Thanksgiving Our Way

Just about every time we make it up to my parents house, holiday or not, this is what the guys all go out and do.
The woman stay home and watch the kids and make the dinner and the men go out and play.

Grandpa seems to be well stocked with some of the classic models.
We start them young too. Here is my 11 year old nephew taking his turn. Ian has gone before but he didn't this time. He was having too much fun playing with his cousins.

When we did pull the men away from the club they did join us for some Thanksgiving dinner.
A little silliness.
And they helped eat some left overs the next day as well.
The kids mostly did this. It is a good thing grandma has two computers. And many of the families also brought laptops. Hurray for the Airport!
It was an enjoyable holiday. A lot of work and a lot of noise but it certainly was fun to see all my siblings and their families.

Prayer of Thanks

While our kids are little and learning to pray we, my husband and I, take turns "helping" them say prayers. We will whisper phrases in their ear and then they will say it out loud. Ian is almost 5 years old and still requests "help" with his prayers. I am really trying to encourage him to think of his own things to say in a prayer. He has shed a few tears because he just doesn't want to say the prayer. Mostly he just doesn't know what to say. Over the last week or two when it is his time to voice the prayer, we have started taking a moment beforehand to think together of things we want to thank Heavenly Father for and a few things we would like him to bless us with so that Ian has these things in his head when he says the prayer.

Ian often lists things like soccer, the park, his knights and pirates as well as food. But he also almost always says he is thankful for "Henry who plays with me". Henry usually throws in spiderman and his football. Sophie is a little more thoughtful and adds in family, friends, and activities. Sophie often will ask for Heavenly Father to help Ian with his reading and Henry with his potty training. I love to hear them pray for and about each other.

Each time Ian is asked to pray he is getting closer and closer to "doing it on his own". He is a very sweet little guy and has always taken his time doing and learning most things. He didn't walk until he was 15 months old and didn't talk until he was over 3 years old. When he started walking, he was quickly off running. And complete sentences came out of his mouth when he finally started expressing himself with words. He just always waits to do things until he can do it well. But this experience, with him learning to pray, has been good for us as a family, especially at this time of year. It has helped us focus more on what we are grateful for and who gave us all these good things.

We do live a very blessed life. We are truly grateful for it.



For more Wordfull Wednesday posts visit Chocolate on my Cranium.

Brrrrrr...... it's cold

With temperatures rather cold this week (I know in California we don't really know cold) it has been fun to start our study of our next biome, The Arctic Tundra. The kids got all excited when I pulled out the books about polar bears and and I am sure we will have to read some of our many whale books before this unit is over.

On Monday I brought our globe down from the high shelf and we all enjoyed finding the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic circles. We discussed why it stays so cold in these regions and that sometimes it says dark for days during the winter and light for days in the summer. We have only started reading our huge pile of books.
I can't believe how many books there are about this subject. We of course found a Jeff Corwin video where he goes to Alaska. We haven't watched it yet but will shortly I am sure. My kids have been really excited about a DVD I found at the library called Growing up Arctic. It has a number of episodes of an Animal Planet show called Growing up. Each episode shows how some baby arctic animal is rescued and either sent back out to the wild or finds a new home in a zoo. We all enjoyed watching the baby polar bear and the baby seal. We still have the Walrus and Penguin to watch.
I still need to figure out some sort of fun project to go along with this science unit. I know when we did our FIAR unit on the book "The very Last First Time" we made sugar cube igloos and they kids loved that. We may try that again.


On a side note... I went to look for this book at the library to read again for this unit and the library doesn't have it anymore. If I remember right, our library system had only one copy of the book. Now it is gone. They get rid of books that nobody checks out. It is always so sad when good books get taken off the library shelves.

Castles, Sand and Stories - Weekly Report

This week has gone very well. Most everything I had planned to do was done. There is still more we could be doing but at this point I feel good about what we have accomplished.

Ian is starting to read! We checked out Jen the Hen and the others in the series from the library this week. We gave them a try and Ian actually did really well sounding out the words. I remember looking at Bob books with Sophie a long time ago but she was already reading beyond that level so she wasn't that interested. Maybe they would be good for Ian.

