Homeschool Wrap Up Week 14

Week 14 in our Homeschool

P.E.: We did 4 days of Family Time Fitness.

Lily and Christian were having a challenge to see who could hold a plank the longest.  The boys underestimate Lily's arm strength.  She won by a lot!

Bible: Our memory verse this week is Matthew 9:37b-38.  We read Matthew 9:18-10:20.  We also read about Menno Simons in Hero Tales.

Read Aloud: Two days this week we read stories out of Kingdom Tales.  The scheduled read aloud for the next several weeks was George Mueller, but we read that last year.  So instead we are reading William Booth: Soup, Soap, and Salvation.  We finished 3 chapters this week. We finished our book club book, Mice of the Herring Bone.  We also read 8 chapters (they are short) in Snow Treasure.  For our evening read aloud, we finished The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson.  If you have never read it, you should.  It is a wonderful, funny story but also has a great message.  This is the third time we have read it and I cry every time!

Poetry: We started memorizing the poem Persevere (author unknown.)

E.C.C:  This week we started learning about France.  We read some pages about France in Children's Atlas of God's World and some facts about France in Another Trip Around the World.  We colored the Jon 3:16 page and a flag page and wrote some facts about the French flag.  I read Madeline's Christmas to the girls. For the science portion we read about animal defenses, adaptation, and caves.  We also did a worksheet on animal adaptation.  I had several moments this week where I considered not continuing with this curriculum.  We are going to finish up France next week and I will think it over during Christmas break.

Art: Art this week was on Impressionism.  I dug out some art books and looked at some examples of Impressionist paintings and then the children did their own painting.  The other art activity was making homemade soap.  We skipped that one.

Apologia Science: We finished the chapter on Space Rocks.

Language Arts:  Lily's lesson was on alphabetizing and using a dictionary.  In Fix It! Level 2 we finished lesson 10.  In Language Lessons for Today we did an oral composition on spiders and insects, a picture study on a painting by Vincent van Gogh, and a lesson on synonyms.  I asked the children if they knew what a synonym was and one of them replies, "Something you put on toast."  Nick is working on diagramming sentences with predicate adjectives.  Alex has not done much grammar since he started learning German using Middlebury Interactive Languages.

Spelling/Reading: In AAS Level 3 the boys finished step 15.  In AAR Level 4 they finished lesson 37.  In AAR Level 3 Lily finished lesson 5.

Math:  Nick completed lesson 13 in MUS Geometry.  Alex completed 4 lessons in Teaching Textbooks and Lily, Christian, and Anthony completed 4 lessons in Math Lessons for a Living Education. 

MFW Creation from A to Z:  Emmie started the unit on "I" for insect.  She completed her picture card page, sound identification page, and math page.  The cut and paste page she completed but instead of cutting and pasting the words, she is writing the word on the line.  I had a DVD called The Fascinating World of Insects from Brain Food Learning. that all of the children decided to watch with her.  I decided not to do an ant farm (suggested activity.)  We have had an ant farm three times already.  Last time we had one it got knocked over and I had to quickly vacuum them all up! 

All American History and God's Design in Nature: AAH is on hold until after the holidays when Nick will begin Vol II.  In God's Design in Nature he has completed through day 67.

Other Activities this Week:

Tuesday the girls had gymnastics.

After they were finished we headed down to Main Street to watch the annual Christmas Parade.

Wednesday and Thursday the girls helped me make some candy and some sugar cookies.

Friday was our monthly Book Club meeting.  We also decided to do some other activities and have a finger food potluck for Christmas.  We made Christmas cards and decorated sugar and gingerbread cookies.

After that we headed home for a few hours.

Then headed back out for our December Nature Seekers 4 H meeting.  We made 3 crafts and had a cookout.

 I hope you had a great week!

Happy Homeschooling!

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December Nature Seekers 4 H Meeting

Every year in December our 4 H club has a Christmas party.  For several years we did a pizza party, and the children of course loved that.  We also made several different types of crafts. But last year a cookout was suggested so we cooked hot dogs and had people bring cookies and things to go with with it, and we made Nature Crafts at Grandview.  This year when I asked the children what they wanted to do they voted for another cookout.  One of the moms said that she would love to have it at her house and would provide the hot dogs, toppings, and buns.  The children wanted to make Smores too so I volunteered to bring the items for that, drinks, plates, and chips and asked any others that were coming just to bring something to go along with hot dogs.

It has been COLD here in Arkansas.  We  have been dropping down into the 20's at night and barely hitting 40 during the days the last several days.  It would figure that our cookout fell on the coldest day we've had!  We did not have good attendance, only 7 children (and 6 were mine!)  But the children had fun!

We made a penguin craft to take to the nursing home.

And a sleigh out of Hershey bars and candy canes to take home.

We also made pine cone bird feeders.  This was the coldest activity!  We were outside and away from the fire!

They cooked their hot dogs and most of us ate inside.

Then we went back out and made Smores.

The house we went to had goats, donkeys. horses, cattle, chickens, and a rabbit, plus dogs, cats, a rat, and lizards.  The children enjoyed visiting the goats and the donkey.

