School - Week 24

Gabriel took the week off from his kindergarten work.  I had a parent teacher conference and decided that it was okay to give myself and him a break.  Because he's a pre-kindergartener doing kindergarten work and well, that means I can give him a week off if I want.  That's just the kind of week we had if anyone can relate.

But the older boys didn't get the week off, much to their displeasure.

We finished up reading in 2 Samuel and started in 1 Kings, continuing reading about King David, and we read some of the Psalms he wrote as well. 

We started reading about King Soloman as well.  Again, I'm amazed at how little I actually knew about these well-known kings of the Bible and it makes me appreciate this homeschool curriculum we're using even more.  And it's so odd how much less boring it is than I thought it would be.  :oP

Christopher finished up another lesson in his writing curriculum.  This one was about looking out a window and describing what he saw.  

And we are still getting caught up in art. 

I love how some of the lessons specifically tell us to go outside and draw God's creation.

The first one of these was the boys drawing a portrait of me, their momma.  Lovely, aren't I?  The one below those is copying a scene of an angel talking to a woman that was in their book. 

Matthew's on left, Christopher's on right.

And this lesson is a few sketches of dragons.

Matthew's on left, Christopher's on right.

These ones are some of the what they've been drawing in their free time lately.  They make up scenes from Mario Brothers video games on the Wii.  There are many many many of these types of drawings around the house.  They explain the whole level to me, usually when I'm trying to make dinner or something, and you probably need to have played the game before to be able to figure out what everything is.  And then they also make up their own stuff too.

Christopher's

Matthew's

Christopher finished his math workbook, Singapore Math 5A, this week!  I told him we can just do some math facts practice and games next week before starting the next workbook.  He was pretty happy with that.  Can't you tell?

And I thought I'd add these pictures...

I teach a Construction Art craft class for third through sixth grades at our homeschool co-op that meets weekly on Fridays.  We use materials that you can normally find in your home to make various artwork.  This week we made sock pets.  They were a hit and when we got home, my other children wanted to make some too.

Christopher with two classmates.

Christopher's, Matthew's and Gabriel's creations.

I hope your week was great!

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School - Week 23

This week, Gabe has been learning about elephants and the letter "E". 

This is the first week that he has a little story to read.  We're supposed to cut it out and make it into a little book, we just hadn't gotten to that part yet.  He felt so proud after he read the whole thing by himself. 

Gabe with his words to remember.

We learned quite a bit about elephants this week.  For our map, we focused on the African elephant and some of his African friends.  We colored the continent of Africa based on whether it is desert, forest or grasslands and stuck the animals basically where they belonged.  We have a couple more animals to learn about in coming lessons before we'll take down our map of Africa.

Some cute little elephants we made from a toilet paper tube and this website.

 One of the books we read about elephants this week.

Our new simple supply caddy...$2.99 at the Container Store baby!

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Christopher and Matthew are continuing to memorize Psalm 1 and they pretty much have it down now.  Matthew needs a hint or two towards the end, but they've only copied four of the six verses, so he still has two more weeks to get it one hundred percent. 

We finished up reading about King Saul this week and moved on to when David was king. 
I read Unspoken: Bathsheba from the Lineage of Grace series by Francine Rivers a year or so ago, and while it ws an awesome book, it was the most I've ever read about David other than when he killed Goliath with his sling.  The book did not make me think that highly of David since it was from Bathsheba's perspective and I didn't quite understand why he is considered such a Godly man. 

Oh, is that why I should actually read straight from the source?  (That was sarcasm.)
 
We've spent the week reading about David, and how he did mess up and did sin, and some of his sins were very serious, but God knew his heart, and he knew that his heart was completely for HIM.  How great is it for me, that the same man in the Bible that God loved so much and blessed so much, was a sinner, just like me.  I always will be, but I can still love God with all my heart and he'll know that, and love me too.

I never thought that reading through this part of the Old Testament would be something I looked forward to doing, and I am pleasantly surprised.  (Goodness, I sound like a heathen mom, don't I!)  I get so excited telling the kids about the lessons we are learning and how it applies to our lives and I just truly hope that some of it will stick with them.

I wonder sometimes, because Matthew seems to have a bored, distant look on his face quite often, and like I've said before, he often seems more worried about his next snack or meal than about anything else.  Lucky him, he'll be going through this same curriculum again in five years.  :o)

So at the same time as we're reading through this period in the Old Testament (and some of David's Psalms), we've read about a civilizaion from Phoenicia.  The boys got to see what their writing looked like, and wrote their names using their alphabet at the bottom of the worksheet below.

Matthew's name written using the Phoenician alphbet and his summary of King Saul. 

Christopher's summary of King Saul and his name using the Phoenician alphabet.