Ian did two letters this week in his Get Set for the Codebook. And he is almost done with his Early Bird 1B math book. I think I need to purchase the next two math books. Sophie also mentioned that she want to do Explode the Code too. So maybe i will see what level she would be on and see if that would be helpful for her.

Sophie has been doing well with her math. We went back to adding and subtracting and she just gets herself flustered and just starts to loose her cool while trying to finish her math. But she does do it eventually and she does it well. She just really doesn't enjoy doing problem after problem. Maybe I need to change things up a bit. She loves the feeling of accomplishment she gets when she finishes an exercise and especially when she finishes each book. So far so good, but I don't want her to start hating it just because it feels like busy work.

History has been great this week. We have read a whole slew of Castle and Knight books. We didn't do the next chapter of SOTW. I thought we would just finish reading all the different books we have gotten from the library recently and it has been lovely. We all pile into the reading chair and go through 3-4 picture books each day. Still no projects however, much to Sophie's shagrin. Sophie has been wanting to build a paper castle but I just can't bring myself to do a major project like that right now. Maybe next time we do the middle ages and I don't have 2 small boys to help along the way or keep out of trouble. We will just have to settle for playing with our play mobil knights and castle. They are always doing battle at our house. Usually with pirates.

Science has still been all about deserts. We watched another video about deserts and yet again they talked about the same cacti and animals found in the desert. I am glad we are moving on to another biome next week. We did do an art project this week somewhat related to deserts. We made pictures with colored sand. A few weeks ago we made these sand filled bottles.
We didn't use all the colored sand so I saved it for this project.
The kids enjoyed squirting on the glue and spreading it around with a paintbrush.
Dumping on the sand was fun but not as fun as shaking off the excess sand and seeing the image left behind on the paper.

I didn't tell them to, but they all decided to make a desert scene with a cactus. Ian and Henry got creative with the sky, while Sophie made sure her cactus had pink flowers on it.



Sophie is getting more cooperative with dictation. I try to do dictation on Monday and then use words from that for "spelling words" for the week. We don't have a test or anything. Sophie just uses those words in a story she writes. This week she only misspelled two words in dictation so she only had two words that she had to put into sentences of a story, Cloud and Float. She wrote and illustrated a story about a bouy floating in the sea getting rained on by a big cloud. It was very cute. The next day our Language lesson was a picture study. We looked closely at a picture and answered in complete sentences some questions listed in the book. After doing the assignment she requested to write another story. Since the picture was of some kittens in a basket she wrote a story about those kittens. She really enjoys writing stories and then does countless illustrations to go along with it. We are also making our way through the McGuffey Reader. Sophie usually reads the passage and then tells me about it, informal narration. These little stories are so good and they teach good principles. I have the primer as well. Maybe I should be using it with Ian?

We are making our way through the New Testament. The boys usually look at the reader which has the pictures and Sophie and I take turns reading the passage each day. We are moving very slowly but are enjoying it.

They boys can almost recite the pledge of allegiance. They never let me forget to start our day by standing at attention with our hands over our hearts looking at our tiny little Stars and Stripes.

What a fun way to spend our days. We learn a bit too.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies

Last week at the library I picked up Good Masters! Sweet Ladies for our medieval studies. I was really lucky to also pick up the audio CD of this book which was on the Library shelves. It must be brand new, just released, because Amazon doesn't even have the audio book listed. Or at least I couldn't find it. They do have an audio download. But getting the CD was so perfect. We had attempted to sit down and read these short little monologs a few weeks ago and didn't really get anywhere. I returned the book eventually and thought I would get it again later.

Listening to the different actors read the parts was wonderful. When the author says they are plays she means it and plays are meant to be performed. My kids loved them. Sophie sat with the book in front of her and listened while she followed along and looked at the illustrations. Ian requested to listen to it again and then also wanted us to take it out to the car so we could listen to it as we drive around. So if you can find the Audio CD of this book it is well worth it. Great little stories that really bring to life the different people in a medieval village.

