Birthday Pics

Here are some pictures of A6's birthday party. The day before the party A6 had a fever and was vomiting. The morning of the party she was feeling much better but I decided to let the other moms know that she had been sick the day before. Some kids are more susceptible to catching colds than others. I think she had one of those 24 hr bugs. Only half the kids showed up, which was great because even though she was feeling much better I didn't want her doing too much. She had a great time! After all the kids left she crashed on the couch for almost three hours!

She had a ballerina cake which half of it is still in the fridge:)

Little Nino's Pizzeria

This week we are rowing Little Nino's Pizzeria.
The book is about a little boy who loves to help his Dad at their small family restaurant, but everything changes when they move to a fancier place.

The are so many cool activities to do along with this book. I'm thinking we could make a pizza using construction paper, different color paper for the different toppings!! Then we could make a real pizza from scratch. The book also talks about feeding the homeless which is a great lesson for young kids to learn.

I'm going to take a break from Reading Made Easy. We hit a rough spot, she's having difficulty with the i sounds, so I decided to take the next week or two and just review what she's learned so far. Maybe do sentences from the books we are rowing and then go back to where we left off.

That's the great thing about homeschooling, if somethings not working you can put it aside and do something else!

My Little Girl is 6 years old!

The day you were born!

1st B-day!

You had no hair and you made a mess with that cake!





















2nd Bday!
A little more hair!






















3rd BDay!
You finally have a head full of hair! and a little brother.




























4th BDay!
You picked the cake yourself!!






















5th BDay!
Your very own Princess party!





























and look at you now! Six years old!























Happy Birthday Sweetheart!!!

A New Coat for Anna

This week we are rowing A New Coat for Anna. It is the story of a little girl who needs a new winter coat. Her Mother thinks of a very unusual way to get the new winter coat. It's really interesting to see how a wool coat gets made, at least back then.
The story takes place right after World War II.
It is set somewhere in Europe.
So A5, soon to be A6 will be learning about Europe!
I don't think I'll talk about the war as much, other than to point out why the Mom had no money. When we row this book again in the future I'll get into that a bit more. We'll also talk about bartering, Anna's mom has to trade things in order to get the coat made.
As for science, we could talk about wool and sheeps, dyes... stuff like that.

Speaking of wool, I used my wool coat for the first time this morning. It was 10° this morning and windy, it is 15° right now. Dh took the garbage out as soon as we got home from Church, that way he won't have to go out there tonight in the COLD.
I bought some suet for the birds, the fat should help them stay warm in the next few days.

A5 soon to be A6's birthday is this week, I probably won't be posting as much this week because of it!

Look who finally got a haircut!

No... not Dh!



Before














After

My Dh is going to love this!

brought to you by TravelPod, the Web's Original Travel Blog ( part of the TripAdvisor Media Network )

If You Fill it with Seeds, They will Come

I'm not sure what type of birds these are... chickadees?
I was very close to them and they were fine,
there was also a female cardinal but as soon as
I got close enough to take a picture she flew away. Oh well!

Update: the birds in the pic are juncos.

Here we go again!

Finally!! Snow!
I think we are getting 2 - 3 inches.
A5 has a bit of a cough and stuffy nose, so we won't be going outside today. She is going to a birthday sleepover party at her friends house tomorrow and I don't want to make her cough any worse.
She has been looking forward to this sleepover for the last two weeks! I told her we have many more snow days coming.

3 hrs later... We all ended up going outside, even A5!

We love each other!

Aren't they adorable???

Mami, I'm sick

This is a conversation my 3 year old son and I had this morning.

X3: Mami I need that. (points to the dresser)

Me: You need what? candy? snoopy? cars? (these are all things on top of my Dh's dresser)

X3: No Mami, that! (points to children's cough medicine on top of the dresser)


Me: Why?, you don't have a cough, your sister does.

X3: I'm sick Mami, see! achooooo, achooooo, *fake cough*, *fake cough*.

Me: ?!?!? :)

X3: See Mami, I'm sick!

Owl Moon

This week we are rowing Owl Moon, a wonderful book about a little girl and her daddy going out at night searching for owls.
The story takes place in a wooded area near their farm house, in a northern area of the country.
Since the book doesn't say what town or state the story is set in, I'm going to go with Pa.
We have snowy woods here, we have farm houses here and we have owls!
A5 has been wanting to learn more about Pennsylvania so here's my chance!
I'm going to keep it simple.
I'll let her color the flag, show her where Pa is located in a US map and show her where the US is located in a world map.
That'll take care of geography.
For art I'll let her color some owl coloring pages and I'm sure she'll want to draw one as well.


For science I downloaded 5 video clips of owls with their babies, in their nest and just hanging out.
I would also like to talk about the moon and the different moon phases, if we have time.

We can always row this book again next year and talk about the moon then.
As usual we have her reading, writing and math rounding up the week!

Trying to attract more birds...or at least one

So, we've had the bird feeders up since Wednesday morning, no birds. I've checked every day, every hour, no birds. I checked the actual feeders, the food is still there, all of it.
I need some help getting the birds here.
I just purchased this book for $0.99 from Amazon.com:
Attracting Birds to Your Backyard: 536 Ways To Turn Your Yard and Garden Into a Haven For Your Favorite Birds

Hopefully this book will help us attract our little birdie friends to our yard!
I found another book on how to attract everything from birds to bugs to small animals.
That one was a bit pricier, will have to wait till the spring to get it.

