An Update on our Summer and Jelly Fish!!

Hey everyone!  I know it has been a bit since I have posted here!  We just got back from vacation (you can go to our RV blog to read all about it!)  Since we have been home we have started getting into a summer routine!  We did "summer school" three days this week and things went REALLY well!!  I mean Seth was rocking and rolling along!!  We are doing the 2nd Learning Through Sounds book from Pathways 1st grade, finishing our 1st Grade Climbing to Good English book and finishing our 1st grade Handwriting without Tears book!  Right now for math he is playing math games on the ipad.  I have some board games and stuff I want us to play at some point as well.  We are also reading alot!  Seth is doing a Summer Reading Program...working towards a big prize he really wants (seasons 2 and 3 of Star Wars Clone Wars).  We are also reading a chapter book aloud.  We will be doing alot of this in 2nd grade so I want to get them used to it now.  Right now we are reading 'All Because of Winn Dixie'.  We of course will watch the movie when we finish the book :-)

I have discovered that if I let them play outside from about 8:00 to 10:00 in the morning, they get their outside play in before it gets too hot, and they relieve some energy before we start school and it helps them stay calmer in the schoolroom!  It's a win-win situation!

I also have some fun science stuff I want us to do this summer!  One of those things we did with our friends Tami and Caleb today!!  They came out and we made 'jellyfish in a bottle'.  (If you read our RV blog then you know the story of Seth stepping on a jellyfish on vacation!)  I got the idea on pinterest here.  I couldn't find plastic bottles like they used on the instructions big enough so we used water bottles.  I think it would have been a bit easier to see in a smooth bottle - but the kids still loved them!

Caleb holding up his jellyfish 

 Mommy being silly as she is filling the head of a jellyfish

 Alyssa's jellyfish

 Aaron showing his while Seth holding up his jellyfish

 Seth's jellyfish

 Caleb's jellyfish

The kids seemed to have a lot of fun making these and Alyssa has sat and played with hers all day long!

Another thing I am working on right now is rearranging/reorganizing my schoolhouse!  I found an idea on pinterest (click here to see it) where you turn milkcrates on their side and tie them together then put a foam bench on top and canvas totes in the front for storage!  I ordered my milkcrates today!!  They should be here Saturday!!  I am so excited!!  Of course I will show pics of my finished bench!!  It is going to replace our beanbags!  Whoo hoo!!  :-)

Weekly Wrap Up (or should I say Monthly now??)

Well things have been nuts lately!!!  We were scheduled to finish our green book in Pathways this week, which is the last of the 1st grade program, but the stomach bug has hit our house and has brought everything to a complete stop!  Seth was throwing up during the night last night and Aaron started throwing up this morning.  I am sure Alyssa will begin it soon!  UGH!!  I am just praying that Daniel and I don't get sick...or if we do that we are well by Friday because we are suppose to be flying away to Portland for a romantic getaway weekend!

Seth will hopefully be finishing up most of 1st Grade in the next few weeks!  We are planning on continuing to do school through the summer though.  Of course it will be light...but just enough to keep us on a routine when we are home :-)  We will be working through the "Learning Through Sounds" portion of Pathways and we will be finishing up the 1st Grade Climbing to Good English.   We will also be playing math games so Seth can have continued practice on his math skills.

We are also going to be doing a Summer Reading Challenge.  We will be turning in our book records for the summer reading program at the Library...but I am making ours a bit more fun this year!  I am coming up with incentives for Seth to work towards when he reads so many books.   His two major incentives will be to get Season Two and Season 3 of Star Wars Clone Wars series, but he will be earning smaller prizes along the way to his big prizes.  I am still trying to think of a final major prize at the end of the summer as well!  Some of the smaller incentives will be ice cream treats, $ to buy a toy, a pet frog, etc...

I am making my own progress charts that he will be able to add stickers to as he finishes reading a book.  Of course the charts will be Star Wars themed :-)  And I have found some good reading lists online for his grade level that I have printed off and we will use to determine what books to read :-)

I am also doing a reading progress chart for Aaron even though it will be books that I read to him.  I will be coming up with incentives for him as well.

