Show and Tell Friday

Dodge this...

Super Bowl lapbook

Since we were done with our lapbook on Thursday, I decided to do a fun lapbook for the upcoming Super Bowl. We are Steeler fans and are looking forward to Super Bowl 43.
It's not too in depth but it has things the kids can understand...I know there are a lot more positions on a football team but I chose the ones that are easier to explain.

The kids really got a kick out of this one! We'll be finishing the lapbook on Sunday, since we need to know who won and what each team scored. I hope we'll be happy with the results!

Go Steelers!

Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car

This week we are rowing Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car. The story is really simple, it's almost the same story as Mr. Gumpy's Outing. The only difference is they are riding a car instead of a boat.
The lapbook for this one doesn't have much, I'll post a pic as soon as we're done with it.

Geography: England
Language Arts: onomatopoeia {words that imitate the sound it is describing like "oink" or "meow"}
Science: the water cycle
Arts/Craft: rainy day mobile

We are getting lots of snow now and we may be getting lots of ice as well. Piano lessons were canceled today and we may have to cancel Clubs tomorrow. It's a good thing we have plenty of bread and milk!

Here is the completed lapbook, it was a very simple one. We were done with on Thursday.

Show and Tell Friday

Clones have spirit
Yes they do...

Clones have spirit
How about you?

Happy Birthday Padawan!

Happy Birthday my young Padawan!

I pray you will grow to be a wise, caring, generous and strong Jedi Knight!

Inauguration Day

We watched the Inauguration this morning as part of school and that's pretty much all we did. I purchased an Inauguration Day Fold and Learn from FIAR digital.
These fold and learns are pretty interesting. They are different than regular lapbooks. They contains lots of info and pics but is not set up the same as a lapbook. I went ahead and did my own thing with it and made it into a foldnlearn/lapbook. It came out pretty good.



I wasn't sure how I was going to explain this all to the kids but interestingly enough they were able to follow everything I was telling them. I gave them so much information about presidents, vice presidents, slavery, Lincoln, but they stayed with me! That was a pleasant surprise!

I was also surprised to see just how excited they got when Obama finally made it to the platform. X4 was jumping around saying "There he is, there he is!" They seemed to be very happy that Obama was now our President!

Very Last First Time

This week we are rowing the book Very Last First Time. It is the story of a girl named Eva, and the adventure she has under the sea.
Geography: Northern Canada
Culture: Inuit culture
Language Arts: vocabulary words
Science: dress for the season, temperature, who lives in the tide pool.

Here is a pic of the lapbook we made.

Ocean Unit Study & lapbook Part II

This was our second week doing the ocean unit study. This week we got more into, God creating the land and the ocean and what they mean to us and all the creatures that live in it.
They learned what a continent is and how many and their names. We also learned their location and the oceans names and location.


We also read the book Arabella, about a grandfather his grandson and the sea. The book is out of print but somebody from the Five in a Row message boards knows Wendy Orr and contacted her. She sold us the book, shipped it from Australia and signed it!! Thank you Wendy! It is a wonderful story and my kids enjoyed it very much!
I have a world puzzle that has the continents and oceans, they played with that everyday. We finished the second lapbook, oceans and continents:




Then on Friday we watched Planet Earth The Complete Series dvd. We watched Shallow seas and Ocean deep. They got to see all the ocean creatures we learned about last week plus we got to see which ones live on which ocean and how they travel from one ocean to another for different reasons. The Great White footage was incredible!



Amazon.com has the complete series dvd for under $20 if you buy it used, which is what I did. If you buy it new, you're looking at $50+. This dvd is going to come in handy when we do our Zoology unit study at the end of the school year.

Next week we're going back to doing a book a week.

Show and Tell Friday

It's fun to stay at the...

Y M C A

Past Lapbooks

I wanted to post about the lapbooks we've done so far. I'm going to be posting pictures of our lapbooks this year but I don't have any of the ones we did when we first got into lapbooking, so here they are!

Our first lapbook, Mirette and the high wire!

