Weekly Review 11/30-12/4

I didn't get a whole week of pics this time like I wanted to (especially of Big A's school), but I did get a few of the little ones preschool. We went through Unit 3 of Little Hands to Heaven and learned all about Abraham. I am amazed at the retention that Middle A is starting to have with these Bible stories and is really enjoying them! We are still doing all the letter activities as LHTH calls for since Little A is enjoying them and recognizing and retaining what he is learning. Starting in March, when Middle A turns 5, we will start adding in some more difficult things, but this really gives her a good review and mama some time to get her attention span a little more work ;)

Here are some pics of the preschoolers and some of what they did this week:


Here they are dancing to their Bible Song this week "God began a Nation"....I try to break up what they are doing, story time, music, another read aloud, activity, then art etc. It seems to work this way for us and they are able to sit and listen to what they are being read since they know they will be getting up to move and shake soon ;)


Here they are working diligently on their letter "C" by filling them in with beans. I am amazed that they both wanted to actually stay in the lines! LOL


Here are their tents that they made that symbolized the promise that God made to Abraham that he would have a son and more children than stars in the sky:


And here they are playing with their cars on the letter C....


Big A finished Unit 13 this week and will keep plugging along into Unit 14 next week if I don't go into labor ;) We will stop there and pick up Unit 15 after our Christmas/Baby break. He is really enjoying this year and its going to be hard to take a long break, but I am definitely going to need it! Here he is doing his Math.....He is still loving Teaching Textbooks and is halfway through his lessons.....I think he'll be finishing this up early this year:

He really does love his math despite the look on his face! LOL

And one more pic I did get of his clay countries...not sure why he chose to keep them all separate..maybe trying to make a global statement ;p

I am now 39 weeks preg and every day is a guessing game as to what comes next....that is NOT what I am used to and its really a matter of just trusting my day to the Lord and praying it is a fruitful one!
I promise you we'll review whatever it is that we do! School? New Baby? The suspense is killing me! LOL

Weekly Review -

Week has been busy again...but not so much that I didnt take any pics ;) I'm just going to sort of break it down day by day...and then you'll see what I mean ;)


Monday: Who ever remembers Mondays? LOL. I know we started Unit 9 of our CTC and I needed to clean from a very laid back weekend, but the rest is a blur. LOL

Tuesday: my little one turned 2!! We did school and then headed outside to play for most of the day..it was cool and windy..perfect for playing outside (Well besides the wind..)

Isn't he getting so big!

Whoa..watch out Jr.

I knew you'd be trying to read what that sticker says on the side of my minivan in that pic so I took one up close for ya (car is DIRTY, hence all the dirt we live in ;) )

And of course, more playing in the dirt. We take a lot of baths around here ;p

Wednesday: This was our last day for homeschool PE Class and can I say that I am happy about that? Normally I am happy about getting out of the house to play at the park and let my children run...but at this particular PE day, a dog chased down my little girl and jumped her causing her to fall to the ground..let's just say you've never seen an 8 month pregnant women run so fast to get to her child as I did or hear the words for the lady who NEVER wants to leash her DOG! Had contractions for the rest of the day because of it..sigh. No pics of THAT though! LOL Anyways, that's all I will say about THAT and move onto our next day...lol.

Thursday: We went to our homeschool group's parkday and that was a much better experience than the previous day at the park. LOL. I really enjoyed the fellowship and speaking to other moms that are like-minded......and of course, the kids played in THE DIRT again..Hellooooo children, there IS a playground....LOL!


Friday: We had a SMALL party for Little A's second birthday...unfortunately there are so many sick people right now and I didn't want them all to come and share their germs...lol....so we just had grandparents over for dinner and cake. It was actually really nice and stress free :)

Mmmmmmmm cake!

You don't want to know about the battle of the Magna Doodle that was happening daily here. So they each have their own now..think that will solve anything? Probably not lol ;p But he did get some other things to keep his attention like a wooden"Choo Choo" :)

OH and Big A memorized his first poem that I wanted to share! Here he is reciting Robert Frost's Fireflies in the Garden....(my first you tube video...next time I will make sure to turn OFF the tv!)



Will post more of a "schoolish" review next week....lol.....just had too much fun taking pics of other things!

Weekly Review Oct 8th

We had a pretty busy week..whew! My brother was down from RI and we got together with him a couple of days on top of our weekly PE class and other things that needed to be done. We still managed to get through Unit 7 of Creation To Christ and it was a lot of fun. I'm gonna give you a quick run down of a few "highlights"this week and get back to making my list for tomorrow's bulk cooking session! I'll post more about that in the morning and I am also adding my list of things to cook/bake on my sidebar for those who would like to track my insanity progress until baby is born or before.
CTC : Big A's week....

History Notebooking page...just realized that this pic is awful...but you get the idea.


Homemade air dry clay "gems" that have NOT been painted yet...will be done soon though ;)


His painting for poetry...starting to get used to using a brush and water colors :)




Funny Science Experiment where Big A had to pick up chocolate chips with JUST his tongue! It was hilarious to watch. He also had to time himself and see how many times he could stick out his tongue in a minute...equally as funny!


And here he had to use yarn dipped in honey to resemble an Anteaters tongue (which is over 2ft long btw!) to pick up the chocolate chips (not much success here..think I needed some thicker yarn?)

He is plugging along in all his other subjects and we are still enjoying our school year. I will be grateful when we drop our PE class next month though..we are taking a 2-3 month break from it which means our "regular" day 5 will be on Thurs.