Well this past weekend I went to the Homeschool Book Fair and have purchased all my curriculum for next year!!  Here is what we will be doing:

Seth's 2nd Grade Year:

Reading - Pathways 2nd grade readers and workbooks, we will also continue the Explode the Code workbooks as well
English - Climbing to Good English 2nd Grade workbook
Mathematics - We will be doing Singapore Math this year!  After reviewing several of them I decided this was the best choice for us!  We will be doing workbooks 1B and 2A (per advice from the lady at the MFW booth at the fair since Seth did the math program that was part of MFW 1st grade).
Spelling - Christian Liberty Spelling Level 1
History  - My Father's World Adventures History Portion
Science - I am going to do some of the science stuff in the My Father's World Adventure program, as well as doing the Magic School Bus Science Kits (will be looking at spending a month or two on each kit)  I have already ordered the microscope lab and I am so excited!!  We will be doing this with a friend of ours, which will make it doubly fun!!!
Bible - our main bible focus will be Grapevine Studies New Testament Overview, but we will also be doing some of the activities in MFW Adventures as well.
Manners and Etiquette - I purchased the board game from The Etiquette Factory that we are going to have fun playing as we learn manners and etiquette rules.

Aaron (Kindergarten) and Alyssa (preschool)

I will be doing the Heart of Dakota 'Little Hands To Heaven' with both of them. Aaron will also be doing the Rod & Staff 4&5 year old program and Alyssa will do the Rod & Staff 3&4 year old program (both programs are super sweet workbooks)

I think that covers it!!  I am super excited about our next year!!  I think we are going to have a really fun year!

Until next time,
Kellie

Our butterfly!!

Seth got a caterpillar in his co-op Biology class that we have had so much fun watching turn into a butterfly!! The kids are ready to get more caterpillars and do this again!! Here are pictures of our experience.

We brought him home on April 6th. Here are some pictures I got on the 9th of him in his cup and his cup in the butterfly net garden.








That weekend we went camping and we did not want to miss anything with his progress so we transferred him to a jar. These pictures were taken on April 12th.








Here was his home in the camper for the weekend. He just hung out and ate!

Here is a picture I got on April 16th! I think he sat on his mound of food ALL DAY that day just eating and getting fatter and fatter! I told the kids that he would be making his chrysalis soon!!




On the morning of April 18th we noticed that he had started putting his webbing on the side of the jar and was hanging in a j shape! He was getting ready!!









When we got home from church that night the chrysalis had formed!!




Then on April 27th, while Daddy and I were on a date the butterfly emerged! Thankfully the kids were at our house with Papa so they got to see it emerge!! Here are the pics I took once I got home.








Then on Saturday April 28th we took him up to Granny's house so that she could see him and we set him free!! I didn't get any pictures of him being set free because I was too involved in doing that! He hung on to the twig forever before he decided to take flight!!

But here was a picture I did get of him in the jar on the way to Granny's!! It is a beautiful view of those very colorful wings!!




This was such a neat experience! We cannot wait to do it again!!

Until next time,
Kellie

Weekly Wrap Up - Should this change to monthly?? LOL!

Ok - so my weekly wrap up posts are not happening on a weekly basis at all!!  This is sad!! The reason why I am trying so hard though to update this blog is that at the end of this 1st grade year I am turning all these posts into a photo yearbook for Seth!!  I am hoping to do this for the kids every year.  So, I am not just trying to keep my friends up to date with what is going on....bnt this is my record for our school happenings for my kids to cherish for years to come!

Anyways - we are still trucking along!  Since my last wrap up post we spent a weekend at Fairfield State Park.  I did an extensive post on that weekend on my RV blog.  You can click here to check that out if you want.

We also enjoyed a fun day at the Dallas Zoo!!  Click here if you missed that post!  :-)

Seth is still trucking right along with his Pathway readers and is doing a phenomenal job!!!  If we keep on track we will be finished with the 1st grade readers in 4 weeks!!!  WOW!!!  We will continue working on our Climbing to Good English workbook through the summer and I am also very excited about having Seth do the Summer Reading Program with the Waxahachie library this summer to continue his reading through the Summer!