Madeline's Rescue

Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge

Climbing Kansas Mountains

The Story Of Ferdinand

The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

How do we Homeschool?

Hmmm...this is a tricky question. I would call myself an eclectic homeschooler. I do unit studies (FIAR), we do Charlotte Mason Method, stuff like reading living books, copy work, nature studies. Bible character studies as well.
We are doing Letter of the Week with X4 which is pretty much a poster with you guessed it, the letter, number, shape and color of the week.


We also do a bit of unschooling, especially with my son.
Once we are done with formal school(reading weekly book, work on lapbook, math, phonics, copy work) I let my kids loose and just let them pursue their own interest, of course there is no tv, no video or computer games. I try to make sure the place is filled with lots of books for them to pick up and read or just look through. A6 loves to draw, so I make sure there is plenty of paper and crayons, color pencils around for whenever creativity strikes.
Toys like legos, Lincoln logs, puzzles, building blocks stuff like that. Not everything has to lead to an educational experience, but the truth is they have tons of fun playing with this stuff.

Right now they are really into Star Wars Clone Wars, they got lots of action figures for Xmas and they are constantly playing with that and making up stories.

We practice piano everyday and listen to Suzuki everyday. I'm starting to introduce other music cds as well. Since they are into Clone Wars right now they've been listening to the Episode I soundtrack.

Plus they get to run, jump, kick, dance, throw all over the house and in the backyard. We have a park right next to us and lots of grass right behind our house, perfect for little boys who just want to run!

For right now all of these things are working just great for us, I'm sure it will change as the kids get older and we get into more things.

Why do we Homeschool?!

I was chatting with my cousin on facebook today and she was asking me questions about homeschooling. She has a little boy who's a little over a year and another one on the way!
I gave her a link to this blog so that she could see how we do it.
Then I realized I have never really posted anything about why we made the decision to homeschool.

I like Steve Lambert's explanation on how we came to be homeschoolers. He said that the finger of God reached across time and space and touched our hearts and asked, "What about homeschooling you kids?"
I had only heard about homeschooling once, I was at summer camp at Greenwood Hills. One of my cabin mates was homeschooled. I remember thinking how cool it would be not having to get up early in the morning to go to school on cold crappy weather. Now please understand, I loved school!
Especially high school. No, it wasn't perfect but I had a great time most of the time.
There were a few things I struggled with but overall my public and private school experience was a good one.

I had started gathering together with other believers who homeschooled and they made it sound so great. I just kept thinking there was no way I would be able to do it. I did not have the patience, I was not creative enough and I didn't think I was intelligent enough to homeschool my children.

My husband on the other hand loved the idea. He was my biggest cheerleader. He knew I could do this. The enemy kept putting thoughts in my head against it but a very wise woman told me that God was speaking to me through my husband, "trust Him" and I did.

I did a LOT of research about homeschool, I visited I don't know how many homeschool blogs.
I liked everything I was reading. Then came time to choose a curriculum or not.
I found out about Five in a Row from one of the blogs I was reading and it just sound it too good to be true. I decided to start two weeks before A6's preschool was done. I figured if it doesn't work out I can still enroll her in kindergarten. Our first book was We're Going on a Bear Hunt, and the rest as they say is history! We were hooked! Not just the kids but me as well.
There is something so wonderful about sitting on the couch early in the morning reading a great book to your children.
Needles to say that summer we did many more books, mostly from Before five in a row, which is geared towards 2 to 4 yr olds.

Once September came we started to "row" (as five in a row moms call it), Five in a row books in addition to before FIAR books. Our first book was Madeline! My children fell in love with Madeline. When we started our second year of homeschooling we started with Madeline's Rescue and for our third year I have Madeline in London scheduled to start!

The homeschooling journey is by invitation only, when God invites you on a journey He has already taken care of all the details, all you have to do is follow.
That is the best way to describe our journey. I'm simply following Him! When God is in control we can rest in that, any questions that you have He already has an answer for. He has answers to question you don't know enough to ask yet.

