Week 11, 12 and Thanksgiving Break

OK -  well I got a bit behind in my updates.  Things have been CRAZY around here!  So this post is going to handle our week of school before Thanksgiving, the week of Thanksgiving (when we camped in Huntsville, just a couple of miles away from my parents) and this week.


The boys are really enjoying learning how to play Chess.  (you can see just how interested Alyssa is LOL).  They play many mornings before school and many afternoons as well.

Seth finished the first 2nd Grade reader!!!  He was so excited!!!  :-)

At Cub Scouts Seth learned the proper way to fold a flag!  :-)

He also learned some first aid skills.  

 We had a light week of school before Thanksgiving.  One day we drew a turkey.  Here is my turkey on the board.

 Here is Seth's turkey!  Good job I thought!!

 Here is Aaron's turkey!!  His best drawing yet!!

And here is Alyssa's.  LOL!

 Seth decided one day he wanted to show us how to do hand turkeys.

 Of course Aaron wanted to do one on the board too.

 And Alyssa can't be left out :-)

 We finished Sarah Whitcher's Story.   Here is the yarn weaving that Seth made during our reading time!  He really enjoyed doing this.  :-)

Alyssa convinced Daddy to play tea party with her and Granny.  LOL!!!  :-)

The week of Thanksgiving we took the RV down to Huntsville State Park.  It is about 2 miles or so from my parents house!!  We thought we would try it out as a way to have an extended stay down there, but have our own space!  And it worked like a charm!  Now the weird thing was that we really didn't do anything at the Park :-( Daniel said that next year we need to make sure we do some dinners or something out there where everyone comes to "our place".

Here is a view from our camper.  It was such a pretty park!

But the cousins did get in a lot of good playing time at Mimi's!!

 

And I got to meet and love on my new niece Gracelyn!!!  :-)

On Monday we did not do any school because we had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese!!  OH MY!  Chuck E. Cheese on MONDAY?!??!  YIKES!!  :-) Thankfully we were almost the only ones there and we wouldn't have missed it for nothing!

 We did get in some school this week regardless though.  I have made the decision that the only subjects we are going to do during December are Spelling, Reading, English and Math.  We are also Doing the Coloring The Christmas Classics - where we are learning about the history of famous Christmas carols while coloring pictures and listening to the songs!  :-)

We did a fun math exercise today.  I gave Seth 4 dimes and pulled up the "toy warehouse"  (a powerpoint slide I made)  All the toys had prices of less than $0.10.  He could purchase one toy at a time.  He had to figure out how much to give me, how much change I would give him back and how much money he had left. He continued making purchases until he was out of money.  We played this 3 times!  He loved it!!

 Here he is figuring out the next toy to buy (and look at Aaron beside him counting too!! :-) )

Tomorrow is our last day of co-op for the semester!!!  I am ready for the break but sad because that means we won't see a lot of our friends for a little while :-(!!!

Until next time,

Kellie

Week 10 In Review

Ok - I will warn you now - I have lots of pictures to share this week :-) We have been having a blast!!

Enjoy!!

Daddy was gone all last week (our week 9) so last Friday night the kids wanted to pull out the constellation light again so we all piled in the boys room for some "star gazing"  :-)

 Then last Satruday was the ECCHO Fall Fetival!!!  I dressed the kids all up in John Deere shirts and hats.  Don't they look cute?!?!  Of couse Alyssa wasn't too happy that she was wearing a "boy" shirt so she wanted to wear her pink pearls too!!!  LOL!!  She is such a girl!

 Here is a picture that a friends took of us on the hay ride!

Alyssa got her face AND her fingernails painted!!

 Seth got his face painted too!

Here is a view of the bounce houses from our hay ride!

 They had a fun photo booth set up!!

We were sad that Daddy wasn't able to be with us :-( He was returning home from his motorcycle trip!  But we were sure glad to see him when we got home that night!

I got a couple of cute pictures from Cub Scouts Monday night!  Seth and Caleb were working on their exercising! :-)

In History this week we made hasty pudding!  It was surpisingly very good!!  We made it for breakfast since they mentioned it was eaten a lot in colonial times for breakfast and the kids really liked it!  They want to make it again!

 That night we took the left over and fried it up and it really did make some good corn fritters!!  I was pleasantly surprised!  Daddy was scared to try the pudding but he really liked the corn fritters!

We have changed up a a bit how we are doing our patriotic songs.  I have found another company called 'Color the Classics'.  (Check them out at colortheclassics.com) I ordered the patriotic songs book and the Christmas Carols book.  We did Yankee Doodle from the patriotic songs book this week!  Basically you play the song on the cd and give the kids a coloring page and as they are coloring and listening to the song you tell them the history of the song!  I actually learned a LOT this week studying Yankee Doodle!  If history was this fun when I was in school I might have learned a bit more LOL!!  (the week after Thanksgiving we are starting the Christmas one - so excited to learn the history of some of our well known Christmas carols).

