Saturday, December 25, 2010

Christmas Morning 2010

Christmas Morning at our house!









Merry Christmas!!!!

Merry Christmas 2010

Friday, December 24, 2010

The First Gift of Christmas

The First Gift of Christmas!!!
and our First Ginger Bread House!!
A8 worked really hard on it, with daddy's help of course!!

Merry Christmas!!!!!

My Christmas Table

I don't normally bother decorating the dinning room table during Christmas because we are never here for it. We usually go to Nina and Grandpa's house for the holidays.
This year however we are spending Xmas at home, so I thought I should do something with the table for Xmas... here it is!I didn't buy anything new, just used what I already had in a "creative" way...
I'm not sure how long those mints are going to last.. hopefully till tomorrow morning!
Happy Christmas Eve!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Another Tooth Bites the Dust

I think the tooth faerie might give him some money this time around!

Christmas Vacation!

Today is our first day of Xmas vacation!! I already have everything ready for school next year so for the next two weeks I can truly relax and enjoy the holidays!

All of the kid's gifts have been wrapped, they are waiting patiently for Friday night(they get to open 1 gift on Christmas Eve!) and Saturday morning.

This will probably be my last post of the year, I will post on the new things we"ll be doing next year, next year!

Hoping Nina and Grandpa will be able to join us for the holidays!! I pray we will all have a safe and blessed Christmas and New Years!








Monday, December 20, 2010

Lsst Week of School 2010

This week we only have two days of school, A8 has to finish her math and X6 is just reviewing his RME words. They are also creating their new Winter nature study journals. I was only going to do fall ones this year but we've been doing so well with them that I thought the winter one would be a great idea!

I'm using the templates found in Five in a Row's Winter Nature Studies.

The Five in a Row Digital Nature Studies are not just a list of activities of things to do in each season. Rather they are an encouragement for you and your children to begin a life style of becoming more observant about each season, and noticing and learning throughout the year more about the nature around you. It is a call to begin to discover together the signals of each season drawing to a close and the signs of the next season beginning. The Five in a Row Digital Nature Studies are an attempt to inspire you to enjoy the many aspects of each season through signs of nature, music, poetry, stories, and more.

We don't really use the stories, music or poems part of it, just the observation templates, maybe as they get older I will incorporate the other stuff.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Snow Day and No Tooth

It is snowing outside, it's started around noon and it's still going. Nothing heavy but it is staying...I had no idea were supposed to be getting snow today....We are going to the movies tonight with our small group, we are going to see Narnia!!! I hope it will stop snowing by then...

In other news, my son X6 has lost another tooth!It happened last night right before Clubs. We already had his tooth fairy gift at hand... we knew it was only a matter of time before the tooth finally came out.Now the tooth right beside it is loose as well...

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Last Science Project of 2010

Today we finished our last science project from the Zoology 1 book. The kids were supposed to create a fossil of a pterosaurs, an egg with one coming out of it.

We needed clay, plaster of Paris a real egg of course and some tea to help make the "fossil" look older.

I think we did pretty good, I know the kids were really trying to make it look like the one in the book, but I think it ended up looking more like a flower coming out of an egg than a pterosaurs.. ha ha!!
The plaster kept breaking up, either I made it too thin or we didn't wait long enough before we started applying the tea water to make it darker looking.
We had a good time doing it and that's what matters, plus the kids have a better understanding of what a fossil is and the job a lot of scientists have of finding them and trying to figure out information about it based on the fossil. A hard job to do!

Next spring we will get to do the rest of the projects we were unable to do due to the cold weather. I think there's about 4 or 5 of them left. A couple that have to do with insects and a couple of bird ones.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Parents Day at Ballet

A8 has been taking ballet lessons for the last few months, today was parents day! I was not able to make it but Dh was there and he took lots of pics and videos of the warm ups and the performance! Enjoy!!


Here's a few video clips of the night!


Monday, December 13, 2010

School Week 17 2010

This is our last week of school for the year. We will be doing some nature study next week that will count towards school and A8 will be finishing lesson 5 of Gamma but that should only take a couple of days. By Wednesday we should be starting our XMas vacation!!!

This week A8 is rowing the book, The Bravest of Us All, this is our second time rowing this book. I know it has nothing to do with Xmas or winter for that matter but she really wanted to do it so I gave in!

X6 is reading five different Christmas books for our Baby Jesus lapbook.
Tomorrow we'll be done with Reading made easy for the year, the next lesson starts with the letter I sound, no sense starting that now and have a two week break right after starting a new sound.

