End of May

We finished up May with a bit more school for Gabe...since he was a year ahead of where he needs to be, I freely skipped school days for him more than just a few times.  We'll be working for at least another month to finish up, but since he takes about a half hour for his school each day, it's not so bad.

Here he was on the time chapter in math and we made a cookie clock...not too bad for having to do school while his brothers were done with their school year!

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The kids all finished up with Awana this month also.  Unfortunately their Daddy was still overseas, so he missed the ceremony.  The kids were all so excited to get their awards.

Anna loves when she is big enough to do the things her big brothers and big sister do.

Leah and Gabriel both were so excited that they ran up to the stage to get their awards!

Matthew finished his final Sparks book and gets to move on to the T&T (Truth & Training) group next year, which is the group Christopher will still be in also.

Christopher had a couple more challenges left in his T&T book from last year, so he had to finish that up this year, and then he worked super hard so he could finish the book for this year as well.  There are so many long Bible verses to memorize in T&T, but he did great and I'm so glad that they have all of these verses in their hearts now.

Psalm 119:11  I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.

I am so appreciative for the wonderful volunteers who give their time and love to run this program for children.  I highly recommend an Awana program if you have one nearby.

Here's several videos of the singing portion of the ceremony...so cute!  (I apologize for the sometimes blurry video taping.)

"Love thy neighbor."

Gabe picked a long verse and although he knew it, he ended up reading it straight from his paper instead of from his heart.  Silly boy.

Have a great week!

Our Week: 16 (and 17 &18)

Our life.

One week at a time. (Okay, so three weeks this time.)

2012.

Week 15, 16 & 17.

This week. . .
(4.8.12 -5.5.12)

So things got a little busy here.  We had Chris' dad and step-mom visit and then shortly after, my dad and my grandma came to visit, my dad from south Florida, and my grandma from Michigan.  It was fun to have four generations in our home.

Chris went on a short TDY right before my family came and so they all three ended up flying in on the same day, and all traveling through Atlanta to boot.

And while Chris was in Virginia for this TDY, he was told that he'd be leaving for the middle east in eight days.  For a month.  He left the day after my grandma flew home to Michigan and the same day my dad drove back south.  Oh, I'm not ready for these longer ones* again.

*And yes, I realize that to other military folks, one month is not that long.  To me and my kids though, it is long enough that we will miss my husband/their daddy A LOT.

My friend Cheryl at https://www.facebook.com/CrazyMessyBeautifulPhoto took this photo last month.  It's my favorite.


These weeks in school...

It got done here, there, and where ever and whenever we could fit it in. We really want to finish up, so we kept up with it in between doing fun things with family.  My grandma enjoyed listening to our history and Bible books along with the boys so that worked well.

So, for the older boys, this was weeks 31, 32 & 33 of our school year.  In these weeks, we...

• Read about several important men and women of the Reformation era...Martin Luther, William Tyndale, Anne Askew, John Calvin, John Knox...and about the new translations of the Bible that were being written so that people could read it in their own language.
•  Read about William Shakespeare...and are still enjoying it!  We are reading a recommended book called "The Children's Shakespeare" which has eleven plays in it written in storybook fashion, each about ten pages long.  My boys bring it to me each evening to read the next one. Can you imagine children enjoying Shakespeare?  It is mostly in language we can understand (hahaha) but has some words that I have to guess the meaning and try to explain it to the kids.  We also made a cardstock model of the Globe Theater.  We cut off an extra flap or something and it didn't work out 100% correctly, but we got the picture.
• Read more about Native North Americans.  We snacked on beef jerky, sunflowers, and berries, and also used berries as ink to draw with, as the Native Americans did.  We also made arrows out of straws.
• Finished up our Latin vocab words for the year!  The boys are thrilled.  It's not their favorite.
• Learned all about Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Keiper Belt, stars, and galaxies.  Wheh!  The kids put on a play about the discovery of Uranus.  We made our own clouds (like on Neptune) while some friends were over and attempted to make a baking soda rocket.  Note: Marshmallows will not substitute for cork when using vinegar and baking soda rocket. (What?  We had to stop up the bottle opening with something!)
• Debated about whether Pluto should get to be a planet or not.  Christopher and Matthew both said yes, and wrote and assignment about why.  
• Made ice cream (when learning about how freezing cold Pluto is) using plastic bags, heavy cream, vanilla, powdered sugar, ice, and rock salt.  It was pretty yummy, but melted really fast.
• Made an astrometer for astronomy to measure the brightness of stars.  It's been cloudy every night so we haven't used it.  We also poked holes in a cardboard box in the pattern of the big dipper and shined a flashlight into the box so it lit up the dark wall.  
• Made big planet orbit posters.  With glitter glue, which makes it even more fun.  

Wow, that sounds like a ton of astronomy projects this month!  We used a few that are in our Astronomy workbook that are not in the teacher's manual because the boys just want more, more, more hands-on work with astronomy.

Some pictures of our weeks...

Making Saturns (project from the prior week)

Doing art comfortably...

Writing backwards...the way DaVinci wrote in code.

Christopher's

Matthew's

Making clouds...

(warm water in microwave, drop lit match into water, quickly cover with bag of ice)

Attempting to launch the baking soda and vinegar rocket...

(I'm guessing Leah has to go potty?)

It's a dud.

Making ice cream...

Planets orbits posters...

Christopher's not finished with his yet; he has to make it just perfect...

An astrometer is used to determine how bright a star is.  Each rectangular hole has an extra layer of plastic wrap to make it harder to see dimmer stars (or something like that).

Using straws as arrows...the Native Americans used feathers for increased accuracy, so we cut the end of the straw to act like a feather.