Anyways - here they are coloirng one of the pages (don't look at the mess on the floor that Aaron and Alyssa needed to clean up!)

I found a new "busy hands" activity for our read aloud times.  I introduced the kids to basic yarn weaving!  Seth actually really took to it and is doing a good job with it!!  The other two didn't really grasp it well but sure had fun trying.  Here they all are working on their weavings.

I had to get this picture from Seth's Pathways reader on here!  This was such a sweet moment during our reading that day!  We were reading about one of the children in the story having a new bat and how he made a holder in the shop to keep his bat.  Seth stopped and said "WOW!!  He made that!!!  Man I need to be getting out in the shop making stuff!!"  I just had to laugh!  I told him that child was a little bit older than him but he said that didn't matter...he still could be making stuff!!  :-)  That kid cracks me up sometimes!

Ok - the rest of the pictures for this post are from our very very very fun day birdwatching and geocaching at Cedar Hill State Park with friends!!  We had an AWESOME day!  The kids had so much fun!!

In our MFW curriculum we are starting a bird study.  As we go through each of the states, studying the state bird for each is going to be part of the lessons.  Well we decided it would be so much fun to do the intro lessons on bird study somewhere where the birds are!!  Cedar Hill State Park is actually known for a great place for birdwatching.  I didn't realize that until we went camping there a few weeks ago.  So we took the kids to one of the good birdwatching sites.  We did the intro lessons talking about what a bird is and what makes birds unique.  We then talked about the American Goldfinch, which is a year-round resident of this park.  Then we gave the kids binoculars and let them do some bird watching.  We never did see the Goldfinch we really think we heard one at one point.  :-)

 (These next two pics crack me up!!!!  LOVE THEM!!!)

Yikes!  A baby water moccasin!!   

After our bird watching we spent the rest of the day geocaching!!  We found 5 yesterday!!  We probably walked close to 5 miles!!  The kids were such troopers!!  And I made sure the ones we were hunting would have "treasures" to make it so worth it.  We really did have a blast!

We started off on the duck pond trail!

Here is our first one!

 Here are the kids with the cache!  Seth is holding up a million dollar bill!  This is a tract that our church likes to hand out - it looks like a million dollar bill but on the back has a salvation tract (and a stamp of our church name, address and phone number).  We always make a point to put these in every cache we find!

 When we got to the pond we got a sample of pond water that we brought home and are going to observe under our microscope one day.  (I made sure to put our dropper and some specimen jars in our backpack just in case we found stuff that we wanted to observe in the microscope later)  :-)

Don't know if you remember the post that I made when we went camping at Cedar Hill State Park...I mentioned Aaron find the beaver dam?  Well today we found a LOT of evidence of beavers around that dam on Friday!!!   Here is Aaron squatting by a tree limb that a beaver had been gnawing on.

 And look at that gnaw working on that branch!  Too cool!!

We also found these tracks by the pond.  At first we were wondering if they were big dog prints or something...

 

 but then as we got back on the trail we saw this pile of animal scat.  Tami and I were trying to figure it out and realized that it had to come from a pretty large animal and I began to wonder if maybe it was cougar scat...because I know they are in the area.  So I looked it up on google and it really did follow the description I found there!!  I then looked up what a couger paw print looks like and it really does look like the paw print I have printed above.    When I got home I have done some more research and it looks like both of those could possibly be bobcat too...don't know.but we saw this kind of evidence all day!!  I looked online when we got home and found there have been many bobcat sightings in the park, as well as some couger sightings!!

After we found the first cache we got a bit lost on a trail looking for our next one (it was my fault - I was reading a map wrong...UGH!)  So we decided it was lunch time and found some picnic tables near a fun playground to eat!  Kids ate and then had some fun playing on the playground.

 Boys eating apples on the slide!

Then after we ate we walked to the lakeshore and enjoyed looking out at the water.

Then it was time to do some more treasure hunting!  We found the cache that we were searching for when we got lost!

 Seth was trying to pull it out with a stick so he didn't get scratched up.

We found another one at the Penn Agriculture Farm (in the park)  It was a really neat place.  The cache was found near an old barn that the kids had fun exploring in.

 We actually found TWO horny toads inside that barn!

Our fourth cache was a fun one!!  Whoever hid this one was very creative in their camaflouge!!  They painted a crystal light container and screwed to the end of a big branch and then stuck it in a tree!  Caleb has super sharp eyes though and spotted it!!

And then we found a 5th one!!  We found this one around 4:30...it was starting to get a bit close to dusk and we really didn't feel like meeting "Sam"  (the name we gave to the couger or bobcat or whatever creature he was that we were finding evidence of all day) so we figured it was time to call it a day!

  We sure had fun!  My legs are super sore today!!  I got my exercise for the year! LOL!

Hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Until next time,
Kellie