Loving our Bible Studies

No Focus on Thanksgiving post to put up today :-(  We finished working on our secret project that I can't share on here until after Thanksgiving so I don't ruin the surprise for our family members.  Aaron and I are headed to speech therapy today and then the two of us are going grocery shopping to get the stuff to make all the yummy food for our celebrations!!  :-)

I do want to share today about how well our bible lessons are going!  If you have followed us then you know that we are using Grapevine Studies and it is fitting really well with MFW.  The first lesson of Grapevine Studies was creation.  Since MFW spread out creation into a couple of weeks we were only doing one box of stick figures at a time for the creation lesson.

Well - that has all changed now.  Today was our first day to do a full Grapevine Studies lesson - the story God forming Adam and Eve and Adam's job in the garden.  Actually it was two lessons for Grapevine Studies - God forming Adam and putting him in the garden, and then God forming Eve and putting her in the garden.  But since MFW had them as one lesson we combined them as one lesson.

I actually used the story from the MFW teacher's manual to tell the story - using the stick figure drawings from Grapevine Studies.  Here is a picture of my teacher's manual - I made small drawings at the points where I wanted the drawings to go into the story.

After we finished the story (the boys drew the pics in their notebook as I was drawing them on the board) I had each boy go to the whiteboard, and retell the story back to me, using the pictures.  They both did a very good job of retelling the story!

I think they really liked getting up there and "playing teacher", telling me the story.

I really think this method is going to work well for us!  And I love how well the two programs work together! :-)  I think using the Grapevine Studies to supplement the MFW just helps in comprehension and retention of the stories for the boys!  (and it is a good way to get Aaron involved :-) )

Ok - got to go get ready for the afternoon!

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Turkey Bread Basket

Hey everybody!!

We got back at our focus on Thanksgiving today!  We have a lot to get done this week because our first Thanksgiving celebration begins THIS Friday night (with my family)!!!  Yay!  So excited!!

(side note - we are also trying to do a full week of school as well so that we can take next week off!  I will hopefully combine my week in review of last week with this week's on Thursday...if I have time! LOL!)

We worked on two projects today.  One of the projects I cannot share with you quite yet because it is a surprise for the family members - and I don't want to ruin the surprise since most of them read this blog :-)  I will share it with you after Thanksgiving though - I promise!

The other project we worked on was our Turkey Bread Basket.  Of course once I again I got the idea off of Pinterest.  We made our face on the wooden spoon.  I cut out the feathers and Alyssa added some color to them and then Aaron taped them to the skewers.  (Seth was busy working on the other secret project while Aaron and Alyssa and I did the bread basket).

This bread basket of course is going to hold the bread for dinner - but it will also serve as the centerpiece for the table!  I think he turned out looking adorable!  Look at the pictures and let me know if you agree.  :-)

 Alyssa loved coloring on the leaves.

 Aaron did a good job taping the feathers to the skewer!

 I had to get another shot of Alyssa - she was REALLY into coloring those feathers - and she made sure her scribbles were just right!  She was too funny!  (and yes, she is in dinosaur pjs - LOL!)

Here is the end result!!  (nevermind the napkins that I am storing in the basket for right now)

As you can see - the handprint napkin fits nicely in the basket :-)

Other Posts on our Focus on Thanksgiving:

The Mantle

Our Fall Trees

The Tablecloth

Our Pilgrim and Indian

Our Thankful Tree

Oh! On another note - I realized this weekend that I have been nominated for a homeschool blog award at The Homeschool Post through seeing a post from another blog that I follow and love and found out she voted for me in the category I was nominated in!!  Of course she is Tina over at Being Made New and the category that I have been nominated in is Best Homeschooling Methods blog!  I don't know how in the world I got nominated but it is kind of exciting to know that I have been nominated!

So if you love me and love my blog will you go vote fore me?  You can click here to go vote (you don't have to have a blog to be able to vote).

While you are at it - go vote for blogs in other categories as well.  This post has all of the categories listed.  I got my votes in, including my vote for Being Made New as best encourager!  She has been an AWESOME encourager for me!

So if you have time and would like to  - go vote!  :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Thankful Tree and Bread Basket Napkin

Today was a fun day for our focus on Thanksgiving!  I really made the children think about things they were thankful for!!