Memory Lane

Liz at My Ice Cream Diary posted a few of her Senior pictures today and dared others to post theirs. Since I dug out my box the other week I knew where to find mine. I thought I would take a look at them again and see how embarrassing they would be. Would I be willing to share them? They actually aren't too bad. These are the pictures that made my husband tell me I needed to grow my hair out again. He loves seeing pictures of me in high school because I had long hair through most of it. I chopped it about chin length a month after these pictures were taken. When they were finally printed and ready to hand out everyone commented on how different I looked. I don't know why a few inches made that big a difference.

So without further ado here is my 17 year old self, big grin and all.

My mom made this great suit for me. It is blue with green stripped plaid skirt and jacket and it went so well with my blue felt hat that I just loved. I don't know what ever happened to that hat. Did I take to college? I can't remember. I don't remember wearing again after high school.

Here is my thoughtful, studious pose.
I must really have liked plaid. Here I am wearing another wool plaid skirt. I know I took some pictures in jeans and more casual dress but I didn't pick them. I remember changing my clothes a number of times and taking tons and tons of pictures. I was so tired of smiling and posing. My eyes even started twitching.

This is the picture that hung in my parents house for years next to all my siblings senior pictures.

I actually don't mind this one except for my hands. Something has always bothered me about my hands in this picture.

Just to complete the Senior picture show. Here I am on Graduation day.


Yeah the pictures are dated. But they actually aren't too bad. I was never too extreme in my styles and the photographer was good about doing pretty classic poses. Can you guess what year this was?

Liz, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Books, Books and More Books - Weekly Report

This week started off slow. Sophie was still not totally herself on Monday but I went ahead and did our normal Daily work. I had a little more resistance than normal but we made it through. There was some crying because for some reason Sophie couldn't remember how to add and subtract. We have been doing multiplication and division for a few weeks and then we hit the end of book review and she had completely forgotten how to add multiple numbers together or how to borrow in order to subtract. I think she was just tired or not quite well because she did the work just fine she just complained a lot. But we did finish her Singapore Math 2A book and will be moving on to the 2B book. We are chugging away at math well.... most of the time.

History is always a favorite subject. We have been reading Castle Diary all week and have almost finished it. We also really loved Aliki's Medieval feast. The kids were fascinated by the different dished that they made. Sophie has been drawing pictures of the long tables covered in the fancy dishes.

We are really enjoying this part of our history studies. I don't want to rush through it so we may not move on to the next chapters of SOTW yet. We have a whole bunch of books about castles and this time period. I can't say we have done any real projects related to our castle study but the kids don't seem to mind. Reading books is fine by them.

We haven't read through all of these yet and I actually took this picture before we went to the Library on Thursday. I returned the ones we had already read and got a handful more so they aren't all pictured here. My kids of course love the Ms. Frizzle's adventures, Medieval Castle. Each of the kids has poured over this book.

Along with Castle books we have also been reading a bunch of books about Deserts. We have found that most of these books seem to talk about the same animals and plants.
We have really enjoyed some of the videos on Deserts that I found at the library. Jeff Corwin videos are their new favorites. But they also really enjoyed the Reading Rainbow episode I found Alejandro's Gift.

We have been reading a few books about photography as well.
Again, we haven't read all of these yet but plan to before the end of the month.

Ian is doing great with Explode the Code. He finished the Get Ready for the Code primer this week and is excited to start the next one. He is also happily doing a bit of math each day and is working through his Earlybird math book each day.

Sophie's language lessons this week went pretty well. On monday we did a bit of dictation and she fought it but did it alright. The words that she didn't spell correctly I wrote down. At her next language lesson she was to write a sentence using those words. She asked to do this since she didn't like me telling her what to write. She wrote the sentences without a fight. We may try this again.

Along with our school work we also had a lot of play time. The kids have had the Knex out everyday. They are getting very creative with them.


There was also a bit of outside time each day.

So life here isn't all books but they certainly play a prominent role!