoo!!! 

In geography we are covering South America and using the rain forest for science. Skyler really enjoys the continent box for South America we have been putting together. She constantly is playing with the animals. 

They both like the music instruments. 

Skyler is also using the Enchanted Homeschooling Moms Journey Into The World Of Folktales geography.  She is only doing some of the activities like the passport and the postcard making. 

Of course she has to have her own Princess Daisy Dog. She has made a magic car for all the characters from this curriculum. 

We celebrated national cream filled doughnut day!!!!

We made rain forest rubber when we learned about products from the rain forest 

It was messy and fun!!

We learned about bromeliads and planted a pineapple. 

We also made a rain forest garden.

 These ideas came from this site.

We made rain forest cookies and they were amazing!!!

We learned about Henri Rousseau who painted jungle scenes. He had never even been to a jungle but he still painted them. The kids did their own paintings using leaves from our yards to make imprints on their papers. 

Here is Skylers

And here is Little Mans. 

Fox is not really into art. He is either in a mood to take all day or get done in five minutes!

Since we are studying South America we had a lunch day with food from that continent for home school spirit week. 

Skyler also did crazy clothes day!

We also had Wonderland Week at our local library. Skyler enjoyed that. On Monday they did photo day and different activities for the rest of the week. Make a crazy hat, writing workshop, making gloves, origami, watching the movie having a mad hatter party etc. She really enjoyed it!!

We also started a new system for lunch. Lunch items are divided into bins and every morning they pick one from each bin and lunch aggravation is over!!! It has been working so far most days LOL. While I took a billion pictures of our first month of school I can't blog them all. So here is a link for way way more!!! 

We also took one more field trip this month. Sweet Pete's . It is candy shop. Chocolate comes from cocoa beans and cocoa beans come from the rain forest.We learned how to turn chocolate into candy bars!! We also did some candy science. The kids got to make their own bars and wrappers as well.  It was even more fun since Damian got to go too!! 

We also met lot's of new friends!!!!

I of course have many pictures of this day!!! See way more!!!  That is about it for the first month. I have decided I will never ever do another monthly post! Too hard to fit everything in and remember what we all did!!! Hope everyone else is off to a great school year!!!!!

Our Back To School Party!!! Let's Kick Off The New Year!!!

We of course started our year with our special breakfast and lunch. This year was a bit different since we had FRIENDS FOR LUNCH!!!!!

Damian wasn't too thrilled this year with pictures. Of course my other two made up for that.

Since Damian had to leave so early he missed pictures with the college kid!! Life sure is changing nowadays. Sometimes I think it is gonna calm down but of course that is always just the tease before the storm!!

Just some fun pics at breakfast!!

At lunch we had friends that came over. That was a great way to start the week!!

We had our special lunch and all our treats!

And after lunch we had more fun with a make your own sundae bar!!!! I am sure to the kids this was the best part.

 It was a pretty good party if I do say so myself. Wish everyday was just a party. Too bad we have to interrupt the fun for things like learning, HOW BORING!!!!!!!!! I took a ton of pictures you can see more here.

week 16 weekly report

We missed Wednesday and still had a FULL week!! I am way behind on my blog this is week 16. I never blog, but I facebook alot so that maybe counts,right?? OK I am a blogging failure and I was so excited to have a blog years ago. I just usually have 5,000 things to do on any given day. My friend Linda Rose at Rose Academy and Sew Happily Ever After (ok so she is like my bestest friend we were most likely related in a past life) she blogs and reminds me all the time that I should so do a blog update. I don't get it she gets to see their shining faces on facebook every single day, I suppose to her it is not the same. This post is for her.

Just so everyone knows we do math, spelling, grammar and of course reading. I just rarely take pictures of those things but we do them every day just like a good little student. Those things are just kind of the gotta get through it things to me. I love history, science and lately geography. Those things scream fun projects and awesome books to read!!! That is where my handy dandy camera comes in because I have had cameras in these kids faces since birth! Thank God things went digital shortly after number 4 because until then I was spending a fortune on film and developing.

So without further ado here is our week 16 in color!!!!!!!!

This week we started a geography study of the oceans. I chose Amanda Bennet Unit Study Oceans for this. First up was of course oceans and the animal we first studied was sharks!!!