We are fixing to be finished with the Complete Book of Math book as well!!  I am currently researching what to do for Math for next year and have several different curriculums I will be closely looking at when I am at the homeschool bookfair in a few weeks.

He is steadily improving his handwriting as well!  He finally got serious about it when I started counting off on his worksheets for poor handwriting.

This last week was quite a crazy week!!  After the zoo on Monday it was very hard trying to get the kids back into school!  It was a pretty rough three days of school.  And then on Thursday I had my iphone in my pocket when I was going to the restroom and it fell in the toilet!!!  It was not the best of times with me because I freaked out!!  I realized that day how attached I am to that silly thing!!  I put it in a bag of dry rice but really did not have any hopes of it being ok!!  And after that point it seemed like EVERYTHING went bad for the rest of the day!  That is until some very dear friends of ours decided to surprise us!!  They had decided to try the sushi in our small town (yes hard to believe you can get really good sushi out in the middle of nowhere LOL) and while they were waiting on their order to be completed decided to come by and say hi!  Well we decided to order sushi as well and they stayed and had dinner with us!  We then had fun doing some target shooting and ended the evening making smores with my butane torch!! LOL!!!  So my day didn't end near as bad as it started!!  And - I found out that night that my phone STILL WORKS!!!!

Friday we had a fun day at co-op and then played with some friends afterwards.  Then Saturday we went to the Bluebonnet Festival with friends and then to the garage sales going on in the Maypearl area!!  I really racked up on some clothes for Alyssa and a few for me too :-)  It was a fun day!!

Alyssa was so excited when she got to ride a rainbow pony!

Our garden is going well!  And our catapillar made it's chrysalis!!  Any day now it should be emerging as a butterfly!!!

And I had to share this super cute picture of the boys swinging!!  It just cracks me up!!

Hopefully this will be a good week!!!!  :-)  Lots to do!  I am figuring out curriculum for next year, or at least what I want to research at the bookfair so that I can make a decision :-)  I am also working on getting my house back into some kind of order and, of course, I have some garden tending to do this week as well!!

We are also working on planning VACATION!!  I think I have figured out where we are going to go and hopefully in the next couple of days we can get dates nailed down and reservations made!!  WHOO HOO!!!

Until next time,

Kellie

Homeschool Day At the Dallas Zoo

Yesterday the kids and I attended Homeschool Day at the Dallas Zoo!!  It was a very fun day!!  The weather could not have been more perfect!!  It only reached a high of 74 I think...clear skies with no rain!!

This was my first time to the Dallas Zoo since before any kids were born!!  When I had been before I was not impressed at all!!  I felt the enclosures were to0 small and the whole place just stunk!  But in recent years they have done some MAJOR renovations and I have to say that I was VERY impressed yesterday!!  So much so that I am considering purchasing a membership for our family!!  This could be such a great resource for us!!

For homeschool day we got in for only $5 a person and I also signed the kids up for a backpack ($5 each) that had binoculars inside!  They were SO EXCITED about those!  We also purchased tickets to an animal adventure show where zoo keepers brought some of the neat animals of the zoo out and told us all about them as we got an up close view of them.

Anyways - I thought I would share some pictures from our fun day!! (this is just a small sample of over 100 pics I took yesterday LOL!)

 The kids LOVED the binoculars!!  They used them all day!

 For some reason the larakeets loved my hat and hair!!  They landed on my head several times!!  (they probably liked the shiny grey hairs LOL!!  There was plenty for them to see!)

 We all agreed that the rhino was the stinkiest animal in the zoo!

 We took a break waiting on our animal adventure show and worked on some zoo worksheets that I printed out for the kids.

 Alyssa's favorite animal in the show was the boa!! YIKES!!  She came home that night telling me she wanted a snake!!!  Don't think that's going to happen!

 Probably one of the neatest things was getting to pet the giraffe!!

It is hard to believe that TODAY my Alyssa turns 3 years old!!  OH MY!!  Where has the time gone?!?!

Until next time,
Kellie

Child Training Bible

Hey everyone! I just had to share something that I am SOOO EXCITED about!! I ordered a child training bible kit!! I have gotten in the kit and bible and all my supplies and am looking forward to some down time during our camping trip this weekend to work on putting it together!