Here are a couple of pics of the littler ones this week....As you can see from little A's expression..he was NOT going to cooperate this week..lol. We decided to just drop anything formal and do some phonics (with Middle A) and fun stuff :)


Apparently diaper wipes containers make nice hats.


And this is after a long day of fighting over who's Elmo is whos and who had the Magna Doodle first! So sweet aren't they ;) I think I may need to keep preschool with Middle A just with Middle A...we'll see how next week goes first ;)



Will see you all tomorrow during my first bulk cooking session for my after-the-baby freezer stash!! I am 31 weeks pregnant today and plan on having a session a week for the next 5-6 weeks to fill my freezer with meals for that time after the baby when I will need to just sleep! LOL

Weekly Review

This week hasnt been as busy as other weeks as far as spending time out of the house, but I still managed to forget to take pictures of what has been going on in our homeschool. I plan on keeping my camera out and ready next week though so I can catch more things. Its hard when you are actually in the middle of a finger play or acting something out to capture things! My littler ones tend to stop and pose when they see the camera...lol...so I try to sneak some in like the one above.

My preschoolers did a lot of playing with legos, painting with watercolors (like big brother) and preschool activity bags this week. We finished Unit 2 of Little Hands to Heaven and Middle A has started with phonics which is so exciting!! I'll share more of what we are using in next weeks review but we are just starting with it but so far is really is a lot of fun and very easy to implement!

Onto Big A's Creation to Christ program. We are finished with Unit 6 and moving onto Unit 7 next week! We have FINALLY found a good balance with school and outside commitments and have a good working schedule in place now. Things are going so smoothly now and neither of us could be happier with this curriculum and the others that I chose for this year.

In Bible Big A is reading in the book of Exodus and memorizing Philippians 2:6. He has always enjoy reading the Old Testament and has an even better understanding of it now with it being broken down into bite sized chunks everyday. He came up to me the other day and said that he just wants to go out and preach the gospel..wow....I could stop here with the review and say that our week was a success with just that one statement!

Math is still going great and he has asked if he can start doing two lessons a day....nuff said.

Grammar/writing/dictation has been going well. This is one subject I feel I need to reign in a little bit and make less independent. I am very happy with Growing with Grammar but the jury is still out on Writing Strands. Dictation is also slow going and I think I need to up my expectations a bit. He's also started reading one of the books for DITHOR but we are skipping the lessons for the first genre and will add them in next time. He is currently reading "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He has seen the movie but never read the book and loves it so far!

For History he made a column like the Temple of Karnak. This project was honestly not something he enjoyed at all. LOL He is like me, wants to just get it done (when it comes to anything artistic) and just flew through it without much attention to detail ;P


These are his notebooking pages for this week:

In Science Primates were the focus and he did an experiment on depth perception between them and us humans to end the unit.

Poetry was Robert Frost's Poem "Fireflies in the Garden" and this was his painting for the week....he wasnt too thrilled with the way this one came out and thought he was getting out of taking a picture since I haven't done a weekly review for a while. Surprise son! LOL


Big A also started football this week with his Homeschool PE class and really enjoying it so far! We'll be taking off the months of Nov and Dec but still has this whole month to go and looks forward to going every week.

I'm sure I am missing some other major details of our week but wanted to make sure I got this up this time!! Next week I plan on having Big A narrate our Weekly Review according to how it went so that should be fun :D

Weekly Review

This was Big A's first week of school and it was a blast! We had some pretty busy days, but were able to fit in 3 full days of unit 1. We'll finish the rest next week :)

Here are a couple of pics of what he did for history and science:

I really love having his notebook pages all ready to go and boxes for him to just fill in. Neither of us are that creative, so just having a pre-made layout has worked out really great! I especially loved the generations flap book that was scheduled :)


Poetry is also included in his HOD curriculum and this week he was to paint a yellow background with watercolors and a tree with branches. Lets just say that the painting was FUN but he has to get used to using a paintbrush instead of markers. LOL. He was happy with it and so I am as well.


In Science he read about the Creation of the Earth and did some Animal Classification. Another excellent part of the HOD curriculum and was really well planned out for us parents.




One of the best choices I made was his math. He actually did 5 lessons in those 3 days. He said it was the best math ever and well, I agreed to just let him go with it. We are using Teaching Textbooks Math 5 and have a feeling he'll be in level 6 before the year is out, although its not something I am expecting :)

Last year, my main focus was getting Big A to love reading because I knew he would have his fair share of it using this curriculum, and thankfully that was successful. He is reading far more than I thought and I am having trouble keeping enough books around the house for him. Weekly library trips were mandatory during the summer! He takes a book to read in the car, while waiting at the dr's office...wherever. With that said, this year we are going to focus on his penmanship. He is a reluctant left handed writer. He doesn't enjoy it AT ALL. I am hoping that the notebooking we are doing is going to encourage him to do his best. He also is still practicing cursive but is not confident enough to write it. I am going to start working with him diligently on this because I do want it to be smaller, neater, and more carefully done. I hope to share a picture, side by side, with the notebooking one above at the end of the year to see our progress :)



My Preschoolers absolutely LOVED the first unit of Little Hands to Heaven so we extended it another week. Even my 22 month old is memorizing the fingerplay and bible songs. He is BEGGING to do school every morning and loves our circle time board! We are focusing on the habit of attention and so far so good. I am able to get them to sit through our bible story just fine now and that was really tough a couple of weeks ago!

Have a GREAT week!