Now, anyone who knows my son knows his complete adoration with sharks so we had no issue finding a shark book or more LOL in our home library.  

   I can see him as a toddler running around with this giant shark toy we had as a bath toy. Truth be told we still have that shark in a box of tub toys that technically my youngest don't play with anymore but I have had a box of tub toys since my oldest (17) was about six months old. I can't see my bathroom without it!! We started reading Explore Earths 5 Oceans for some ocean facts. This helped us to do our lapbook pieces from the two different lapbooks I am using pieces from. Homeschoolshare has a lapbook for the actual unit study I am using. I also found stuff at Iman's homeschool blog. Moving onto sharks, again we have a few shark books. We read the general information in the Dive Into Sharks up close and personal book. The kids enjoyed it. It also was used in the filling out of lapbook pieces and questions from the unit study. I have continent boxes so we put together an ocean box to go with those as well. I had no shortage of sea animals for that either. Once upose a time Lakeshore Learning and I were very very good friends!!

The shark we really learned about was the hammerhead. The kids watched a video and made a notebooking page about them. Video was found in google by searching hammerhead sharks videos.

A moment in our world has free shark notebooking pages as well as 3 part cards. I also bought a Perils of the Deep science set for them to play with. The experiment we did this week was on density with a skull.

Skyler of course had to take forever decorating and coloring her notebooking page. Of course she then took off with it before I could snap a picture! That is all the ocean work we managed this week. Onto history!!!! Our Story Of The World took us to Ancient Egypt. I could study this every day and never get bored in all honesty. I love all things Egypt.






I fell in love with this treasure chest kit!!! It has everything I think. We have had fun playing with it this week.

  We filled out a map of the different civilizations to use picture writing.

We read about the Rosetta Stone. We made clay tablets.

They made their  own cartouches 

We played Mehen and Egyptian board game. 

See the helmet in the background? It has becme a normal part of our school as of late! He got it at Christmas and won't let it out of his site!!!! 

They made their own pictures on actual papyrus from Egypt. I bought these at Rainbow Resource and the kids were tickled to see an actual MADE IN EGYPT stamp on the tags!!!

We moved on to the mummy chapter!! My kids love mummys too!! I know we could make a chicken mummy but that is not something I want sitting around my house for weeks on end. So we built a moveable mummy!!! We used the Scholastic moving model book.  This was a gift from aunty Linda Rose as the kids call her when they are being sweet!!! 

This model took way over an hour to put together. I think we all kinda started yelling at each other towards the end LOL. 

In Ancient Egypt they worshipped cats. I don't think our house is much different with our two. Mischief is being held by Fox and Mayhem is in Skylers arms. Both cats were strays rescued from different parking lots months apart. I have no idea if they could be related or not. The vet tells me Mayhem is a full white siamese and Mischief is a mix of that and something else. Either way we lucked out finding such beautiful kittens. 

We also made bread. This recipe comes from an amazing mom who does our co op lessons. She has all her lessons online for free for anyone to use. Did I mention she is amazing???? 

We made this at co op once he loved it but refused to put his hands in the dough to make it. I told him to do it for his favorite teacher Miss. Shannon (who wrote the lesson) and he did it. No I don't care his favorite teacher is someone else I am just happy anyone can make a good impression on this kid!!!

The finished product was good though!! We made two batches. 

We also got to our art lesson this week. We are using Atelier Art and we did the contour lesson this week. 

Here are both the pictures they made on my sad almost empty art wall LOL I really need to make art a priority!!!

The pictures of the cats are the recent works of art!!

We also added another picture to our Mary Cassatt works of art. They are doing this from their English Lessons Through Literature.  

Well that was our exciting week!! As usual I took way too many pictures so these are just a few if you would like to see the rest you can do so here. 

Wordless Wednesdays

Not so Wordless Wednesday

This is Mischief. We found her in a bank parking lot during a down pour. At home, we never know where we will find her!!!

In the game cabinet

Under the step stool

In a basket on the geography shelf

In the desk drawer

In the box for co-op things.

In a library book bag

She even tries to go in the printer. We have found her in all kinds of places, these are just the few we got picture proof of. She has been in the dishwasher, in the dogs cage, on a childs plate that was left on the floor, in the shelf of the fridge and in the washing machine. She is named Mischief and we call her the found cat.