Also next week the kids get their winter journals, they've been working on their fall journals but after next week it will no longer be fall.... sigh.... :)

Nature Study Club Post 8

This morning as we were doing school the dogs needed to go outside, when I was letting them back in I noticed this bird in our backyard, well the neighbor's backyard....It was a Cooper's Hawk according to my bird expert daughter, we grabbed the binoculars and took a closer look. The bird was beautiful!! It was a juvenile hawk, not a full grown adult. Our bird feeders are now full of Dark eyed Juncos and we think he was scoping them out for a quick lunch, of course the Juncos were nowhere to be seen... as soon as the hawk left they all came back!It flew to the other side of the backyard and then left. What a beauty!! The PA bird's field guide also showed another hawk that looked a lot like this one, the red tail hawk, but we know it was a Cooper's hawk because it's tail was dark, not red.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Nature Study Club Post 7

Remember Toni the black swallowtail caterpillar, the one that was supposed to be overwintering? Well, apparently we forgot to put him in a cold location so that he could in fact overwinter till the spring. We kept it upstairs in the living room and of course the colder it got outside the warmer it got inside.... and Toni emerged from his cocoon early.... much earlier than we had anticipated!

Here's Toni as a caterpillar!
Here he is inside his cocoon overwintering.... or so we thought!
Here is Toni as a beautiful Black Swallowtail butterfly!
He stayed in A8's room, because she keeps it nice and warm and we gave him an orange and lost of sugar water in a cotton ball for it to eat!
He emerged from his cocoon the Sunday before my surgery, he lived about 10 days. No females for him to mate with, he kept looking at the sun through A8's window but it was too cold outside for us to release him. We made him as comfortable as we could....
Thanks for sharing your beauty with us Toni!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Nature Study Club Post 6

Nests! For Zoology 1 one of the projects is to build your own bird nest. Here is a pic of the nest A8 build all by herself. I think she did a great job!
She used lint, grass, mud, sticks, dry leaves... and some other stuff she found outside. She had a great time building it!
She was hoping to save it till spring and have a real bird use it, but I don't think there's any way to let birds know, "hey! we have a nest already built for you":)

Monday, December 6, 2010

School Weeks 15 & 16 2010

Last week I was unable to post anything due to the fact that any moment I had with even a little bit of energy had to be spent doing school with the kids, I did not want them to get behind in school because of my health issues.

Now that I am feeling much better I can blog about our school! School Week 15:
Last week A8 rowed the book Snowflake Bentley. It is a wonderful story about Wilson Bentley the man who loved taking pictures of snowflakes. We got to use our new digital microscope, we had no snow to look at (Thank God!) but we did look at some ice crystals from the freezer.

We also started Math U See Gamma! A8 is doing very good so far, she understand what we are doing and knows where we are headed... multiplication!!!!!

She has two more weeks of spelling through copywork, next semester we start vocabulary.

X6 rowed the book Library Lion. We love this book every time I read it I'm full of emotion by the time we get to the last two pages!!

School Week 16

This week we are rowing the books Cowboy Charlie(A8) and The Three Questions(X6).

We are on lesson 8 of Apologia Zoology 1: Flying creatures of the fifth day! Which happens to be our last lesson. We started with lesson 1 then skipped to lessons 9-14 which dealt with insects. Once we were done with 14 we went back to lesson 2 which deals with birds.
There are a few experiments we were not able to do due to the cold weather that we will be doing in the spring, so we are not completely done with Zoology 1!

One and a half weeks to go!!!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

So Long Harry!

Our beloved beta fish Harry died this morning! It was very sad. Usually when I go into the kitchen he comes to the front of the fish tank, just to look at me. Today he didn't, when I looked closer I saw he was in the bottom of the tank... not moving.

We'll miss you Harry, you were the best pet fish I've ever had!!!

Christmas is here!

Our Christmas tree is finally up! The kids and I helped put as many ornaments as we could on the tree... it's pretty packed! We have no lights around the deck this year because we forgot we threw all of them out last year so we could get new ones. So I guess we better go and get new ones for outside!! We want the LED lights, those are the ones we now have around our tree and our light pole in the front.

A trip to Lowe's this coming week!!!

Saturday, December 4, 2010

So Many Things to Blog About So Little Time

We are still here! I've been recuperating from surgery, retraining my now gallbladderless stomach how to eat, figuring out this acid reflux junk and what things I can and cannot eat, my hemoglobin is low because of the lack of food and the surgery, so I'm also working on getting my blood iron higher than it is right now, and of course doing school!

I was finally able to drive this week, my surgeon assures me the incisions are healing very nicely and my doctor just gave me some new acid reflux meds that should work better than the last ones she prescribed for me... All in all we are moving forward!

We have two more weeks of school although since we are staying home for the holidays I may extend school a few extra days... if I need to... Xmas is not till Saturday so we could do school up to that Wednesday the 22nd.

School post coming very soon!