Berries and beef jerky...snacks and writing ink.  

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Gabe's been working pretty hard as well.  We are pretty far behind still and he still has several weeks worth of work left.  Now I wish I hadn't been so easy to skip days if we just didn't get to it.  Good thing he's actually one year ahead, right?  

Math using animal crackers?  Gabe's favorite kind of math!

This tambourine is a project from way back when Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea and they celebrated with music and dancing.  

I just found the bells recently.

Whoa.  I think I'm caught up now with our school for the past three weeks.  ONE more week!  

(Not counting Gabe's work, which only takes a half hour at the most each day.)

Our Week: 14

Our life.

One week at a time.

2012.

Week 14.

This week. . .

(4.1.12 -4.7.12)

Bug eyes at the Emerald Coast Science Museum...

This musuem may look small, but it's a sure winner for an outing with my kids.  We bought a annual pass for somewhere around $40 which is a steal for a family of seven.  We go during the school days and almost have the place to ourselves so the kids can go at their own pace, don't have to wait in lines, and it's a very hands-on musuem which works well for little ones.  All five of mine enjoy our time there. 

The bubble room is probably the most popular with my kids...the girls because of their amazement with popping bubbles, and the boys because they can make lots of huge bubbles.

This week in school, week 29:

• We read about more explorers...Magellan, who was the first to sail all around the world (well, his crew anyways...he died near Australia), and Amerigo Vespucci, whom America was actually named after)
• We read about the ancient civilizationsthat lived in Central America...the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas.  While slavery has existed since Biblical times, it's still very sad to read about how Europeans "discovered" these peoples' land, took it over and made the inhabitants their slaves.  I read some of the history of our continent to the boys with tears in my eyes because it hurts my heart that people could think so much less of other human beings, who God loves just as much as he loves us all. 
• We learned all about Jupiter in Astronomy.  The kids were disappointed that there was not more activities so they made another comic strip story about Jupiter (an assignment we did for Venus) and drew lots of pictures. 
• We also rented "Deep Impact" from Netflix so we could watch the meteor-almost-hitting-the-earth part of it (which went along with last week's study about space rocks).  For movies like this, I'm thankful for the folks who came up with the Clear Play DVD player.  I hate that these good action movies have cuss words in them...otherwise they'd be fine for older-young kids.  The Clear Play DVD player mutes out the naughty words so we can enjoy movies without expanding our children's vocabulary in ways we'd prefer not too.  (It will also take violence, nudity, drug/alcohol use, etc. out of movies.  I highly recommend it!)
• Gabriel did some more fun science with water activities this week...experimenting with floating and sinking objects.

We enjoyed hot chocolate one afternoon, a treat enjoyed by wealthy Mayas.

We made pots using the slab and coil method which was used by the Mayas and Aztecs.

We made to-scale sized clay replicas of the nine planets (eight planets plus Pluto?).  Then we combined all of the clay planets except Jupiter together to see that the other planets combined were still small than Jupiter.  Then we added all of the volumes of the planets together to see just how much room was left over in Jupiter if you filled it with the other planets.  (This was not assigned, but an "I wonder..." type activity that Christopher wanted to figure out.) 

Jupiter on the left (complete with Giant Red Spot) and all the other planets combined on the right.  After we were done, Christopher decided we should have weighed the clay, but I told him he was on his own with that since we had already combined it back together.

Gabe guessing and then figuring out what will float and what won't.

This week we also:

• Caught two of these giant spiders.  The first one was in my garden and I freaked out.  I trapped it, looked it up to make sure it wasn't poisonous, found out it was just a nice wolf spider, but Chris still squished it. 
This one was in my younger boys' bedroom.  It was a lot smaller than the one from the garden, but still huge as spiders in my house go.  But I was brave.  I trapped it and threw it over the fence in the back yard.  I hope it eats a lot of bugs.

• Celebrated Passover.  Jesus-believing style.  Last year in our Creation to the Greeks year of history, we celebrated different Jewish holidays, as a Christian.  Passover was one of them, and it was really special.  We use a book called Celebrating Bibical Feasts but this year we didn't do it quite as elaborate as last year.  We scaled down some of the reading and I made a simpler dinner as well.  But it was still special, and it helps show our children the entirety of the Easter holiday. 

The symbolical Seder plate.

Ready to begin.

Matthew reading from the Haggadah.

And Christopher reading from the Haggadah.

The only thing I wonder is how people celebrate the Passover and eat warm food?  Do they bring the food out after they read the Haggadah?  Last year I probably made a mental note to keep the food warming in the oven until after we did the reading portion at the beginning, but that mental note got lost.  I'll have to make sure I make a note in the book for next year. 

We also...

Colored eggs.  Which can be quite daunting with five children.  Especially for the husband when the wife wants to take pictures the whole time.  Hahaha.  I'm so glad I have such a great husband.

And then on this beautiful Saturday morning, we went up to our church and yet again hunted plastic candy filled eggs.  Along with other fun spring time activities... 

Like hula-hooping.  (Is that a real verb?)

I love this picture.  Because I love these people.

Our pastor shared that the Walmart next door had donated about 40,000 plastic eggs about five years ago and they finally used up the last of them last year.  He asked the church body to donate candy filled eggs for the hunt this year...and they delivered.  Almost 10,000 eggs were donated and this is what all the kids' baskets looked like.  Believe me, I am all about other kids' taking home all that candy instead of mine, but all the other kids' baskets looked like this by the end as well.  It looks like we'll have a lot of candy to donate! 

Happy Spring and have a glorious Easter!  Thank God that HE HAS RISEN!