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

Week 9 in Review!

Wow!  Another week is almost behind us.  It was another good, busy week!  :-)

Here are picture highlights!

We had our church fall carnival on Saturday!  The kids had a lot of fun.  Alyssa was a flower princess (with her white kitty that she felt she needed to carry LOL).  The them was "simple" this year.  She got the little princess dress for Christmas last year and I just bought a long sleeve shirt and leggings to go underneath it.  I already had the flowers and basket and stuff at home to go with it.

Seth was Darth Vader.  (very simple - he already had the mask - I just bought a black long sleeved shirt and sweat pants)

 

 Aaron was a Clone Trooper (once again - very simple - we had the mask and just bought a white long sleeve t-shirt and sweat pants to go with it.)

 Here is Alyssa trying to shoot the cans! LOL!

 Here is Alyssa and I going down the big slide!  (Daddy cut off my head in the picture!)

Monday night at Cub Scouts was our first awards ceremony!  It was so cute!!!  Seth earned his bobcat badge and 4 belt loop awards!!  He was so excited.

Here he is saying his cub scout promise.

Here he is receiving one of his belt loops!  I wish this wasn't so blurry because look at that smile!!!

 After they received their belt loop awards the scout master said they had to do one more thing before earning their bobcat badge - they had to fight the bobcat!  They all went out of the room and a few minutes later we heard a LOT of banging around (Seth said they went to the church kitchen and banged on the counters and slammed doors).  Then they all came back in all bandaged up.  Seth didn't look like he did so bad.  Some of the kids had their whole head bandaged!  LOL!!  It was really cute.

 And here he is receiving his badge!

 My friend Tami got this cute picture of Caleb and Seth after the ceremony!

We are studying seasons right now and the MFW activity was to find a tree in the yard to draw.  We are going to make a picture of it each season.  We chose our hackberry tree since it shows more of a change in the seasons than all of our mesquite trees.

Here is Seth drawing his tree.  

 

Alyssa and Aaron did this as well.  (Alyssa wanted to stay in her scooby doo pjs this day LOL!)

 Oh hi there Daisy!!  I guess she wanted her picture too!  :-)

 I think she just wanted some attention - and Aaron never fails to give it to her!  :-)

 Here are their trees.

Oh!  I have to share this!!  We went and got chines food after cub scouts on Monday night.  Below was Aaron's fortune!!!  If you have been keeping up then you know that he has a major goal right now - to read!!!  And it looks like we will be starting his first pathways reader sometime in January!!  So I couldn't help but smile when I saw this!!  I have put it in his record book :-)  We will see how close to this we get!!

Tami also sent me this pic of Seth and Caleb in their lego class at co-op!!  I thought it was super cute and wanted to include it in here!  They are such big buds!

Well tomorrow we have another day of co-op and then Saturday we have our ECCHO Fall Festival!!  We are so so excited about it!!!  It looks like there is going to be a lot to do and it is going to be tons of fun!!  I am sure I will have pictures to share!

Until next time,
Kellie