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Homeschool Wrap Up Week 13

After a week off last week for Thanksgiving it was hard to get back into a routine this week.  We dove back in though and got quite a bit accomplished.  I have been asked what my typical day is like and I will be trying to get a post up about that this week.

Week 13 in our Homeschool

P.E.: We did 3 days of Family Time Fitness and one day of yoga.

Anna joined us for yoga

Bible: We read about Bulgaria in Windows on the World and read Matthew 8:28-9:17.  Our memory verse was Matthew 5:44-45.

Read Aloud: For our morning read aloud we read 5 stories out of Kingdom Tales.  We have been reading two books in the afternoon this week: Mice of the Herring Bone by Tim Davis (our book club book), and Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigen.  Snow Treasure takes place in Norway (the country we have been studying) and is based on a true story that took place during WWII.  It has been a great read aloud so far!  For our evening read aloud we finished up The Borrowers Afield.  There are 2 more books in this series but I do not have these and will have to check the library.  We started reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson (one of our favorite Christmas stories.)

Sally comes to story every night.

Poetry: We continued working on memorizing The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson.  Reciting the poems every day has been the 4 youngest children's favorite part of the school day.

E.C.C: This week we continued to learn about Norway.  I found a book at the library about Europe and read this to the children.  It is a newer reference book and I noticed that when talking about time it does not use B.C. and A.D., but instead BCE and CE.  We read some facts about Norway and completed the flag worksheet.  I also added some pages from Notebookpages.com on money and famous people from Norway.  We have been working on identifying all of the countries in Europe.  It was raining one day this week so we watched Frozen during lunch and recess.  I counted that as school :)

For the science portion we read about seasonal changes and seasonal behaviors.  One of the things they discussed was migration so we watched a Magic School Bus episode on salmon migration.

Art: The art project this week was to make Lapland Felt Squares.

Science: In Apologia Astronomy we started reading the chapter on Space Rocks.

Language Arts: Lily's lesson was on initial consonant blends.  Anthony and Christian completed 3 lessons in Language lessons for today on an oral composition about directions, dictation on paragraphs about insects, and The Fox and the Grapes.  In Fix it! Level 2 we completed lesson 9.

Spelling/Reading: In AAS Level 3 the boys completed step 14.  IN AAR Level 4 they completed lesson 35.  Lily completed lesson 3 in AAS Level 3.

Math: Nick completed lesson 12 in MUS Geometry.  Alex completed 4 lessons in Teaching Textbooks 7 and Lily, Christian, and Anthony finished 4 lessons in Math Lessons for a Living Education.

MFW Creation from A to Z: Emmie's MFW lesson was on "w" for water.  She completed her drawing page, cut and paste page, blend ladder page, math page, sound discrimination page and made her water badge.  We did a hands on activity turning a liquid to a solid, back to a liquid, and then to a gas.  There was a Magic School Bus episode on the water cycle that we watched.  Emmie has also been doing some coloring pages during our morning school work on colors.

All American History and God's Design in Nature: Nick finished one of his books and is still working on the biography of George Washington.  In science he completed lessons 49-52.

Other Activities this Week:

It was a pleasantly boring week as far as outside activities!

Lily made a pinecone bird feeder one day.

Tuesday the girls had gymnastics.  We had to run a couple of quick errands while we were in town.  When we got a little over halfway there I noticed the van was not driving right.  I texted Art and told him what was going on but that I thought I was fine to drive it home.  He checked it out when he got home and one of the front shocks had almost fallen off (or something like that.)  That left me not able to go anywhere until the parts came in and he could fix it Thursday night.

Lily is learning how to do a back flip with no hands

Friday we did our usual grocery shopping and had pizza and a movie.  I attempted to make some Grinch popcorn from a recipe that I found on Pinterest.  It did NOT turn out the way it was supposed to but it tasted good.

Saturday Lily wanted to make a stuffed bunny so I worked on that with her.  She did a great job!

We also made our yearly gingerbread house.

I hope you had a great week!

Happy Homeschooling!

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The Softest Peanut Butter M & M Cookies Ever!

Peanut Butter and chocolate is my favorite combination.  I love to bake and am always looking for new recipes to try out.  I saw a recipe for these cookies and decided to make them for dessert one night.  They were so good I could've eaten the eaten batch!  These cookies are super soft and chewy and taste yummy!  These would make a great dessert for a Christmas party if you used the red and green M & M's.

Ingredients

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 cup butter softened
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 3/4 cup flour
2 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 bag of M & M's


Cream the sugars, peanut butter, and butter together.  Next add in the eggs, vanilla, and the salt.  Most recipes will tell you to mix the flour, baking soda, and cornstarch in a separate bowl and then add it in to your wet mixture, but honestly I use my Kitchenaid mixer and add the dry ingredients straight into the bowl and mix until combined.  Stir in 1 1/2 cups M & M's gently by hand.

Chill the dough for 1 hour.  Preheat oven to 350. Scoop the dough out and roll it into balls placing them 3 inches apart on your baking sheets.  I use my Pampered Chef stoneware because it gives me the best baking results.  Bake 10-12 minutes until the cookies are light golden brown.  Do not over bake or they will not be soft. Once the cookies are out of the oven you can press a few M & M's into the tops.  Cool and enjoy!

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