First Day of School Pictures

We had an awesome first day of school today!  Here are our first day pictures :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

An Update

My Timehop app today showed pictures from 5 years ago when we were first starting school in our new schoolhouse!!  5 YEARS!!  I cannot believe I have been doing this for 5 years!

And it was amazing to see how much the schoolhouse has changed in 5 years!  Here are some then and now pictures!

THEN 

NOW

THEN

NOW

THEN

NOW

THEN

NOW

The room is not the only thing that has changed!!  I was only homeschooling one child 5 years ago. Now I am homeschooling 3!!!!  The kids are in 5th, 3rd and 1st this year!

We are excited to be starting a new history program this year - The Mystery of History!  It is world history in chronological order with biblical history (from Christian worldview of a young earth!)

We are doing Apologia Astronomy for our science and super excited about that too!

I am putting together my own FUN English/Grammar program that will be interactive and will involve all three kids!

We are sticking with Pathway Publishers for our reading!  I still love that program.  We are still doing the Explode the Code workbooks for phonics work.  We are still using Singapore Math for our math curriculum.

The kids will be involved with Salvation Army classes as well.  All three will be taking choir.  Seth will be continuing guitar lessons and Aaron will be continuing piano lessons.  Alyssa will be taking dance and art!

Our first day of school will be this coming Monday - August 17, 2015!!  It is going to be a great year!

Until next time,
Kellie

Meet Tuba....

I realized that when I did my update on Monday I forgot to introduce our newest pet!

Meet Tuba.... the tadpole

He is an African Dwarf frog.  It was recommended in our Apologia Zooology 2: Sea Creatures of the 5th Day curriculum!  We ordered him in August but due to Texas heat they couldn't ship him until it cooled down (and thankfully they were able two in the couple of weeks of nice weather before it got too cold here...gotta love Texas!)

Alyssa came up with his name - Tuba!!  :-)

Oh and the fun is beginning - getting ready for our Thanksgiving camping!!  I made the homemade cranberry sauce today!  I went ahead and water bathed it so that it would keep and that is one less thing to have to fit in the fridge!  YUM!!!  It has been WAY too long since I have canned!  I really need to do it more often!  There is such the feeling of accomplishment looking at the beautiful jars of yummy goodness!!!  Why didn't I think to make more?!?!?  LOL!

I guess that last bit really didn't have much to do with homeschool...but oh well!!  It is our life! :-)

Until next time,
Kellie

A Quick Update

Hey!  Since I haven't updated in a couple of weeks I thought I would post a quick update!

Things are busy around here as usual!  We just got home from a a family Thanksgiving up in Arkansas with Daniel's family!  It was such a nice weekend!

We are gearing up for a week long camping trip with my parents the week of Thanksgiving!!  OH MY will it be fun!!!  We will be doing fun craft stuff such as Christmas ornaments made from twigs and acorns and such to glow in the dark play dough and slime, to of course smores around the campfire!  We will also be doing our BIG Thanksgiving dinner at the camp site!!  YUM!!!  It will be a full week of FAMILY fun!!!  I am so looking forward to this trip!!

In the past couple of weeks Alyssa has started reading!  WHOO HOO!!  She has started her first reader in the Pathways reading program and is reading like a champ!!!  It is kind of bitter sweet to know this is the last time I will hear my children learn to read!  This has been the biggest blessing of homeschool so far!  I am excited for other things that I will get to experience with them...but really don't know if anything can top watching your child learn to read!

I am gearing up for our Truth in the Tinsel for Christmas school.  I am also thinking of how to change school up just a bit for Christmas.  I really don't want to lose this rhythm we are in too much, but I also want to make it a fun and special time as well!  I know I will be able to come up with something (but first I have to get beyond this focus on Thanksgiving week camping trip!... Did I mention how excited I was about that?! LOL)

Anyways, here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks.


Here are Alyssa's latest letter crafts!

And her word caterpillar has not filled up HALF of the board!  She is really learning a lot of words and is doing VERY well!!!

Here are a few pictures from our weekend - we took at fun hayride on Saturday during the family Thanksgiving.

This first one is of Alyssa and her cousin Addison.  They have become such great friends!!  Every time we saw them on Saturday they were holding hands headed somewhere!  Alyssa was very sad to leave Addison Saturday night.  But we have decided that they are going to be pen pals! :-)  I think that will be great fun for both of them!

Well, I promise I will have lots of pictures of our Thanksgiving trip!!  :-)  And of course we still have two full weeks of school and another co-op class to get through before the trip so things will be busy between now and then.

Until next time,
Kellie

Friday Creative FUN School - ART DAY!!

