Weekly Wrap Up (for last two weeks)

As you can probably guess things have been a bit crazy around here. I'm sorry I did not get last week's wrap up post up. I just never found the time to do it! So now I get to update you on two weeks of stuff :-) (I think I will just stick to the major highlights - LOL!)

Last Thursday school was a bit interesting for Seth. We had the monthly preacher's fellowship hosted at our church on Thursday. Bro Gary had begged choir members to be there so he could show off his choir and hubby was going to be able to be there to run the sound...so I thought - hey! Seth can do some school work during the preaching (they have 3 messages by three preachers during the meeting - awesome messages by the way!) So that's what he did. He sat by me in the balcony after I finished in the choir and worked on school! Of course we didn't get everything in because it had to just be stuff that he could do quietly without much instruction but we were still able to get quite a bit in. :-) (and mommy got a bit of a break and was able to soak in some good preaching!)

I did want to share what we started working with last week along with our reading. My mom got me several good workbooks for Christmas for the kids - one was alphabet puppets. There is a puppet for every letter of the alphabet (which I will be making to use for Aaron and Alyssa next school year...have some neat ideas for that)... but they also have blends and digraph puppets!! :-)

The supplemental exercises of the Pathways program is starting to introduce these so I thought it would be fun to make Seth the puppets to help him learn them.

I scanned the pages into the computer so that I could "color" them with Paint and print off the colored copies (less work than manually coloring them).

Here's the cover of the book - THANK MOM!! :-)




And here are the puppets we used last week. (actually there wasn't a puppet for th so I made my own). Seth really liked them!




We are also talking about vowel blends so I made some "walking vowels" (from the saying 'when two vowels go walking...the first one does the talking').

Here are my vowels...





Seth really liked these and apparently they are working because several times now he has seen a word and has said "Mom - two vowels are walking - so first one is talking".

Well it has come to the point in our MFW science to start the science with water book - :-( I am just not liking it and have been really wishing we had a better science curriculum at this point! Monday I was at my desk and I noticed a Magic School Bus science kit about space over at the bookshelf. This was given to us by my in-laws. They got it on one of their vacations. I put it up thinking it would be a couple of years before we could use it. I decided to take a look at it on Monday and realized that we can be doing this now and started getting really excited!! It has 12 experiments/activities dealing with space and it came with all the materials that you need to be able to do the activities!! YEAH!! So we started this week! We are going to take about the next 3 weeks completing this kit! FUN!! FUN!!

I also found out there are more magic school bus kits and they are about $20 each (which since they come with all the supplies that is NOT BAD at all in my opinion). I think we may end up ordering a few of these to finish out our science for this year! I have already started researching curriculums for science for next year and have found a few I am very interested in seeing more of...but if we really enjoy these kits we may have to do some more of these as well next year! My kids LOVE Magic School Bus so they were very excited to have started this kit this week!

This week we talked about why you can't see stars in the daytime - we compared using a flashlight in a dark room vs. outside in the sunshine. They also colored on white and black paper with a white crayon. We also used red cellophane (that came with the kit) to turn our flashlight into a night vision light! FUN! FUN!



Speaking of curriculum I have made the definite decision to not go with My Father's World next year and just piece my curriculum together. I have started doing some research and can't wait for the homeschool book fair in May! :-)

Seth has almost completed memorizing Matt 6:9-13 - we will finish it next week. This is the passage that he is memorizing for his Sunday School class to get a nice prize!! I will get a video of him reciting it once we have the entire passage memorized next week.

He also only has a couple of books left to memorize the entire old testament! Hopefully we can get that nailed down next week as well. The minor prophets have been tough - even for Mommy!! LOL!!

Aaron and Alyssa have been getting along really well in the school room lately!! They have been having fun pretending that they are going on a vacation to the beach! The only problem is that they sometimes get a little loud and it is hard for Seth to concentrate, poor thing, but I am just happy that they are getting along for once! (they have always been oil and water and fight with each other quite a bit).





Remember me telling you about Seth writing thank you notes to the family for his Christmas gifts? Well his cousin Sarah (who is a student at A&M) wrote him back and made some really cool drawings of all of the kids names! They were all so excited and we put the signs on the doors to their rooms!







Seth wrote Sarah back this week and made a really cute drawing of a cat (from his Draw Write Now book). I forgot to get a picture of it though! But Sarah - if you are reading this - keep a look out in the next few days for a letter in your mailbox!! :-)

Seth also wrote a letter to his cousin Joey (who is 2 years older than him). They have become pen pals!! (who needs a handwriting curriculum when you have pen pals, right?!?!)

Well we got Daisy to the vet last Monday and everything went well! We found out that she is not a puppy. The vet estimated her to be about 4 years old!! But she was very healthy and the vet was quite sure she had been fixed. But we quickly realized that was not true when she went into heat the very next day!!!! UGH!! Looks like we will be making another vet trip soon to get her fixed because I for sure don't want to go through another heat cycle and definitely do NOT want puppies!!

Here is the cute girl at the vet!



Here she is in her bed in the school room. She will spend most of the morning sleeping in her little bed.




Well I think that covers the major highlights! LOL! We have co-op classes tomorrow. Kids are super excited! Then Monday we are having a valentine's party at Chuck E Cheese with our homeschool group (kids are more excited than this mom is - LOL - but I am excited for them! We have an awesome group of friends to do fun stuff with!!)

Until next time,
Kellie