Our Thankful Tree
For our first project we completed our thankful tree.  I got the idea from pinterest (of course) but ours turned out looking way different than the one on there (and in my opinion - better).  I found some good branches outside that would work and found a vase in my stash that would work.  I was originally going to do paper leaves that we would write what we were thankful on.  Well I went by the Dollar Tree to see if they had any die cuts of leaves (because our Dollar Tree is good about carrying stuff like that) but they did not.  :-(  I had some cardstock and was just planning on going to the library in a couple of days and just use their die cut machine when I went into Wal-Mart and found that they had packages of fake leaves for a very good price!  I realized they would look prettier anyways so I decided to go that route.

So I got out some ribbon and stapled ribbon loops to each of the leaves.  I then had the kids sit down and I told them for every leaf I held up they had to name something they were thankful for and I wrote it down.  I had 26 leaves total so that meant they were going to have to use their brains and think beyond the obvious things to be thankful for!  And they did a very good job and it was a very sweet, tender conversation that we had as a result! (My heart completely melted when Seth gave Heaven as one of his things to be thankful for!)

So we hung the leaves on the tree and then I took all the things they said they were thankful for and made a really cute little 4x6 picture with them that I framed and sat at the base of the tree!  I am so very pleased with how it turned out!

Here is a picture of what is in the frame (in case you want to read all the things they are thankful for)

Our Bread Basket Napkin
Once again this was from another idea I found on Pinterest (surprise surprise).  The idea there was actually for a tablecloth - they made handprints of the children on the tablecloth and made them look like turkeys.  I loved the idea but we already had a tablecloth and I didn't like this idea on the tablecloth we have.   But I still loved the idea!  So I decided to do it on our napkin that will go in our breadbasket.  (which, by the way, our bread basket is going to be another project - we are making it to look like a turkey - SO FUN!)

So on three of the corners I had each child do a handprint turkey and then I decorated and labeled the fourth corner!  I can't wait to see how cute this is going to look in our bread basket!

Here are the pictures.  You will notice that the napkin is bunched up in the middle - that is because it was still drying when I took the pictures.  We put it on top of another towel so that our paint would not bleed through to the table.  (btw - we used fabric paint and fabric markers).   Also notice the fabric of the napkin - this is the same fabric that I am making my dinner napkins out of (that I mentioned yesterday!)

It was a fun day for our focus on Thanksgiving!  We still have lots to do over the next couple of weeks!  We have a surprise that we are making for each member of our family that is coming to each of the dinners.  We have to make our napkin rings, and the turkey bread basket, and our place cards for the tables.  And there are a few other things I would like to throw in there if we can find time!

This has been a lot of work and has kept us busy but it has been a lot of fun and we are making memories to cherish for years and years to come! LOVE IT!!

Our other posts on focus on Thanksgiving:
Our Mantle
Our Fall Trees
Our Tablecloth
Our Pilgrims and Indians

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus On Thanksgiving - Pilgrims and Indians

Today for our focus on Thanksgiving we made cute little block decorations of a pilgrim, indian, turkey and pumpkin.  Of course once again I found the idea on Pinterest. But the Pinterest link was not to a tutorial on how to make them - it was to a site to purchase them.  But I thought to myself that there had to be a way to figure out how to use that idea and make a craft out of it!  And there was :-)

I went and found 4 pieces of scrap blocks in my hubby's shop :-) and then we used construction paper and ribbon and buttons and stuff to glue on them.  I cut out all the pieces and the kids helped me glue everything on.  (Older kids would be able to cut out the pieces an do the whole project themselves)

Here are the pictures - I will explain in greater detail with each picture what we did :-)

 Here is a view of all four of them displayed on our piano!  Aren't they adorable?!?!

 Our little indian - Alyssa colored his feather, Seth picked out his button eyes and Aaron helped glue on all the pieces. (the feather was glued onto the back side of the block)

 My favorite - the turkey!  Aaron picked out his big colorful button eyes and Seth helped glue all the pieces on.  (the feathers were glued on to the backside of the block)

 Our Pilgrim - Aaron and Seth both helped glue on the pieces - Aaron colored his eyes and Seth colored his nose.

Our pumpkin - I glued on these pieces - I did it before we did the others to make sure that the construction paper would glue to the blocks ok and to give the kids and idea of what we were doing.  (the stem was glued to the back side of the block and the green ribbon for leaves was attached to the top of the block with a green thumb tack)

I was very pleased with how this project turned out and hope we can cherish these for years to come!  So fun!!

Oh - and I mentioned yesterday about finding fabric for our tablecloth - well I found some for our napkins as well! YAY!!  It is actually an old cream colored tablecloth.  Thanks to my serger I will quickly be able to transform it into 10 napkins and have enough left over for our bread basket napkin that we will be decorating. 