So, what do you do when a tummy bug has claimed the second victim of your household and you have to cancel your Friday plans??  Well, today at our house we had another creative FUN school!!  Today was an art emphasis day - we made Fall decorations for our home!!!!  :-)

Even though I might sound very energetic and excited in the writing of this post, I will be honest and say that I am tired!  Yes we had fun and yes I am excited about the results...but this was a lot of work LOL!  I didn't plan ANY of it ahead of time.  This was all decided last minute when we realized we would be grounded to the house for the day.    So, I was having to plan as I went and was trying to figure out what we could do with the materials we had on had.  There was some impatience happening when I wasn't "preparing" something for them fast enough and there was a bit of whining as well.  I have to also admit that things got a lot better when I finally just let them have at the supplies and let them create something themselves.   I also realized that Seth was old enough to show him a picture of something and he was able to figure out how to make it!

So all in all it was a fun day and we got a lot accomplished and I think, my kids especially, will look back on this day and remember it with fond memories!

And Granny brought supper this evening and played games with us so that was a nice end to our big day!!

And since it is creative school - we of course used the creative mode on the camera again :-)!!

Here are some fun pictures from the day!

These first shots are of the kids working on their various projects.  (and yes they were in their pjs all day...I mean it was a sick day right?!? LOL!)

 WOW! What a mess on the table!

Oh - and we got in a little nature study too!  The kids found a praying mantis as they were working on their stuff!!!  (and were so very excited because they have been watching a Wild Kratts episode about mantises recently and were excited that they could rattle off a lot of different facts about these creatures!)

So here are our finished products!!

1st up - our wreath.  We actually made the wreath last year.  We just added the sign and a couple of details to the wreath.

Here is our table all ready for fall!!  We have my glass pumpkin full of acorn beads - which I have had for several years and LOVE!!!  With it we put the modge podge leaf jar that Seth made today!  (and looks REALLY pretty with a candle burning inside of it!)

Here is a view of our buffet table!

Aaron made this button pumpkin picture!!

I made this bling sign!!  I purposely did not use "fall" colors ... I want to leave this sign out all year so that we can be reminded to always have a grateful heart and that giving thanks is an every day thing...not just a once a year thing :-)

This sign we made a couple of years ago but the kids made the paper bag trees today (there are two more in front of Aaron's pumpkin picture...they just didn't come out well in that picture)

Here is a view of our fireplace...

Seth made this scarecrow!!  I showed him a picture (from Pinterest of course) and told him to make it...he did an AWESOME job I thought (oh and the Happy balloon at the top was his own addition LOL)

Here is our turkey.  The kids made the popsicle stick "feathers".  I thought he looked quite unique!

Here is our Give Thanks board.  This picture does NOT do this justice - it looks much better than it does in the picture.  We spray painted two pieces of board yellow with a splatter of red on top.  We then modge podged the letters (they are metallic paper letters) and leaves... it really turned out nice.

Here is our owl and birdhouse.  Poppy (my dad) made this bird house for one of our trees outside but the limb it was on came down in one of our recent storms.  Well we decided to spray paint it today and modge podge leaves on the roof and put a pumpkin on the front.  I then made the owl to sit on the perch.  Beside it you can see a yarn pumpkin tha twe made a couple of years ago.

I just LOVE how this bouquet turned out!!  Aaron made all the button turkey faces that we hot glued in the middle of these fall flowers!  So cute!

Here is Seth's button picture - it is a turkey!  :-)

Here is Alyssa's button tree picture :-)

Here is our piano with all it's goodies.

Aaron made the paper bag scarecrow all on his own.  We made the indian and pilgrim blocks a couple of years ago.

Seth made this paper bag scarecrow and the pumpkin and turkey block were made a couple of years ago.

Ok so that was our creative ART day!!

I figured since it has been a couple of weeks since I posted that I would post a few other things that we have done over the last couple of weeks!!

LOOK at Alyssa's sight word worm!!  Man is it growing!!  She is doing so well with her reading.  We are just a couple of weeks away from her starting her first reader!!!

We talked about sea turtles and added little egg carton sea turtles to our ocean box.

This last Monday was a very rainy Monday morning.  As soon as I opened the school room Anna ran in and decided she was not going back out there!  (she thankfully has found a spot up under the porch where she can get out of the rain...but still decided she had enough of that).  She laid on a blanket at the door and SLEPT the entire morning...I mean she was OUT!  She did not hardly move!  In fact Alyssa was putting all kinds of blankets and stuff on her and it did not phase her one bit.

Alyssa completed a couple more letters for her alphabet book too.

Well I think that is it!!  I am going to bed - I am tired!!!

Until next time,
Kellie