The longer I do this the more I realize that academics is only a small part of homeschooling. Building relationships with your children, strengthening your own relationship with God, teaching your children about the One who created them. Showing your children that they need a Savior and that you do too.

"We are accountable for how our children are raised, they are accountable for how they turn out."
Steve Lambert

There is so much more on this subject but it's late and I have to go to sleep.

Reading Level

I never knew how people were able to tell what reading level kids were reading at. I thought you had to be an education expert to determine that. Yesterday A6 was reading the book Dory Story. She read the whole book and only needed help with three words, fish names since the book is about fishes. On the book cover there is a sticker that says Level: 3.4. I didn't know what that meant.
I asked a teacher friend of mine and she told me that kids who were able to read that book were reading at a third grade and four months level. This was another one of those "I'm not sucking at this" moments!!!!

Ocean Unit Study & lapbook Part I

After a three week holiday break, school is back! I learned a lot from my first year of homeschooling. I was able to write down some things I noticed throughout last year, mainly the times of the school year when we were more motivated to do school as well as the times where motivation was non existent.

September through November, lots of energy and motivation!! Right after the Xmas holidays and Easter week? no desire to do anything... both me and the kids.

So, while I was planning this year I made sure to schedule things that would get us back into the swing of things, something to motivate us in the new year. Since it is the beginning of winter I decided to do an ocean unit study. You know, the beach, summer....{sigh}.

It is a two week study, the first week we are learning about creatures who live in the ocean. More specifically, whales, dolphins and sharks! The kids are familiar with them and want to learn more about them, also we don't really need to get too in depth since we are doing Exploring Creation: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day in a couple of years.

The second week we'll be learning about the oceans where these creatures live as well as the Continents where the oceans are located by.

Lapbooking is something we started this year and it's been a great addition to our homeschooling. I decided to start posting pictures of our lapbooks now that I have the hang of it!
Please remember that most of our lapbooks are made using Homeschoolshare.com, if you see something you like you can just go there and find it.

Here is the lapbook for this week: whales, dophins and sharks! Like I said is very simple but the kids love it, they look at the pictures over and over.



We watched Finding Nemo since it's a perfect movie go along with our study. Happy Feet also shows ocean life and Orca whales!
I wanted to watch Jaws so they could see a Great White shark...but that's probably not a good idea. I watched that movie when I was 6yrs old and had to sleep in my grandparents bed for about a week!! Instead we are watching shark clips on YOuTube.
Along with the unit study we are reading the book Dory Story. The kids love this book, the great thing is I only paid $.25 for this book at the used book store.

Happy 2009 and other things!

I hope everybody had a great new years, we sure did! We got to relax, play and relax some more.
Everybody is healthy again, enjoying their toys. I got to go to the ladies retreat this weekend.
I got a ticket for speeding on my way there, my first ticket, YAY!!!! Don't you just hate it when that happens, especially since I was on my way to a christian retreat to encounter God. Well, I didn't let that interfere with what God had for me this weekend, and He had a lot for me.

There is a lot of stuff to process, starting with making sure I always find time throughout my day to process it. I've been making things really loud around me, maybe trying to drown out God's voice. Sometimes when we are slacking in some areas of our lives we just don't want to hear it and we make it harder to hear God's voice.
I've been doing a lot of "winging it" over the last few months and God's been faithful but it's time for me to start motivating and preparing myself for His service.
The thing is God has promised to give us everything we need to further His Kingdom and we always take that to mean he will give us everything we "want".
DH and I have a lot of talking and praying to do.

I'm so glad I decided to go for the whole weekend, since I was planning to just go for the whole day Saturday. I would like to thank my Dh for taking my Sunday school class this morning so that I could stay for the last session!

Tomorrow is the start of the second semester, I have an ocean unit study that we are doing and of course a lapbook, we won't be doing any math u see or phonics this week. I want the reentry go to smooth, we'll start that stuff next week. I'm going to do a review of all the letters, colors and shapes we've learned so far with X4 as well, then next week we'll pick it up were we left off.