Things are coming together nicely!

Other Focus on Thanksgiving Posts:

Our Mantle

Our Fall Trees

Our Tablecloth

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - My Tablecloth!!

Ok - first I have to SCREAM and SHOUT and JUMP FOR JOY because I get to now host two Thanksgiving dinners!!  YAY!!  My family was not going to be able to come up on Thanksgiving day so we have worked it out where they are coming the weekend before - WHOO HOO!!!  My Mom, Dad, sister and my two awesome nephews are coming!!  YAY!!  So I am now doing two menus and setting two tables, and having two wonderful family celebrations!  I am LOVING this!!

Ok - so on to my tablecloth - LOL!  I am so very excited!!  A dear sweet lady of the church gave me two tub fulls of fabric last week!!  Included in that fabric was a very pretty 60" width nice light weight upholstery fabric - just enough for a table cloth!  And in a perfect Fall rust color!  All I had to do was serge the two short ends - I am going to leave the long ends natural with an extra stitch to control the fraying when washed!

Here is a picture of the tablecloth!  (you probably recognized it - I had just enough scrap for a runner on my buffet!)

I need to figure out what to do for my napkins - I am sure I have the perfect fabric in my huge collection of fabric now - just have to find it LOL!

The kids will be making the napkin rings :-)  Of course I will post about those when we do them!

WHOO-HOO!

Other focus on Thanksgiving posts:
The Mantle
The Fall Trees

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Fall Trees

Today we did a project for our focus on Thanksgiving - getting the house ready to host family!  Today we made fall trees using dot painting.  I found the idea from Pinterest.  Aaron has loved dot painting ever since he got to do it in one of his co-op classes at the beginning of the semester so he was super excited to do this today!

What I did was make two 8x10 pictures of a tree trunk and branches for Seth and Aaron and 2 4x6 pictures of a tree trunk and branches for Alyssa and I.  I put globs of red, orange, yellow and brown paint (washable of course!) on a tray and gave everybody a q-tip for each color.  And all we did was just make dots of color all over our picture.

Thank God for washable markers!  Alyssa had more on her than her picture by the end of it - but no big deal - these paints wash off VERY easily!!

When they dried I put them in frames and hung them over our buffet.  Here are some pictures of the end result.

 Ignore the branches for now - this is part of our thankful tree that we are working on - I will post pictures of it when we are done :-)

 Once again - ignore the branches for now - but don't the pictures look nice on the wall?!?!

Here are close up of the finished pictures:

 Seth's painting

 Aaron's painting

 Alyssa's work!

My cute little tree!

I have to point out a couple of other things on the buffet table...both of these are from crafts we did two years ago!!

Here are our glove stuffed turkeys!  Click here to see the original post from two years ago when we made them.

And here is our fall wreath we made.  Click here to see the original post from this one - I got teary eyed when I looked at it - the kids were so little - Alyssa was just a baby!!  OMG!!

So once again - we are taking time this month to focus on Thanksgiving.  On each of these posts I will put link to the other related posts in case you miss some or want to go back and look at others :-)

Focus on Thanksgiving:

The Mantle

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - The Mantle

As I mentioned in our weekly review, we are hosting Thanksgiving at our house this year (SO VERY EXCITED!) and I am wanting to get the whole house "dolled up" for the occasion!  Not to mention the fact that I think it is good to focus on Thanksgiving more.  I don't want to be like the stores who are going straight from Halloween to Christmas.  I want there to be a focus on Thanksgiving!

The kids are going to help me with a lot of the decorations!  Today I got our mantle done!  Here are the pictures!

 The view of the entire mantle

 I found this picture on Pinterest - loved it so much that I printed it and framed it :-)

 The simple garland I made - cut brown cardstock with scalloped scissors.  Used my leaf punch and punched each corner.  Attached glitter foams stickers and laced cards through pretty ribbon.  

My FAVORITE pumpkin glass bowl and lid.  Didn't get a good picture but those are acorn beads in it and a votive in the center!  I love this thing!  To the right you can see one of the pumpkins we made last year from yarn.

When I was putting up the garland Seth asked what it said and I said "Give Thanks".  He said "we should put one below it that says Love God."  LOVE that kid!!!  He melts my heart at times!

There may be a couple more things that will be added to it that I want the kids to make!  :-)  I will post pictures of those as we get them made.

Oh - and I found this picture today and loved it and thought I would share :-)

Until next time,
Kellie