This has got to be one of the neatest things I have seen in a while!

I just had to share! :-) (and no I was not asked by this company to do a review on the item...I am just sharing something that I am excited about...in case anyone else may be interested in purchasing one as well!)




Until next time,
Kellie

Weekly Wrap Up - WOW! I just can't keep up!!

WOW!! I can't believe I got two weeks behind again!! I've got the kids doing some activities in the school house this morning so that I can get caught up on things, one thing being this blog!! LOL!

The past couple of weeks were good weeks for us. We were able to get some good school in and had a fun camping trip with a homeschool group field trip in the midst of the weeks!

I wrote a good long post on my RV journal last week on our camping and field trip! Instead of rewriting everything here about that I am going to give you the link to that post!! Click here to go read about that fun trip!!! (It will open in a new window so you don't lose your spot on this post. (-:)

Academic Highlights
Seth is continuing to do very well with his Pathways Reading! We are steadily working through the green book - the last book of 1st Grade!! He is reading like a champ!

His handwriting is also making steady improvements!! I have started counting answers wrong if the handwriting is bad, and that has helped him to concentrate more on his handwriting!

We have been focusing on addition and subtraction in Math and he his doing very well!! He has started adding more than two numbers together!

Other Highlights
Well, Alyssa's potty training progress is really not a highlight...she has stalled AGAIN! But after much agony and prayer and advice from many moms...I have come to the conclusion that backing off and waiting until she is ready is the best course of action! This is one thing in her life that she has control over and I think it is best for the long run to not fight her! I am praying though that she "gets it" soon. I still encourage as much as I can! We will get there.

Here are some other picture highlights from the last couple of weeks!

I saw this one morning and had to get a picture! Alyssa said she was tired and needed to rest! And she did lay there QUIETLY for about 10 minutes!! WHOO HOO!! We had 10 minutes of peace in the schoolhouse! LOL!



We have been working hard on our gardens!! Here is Aaron doing his part i n preparing a 4th plot that we put in a couple of weeks ago. Such a hard worker!



Daddy and PaPa recently purchased a new John Deere tractor! The man that sold it to them told them to bring the kids to the lot one day to play on the tractors! Boy did the kids have fun doing that!







Seth and Aaron even got to drive the biggest tractor on the lot!!



They also all got ball caps as well!!





I got Aaron to get a picture of Seth and I one day while we were lounging in the bean bags as he read one of his Pathway stories!! (sorry that it is blurry - that's what you get when you let your 4 year old do your photography LOL)



Speaking of gardens, I have started a photo journal on the progress of our garden! I thought it would be cool at the end of the season to put it into a photo book for us to look back (and probably get a chuckle or two) at our first year of gardening! I am sure we will find lots of lessons learned! LOL! One of the things I am super excited about journaling though is the potato buckets!! I added my 2nd layer of soil this week (got the idea from Pinterest...hopefully it will work right and I will continue to add layers and at the end of the season dump out the bucket to find a bucket full of potatoes!)



Seth got his catapillar from his biology class at co-op this last Friday! He is in his butterfly home and we are looking forward to him making his chrysalis and then emerging as a beautiful butterfly in the next few weeks!! (oh and you can see in the corner of the photo Seth's bird house he made in his wood kits class at co-op as well!)



Here's my bunny cake I made for Easter dinner at Granny and PaPa's!! It was YUMMY!!



Here we are getting ready for church Easter Sunday morning!



Here's an Easter picture of the kids!



I didn't get pictures of our Resurrection Treasure Hunt that I got from Doorposts for your house blog. Click here to see that post. I thought it was such a neat idea to incorporate the Resurrection story into your Easter hunt! This will probably be a yearly tradition for us!

Well this is going to be another busy week for us! We are leaving Thursday for Fairfield State Park to celebrate Alyssa's birthday with family!! FUN FUN times!! And then next Monday we are going to Homeschool Day at the Dallas Zoo!!

Of course I should have lots of pics to post from both of those events!!

Until next time,
Kellie