Winter Nature Study Part 1

I finally purchased FIAR's Winter Nature Study! It has a lot of good info on what to do with you kids during the winter months, as far as nature study.
Why is nature study so important? For kids in elementary grades learning about the world around them, things like birds, insects, trees, etc. is the best way to teach science. You and your kids are out there experiencing all these things instead of being inside learning them from a text book.
This past summer we had a blast doing just that. We learned about butterflies, praying mantis, crickets, tadpoles, you name it! This fall we learned about what happens to the leaves this time of year and how a Woolie-bear caterpillar is a sure sign it's autumn. Which brings us to winter.
I am not a cold weather person, I usually spend my winter days inside, but since we are homeschooling we need to be out there and see what happens to nature during the winter months.
Snow, ice ... that's all I know about winter. Then I read about certain birds associated with winter. Cardinals, Jays and one I had never heard of before Chickadees.
We then decided to set up some bird feeders to see if we could attract any of these birds and that would be part of our winter nature study! We have a pole near our tree with three feeders on it. They have to be away from the house because the birds around here don't like getting too close to people. This way they are at a good distance from us but close enough that we can see them just fine. We put it up yesterday and we haven't seen any birds yet, but hopefully soon.
I also want to hang up a squirrel feeder, I'm just not sure where?!
If I get any good pics of Cardianls or Jays I'll post them here!

Spring is here...not really!!

What a wonderful way to start 2008, it's like early spring out there! Yesterday we had a high of 69° and today is 66° !
We went for a nature walk yesterday, it was so weird because usually there is so much to see as far as birds, squirrels and bugs, but not yesterday.
We saw ONE ant, that's it! :)
We found a few pine cones still hanging from the tree so we decided to take them home and do a nature study craft with them.
The kids are loving this weather, today they were riding their scooters and just running around with the other kids.
Dh is going to set up some type of bird watch spot for us. We are going to get different bird feeders, to attract different types of birds. Then we'll buy bird food and hopefully watch them as they eat it. I also want to get some food to attract squirrels. That'll gives us something to do as far as winder nature study.
Once spring comes the hummingbirds will be back and so will the bugs!!! I can't believe I'm looking forward to bugs being back.
As far as this weather goes, we have a wind advisory for tomorrow and a cold front is coming after that, so we're going back outside!!

Back to School

This week we are going to be reading Stopping by woods on a snowy evening. This book is actually a poem and the illustrations are incredible! There's not a lot of "meat" in this book, which is fine, it'll be a nice way to get back into school mode. I was hoping it would snow this week so we could go out behind our house and look for tracks in the snow, the fact that today's temperature made it to 54º tells me that's not going to be happening.
Not to worry, we have many other winter books this month! it's bound to snow sometime.

Ladies Retreat

I'm not going to be posting for the next few days because I'm going to a ladies retreat for the whole weekend! I've been looking forward to this retreat, it feels like throughout the year I'm a Martha and this weekend I get to be a Mary, I get to sit at the feet of Jesus and just listen!
This is my third year going and I have to say every year it gets better.
See you in a few days!!

Speaking of cookies n cream...

Meet our new hamster Cookies n Cream! She is a dwarf hamster, which means she won't be getting any bigger than that, just fatter! We were going to wait till the kids were a bit older to get a hamster, but Dh fell in love with this little dwarf hamster and our neighbors gave us their old hamster cage with everything included, all we needed to get was the bedding, food and of course the hamster! She is just a little cutie, we also got her a little hamster ball and she just loves it!
I'll have to get a video of her in it, it's too funny! She likes to nibble and she has bit us a few times(it doesn't hurt at all) but I'm hoping the more we interact with her the tamer she'll get.
So now we have a hamster, two parakeets, our beta fish and two dogs!! I think that will be it for now, unless Dh falls in love with some other little critter...like a turtle!?!?!

Christmas Pics

Here's the kids singing happy birthday to daddy!
That is a cookies n cream ice cream cake, daddy's favorite!!


We usually spend Christmas at Nina & Grandpas house! Here are a few pics of the kids opening their gifts Christmas morning. A5 loves her new keyboard and X3 loves playing with his trains!

Lesson Planning

We had a great holiday break, but we can't wait to get back to our routine. For the next three days I'm going to plan the lessons for the next few months, at least till Easter break. I already have the books we are going to be reading, I just need to plan the activities that go with each book. We use Five in a Row which is mini unit studies based on children's illustrated books. Four days a week we read the same book then each day we focus on different things. On Mondays we get to learn about geography or history, Tuesdays we do language arts, Thursdays' math and Friday we do science. Wednesdays' supposed to be art day, but we take Wednesdays off. We usually get to do art stuff everyday really, A5 loves to draw and color and she gets to do that pretty much everyday!

Most of the books we're doing for the next 8 weeks are cold weather related. I'm waiting for FIAR's Winter Nature Study to become available, that'll give me a few ideas on things we can do outside for nature study.

We are going to continue with Math u See and Handwriting without tears. We'll probably do a review week of all the words she's learned using Reading made easy then we'll start the next lesson.

Hope you had a great New Years Day!!!