Christopher adding King David to our timeline

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That's about been our week.

To read about more families' Homeschool Highlights in My Father's World click here.

Game Night - DC-opoly Style

Last year our boys were obsessed with playing Monopoly.  They played everyday, and they are the type of kids who don't lose interest after thirty minutes.

At the same time, they started making up their own pretend versions of Monopoly.  They'd type up the names of the properties they'd have for their own Monopoly game.  They'd change the selling prices, the rent prices, the mortgage prices, the prices for houses and hotels.  We'd have about thirty sheets of paper around the house, printed out with all these pretend Monopoly lists.  They were obsessed. 

The plans for Christopher's Florida Monopoly

Then one day I got the brilliant idea to look on Amazon to see if they had a Monopoly making kit.  They did.  It was $30.  Thirty dollars a kit times three boys was looking at almost a hundred dollars.  Seeing how we were already on our second Monopoly game because things like that just don't last long when they get played with everyday in our house, I was not excited about spending a hundred dollars on these Monopoly kits that probably wouldn't last all that long anyways.

In steps my super hubby with his usual good idea. 

Just buy a regular Monopoly game for $10 at Walmart, get some sticky computer paper (I'm sure that's the technical name), design Monopoly squares on the computer, print them out, stick them to the Monopoly board, and viola!  The kids made their own Monopoly games (well Chris and I did help quite a bit, but they were each designed by the kids.  And it took awhile.) 

Christopher designed a Florida Monopoly game with properties like Lake Okeechobee, The University of Florida, and Disney World. 

Gabriel designed an Oceanopoly game with property names like Baluga Whale, Submarine, and Octopus.

And Matthew designed a DC Monopoly game (I think we made these shortly after our vacation to Washington, DC in April 2009). 

And that is what we played during game night this week.

We used the original money and game pieces, but in addition to making new property cards, we came up with new 'Community Chest' and 'Chance' cards, renamed "House" and "Senate" in Matthew's Washington, DC version.

 It was really fun to do with the kids because they were the brains behind the idea and they were so excited about it.  And somehow they turned out really nice looking.

St Patrick's in the Park

My Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) group met at our favorite park on Wednesday to have fun with each other using St. Patrick's Day as our excuse.  We had four leaf clover crafts but we mainly hung out together and let the kids play in this beautiful south Texas weather. 

Christopher with some of his favorite friends...they spent most of the morning back in the bamboo forest exploring and doing fun boy stuff.

Anna has no problem finding willing friends to hold her.  I think Jess is one of her favorites.  But then again, Jess is a mom of three boys and I think she likes holding my little girl too.

This picture just seems to Anna to me.  She's standing up in her stroller (being defiant) and stuffing her face with food.  This girl must be about to hit a growth spurt with how much she's been eating lately!

I love Leah's choice of shoes here.  I've learned that the shoes that she wears to a park is what whoever said the quote "don't sweat the small stuff" was talking about. 

If you have any kids under kindergarten and would like some good friends to hang out with, look up the closest MOPS group on http://www.mops.org/.  Being a military family, we have to plug in quickly when we move or by the time we find friends, it'll be time to move again!  I joined the MOPS group at our church within weeks of moving here and they were a life saver when we were going through Leah's hip surgery less than a month after we moved here.  (My blog post on Leah's hip surgery...you have to read down a bit before I got to it).

Anna's starting to walk more and more, but I will be happy when she is walking well.  I see a lot of park days in our near future and having a crawling baby at the park is quite dirty.

My Girls - A Photo Shoot

I took Anna to a local portrait studio a few weeks ago and it didn't go well. 

She didn't want to sit where she was supposed to.  She didn't want to be anywhere away from me.  She didn't want to sit by the huge teddy bear.  She didn't want to smile at a feather tickling her tummy or a bunny fake sneezing off of someone's head.

All of my other children have never had a problem with that kind of thing, but this little girl does.

While I took the four others to tons of protrait studios, I've always taken Anna's pictures myself (other than newborn) with my handy dandy Canon, but when I dress her all pretty and put a little bow in her hair, she knows what is going on and wants nothing to do with it. She furrows her eyebrows and wants me to hold her.

A smile?  How'd that happen?

So, I'll try yet again for her one year pictures sometime soon.  Or I may give up and take her back to a studio.

But my older girl?  She's about at happy to take pictures as you can get.

And I know that unposed pictures are nice to have, but really, I'd like a good smile from my little one too.  She does it so often when she's not in front of the camera.

But she was happy to get to play while Leah was posing for me.

In her defense, I'm sure that I annoy her with always having my camera in front of my face and calling her name while she's trying to explore and get into everything.  You'd think she'd just get used to it, right?