Projects and Papers

Last week was a pretty busy but productive week.  The kids completed some projects they were working on, wrote a paper and completed a Standardized Test.  Christopher has really done very well this year.  Things seem to be much more enjoyable and easier for him.  He wrote a paper for one of his IEW assignments that I thought was such a huge improvement for him.  The assignment was to rewrite an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland but in his own words.  Here is what he wrote:

Once upon a time there lived a girl named Alice, she lived in small town named Harriesville. And in Alice’s family she had three sisters Heather, Jennifer and Anastasia. All three were getting dressed because the whole family was about to travel to their Aunt Megan’s farm in Topeka. When they got to the farm they played lots of games like tag and hide n go seek. But one day Alice was sitting by the orange tree reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea when she saw a small white rabbit with a waist coat pocket and stopwatch. Bewildered Alice got up and chased after the rabbit who dashed around the corner and dove threw a rabbit hole. Alice scarcely knew what was going on so she peeked down the rabbit hole but she lost her balance and fell down the hole. As she was falling she cried for help but no one heard her. When she hit the bottom everything went black and Alice was gone. 

Emily completed her solar system and hung it over her bed:

They also made wreaths like the Romans used to wear during their history lesson.  Christopher made his to look like what the emperor would wear by spray painting his gold:

Spray painting looked like so much fun Emily decided to paint some other things gold as well:

                                      

Homeschool Park Day

The homeschool park day is one of the few ways that I can get my girls to spend a couple hours outside (besides swimming) so we took a break from school work for a couple of hours to go and play.  Here is a sampling of the fun they had:

This is one of the many bugs we have discovered while at the park.

And of course Christopher got in a baseball game with some of the other boys

Amber's Self Portrait/Emily's Solar System Project

Who would have known today was Monday.  Everyone was so relaxed and happy.  I was more organized for once which was probably the biggest reason for such a nice, care free day.  

Amber was able to make her first portrait of herself.  I think she did an incredible job especially the pink hair which is hard to see in this picture.  Her toe nails are also pink of course.

Emily began her project of making her very own solar system.  She has to paint each planet and try to match the actual colors of each planet.

This is her Jupiter planet before we added the rings which there are two but they are much lighter and harder to see than Saturns.

Here is Jupiter with the rings attached.

Disorganized But Not So Messy

After a weekend of hard work by myself, Christopher and Emily we finally managed to clean up the Black Hole, aka the basement.  The kids complained the whole time but I was able to keep them focused on the task and am very pleased at the results.  

It still needs a lot of organizing but at least everything is off the floor.  I went through a lot of the books and filled up 6 boxes with books that we will not need for at least a year.  Once I get more boxes I should be able to pack up some more so that I can really organize everything to make it more accessible to the kids.  And hopefully I will here "I can't find it" a little less often.  

Now the desk still needs a lot of work but it is so much better.  Usually there is piles of books and papers all over.  It literally drives me crazy!  So I have managed to put away all the books that were on the desk at least.  Its a work in progress.  

Pool Noodle Rosary

Our latest project was to make a rosary out of pool noodles!  I discovered this idea from a blog that I just love.  It is called Catholic Icing and she has wonderful ideas: http://catholicicing.blogspot.com/.  So here is some pictures of the kids making their own version of a rosary out of pool noodles.

First we cut up a green flower shaped pool noodle into 53 pieces using a bread knife for the Hail Mary beads.  Than we cut up a red round shaped pool noodler into 6 thicker pieces for the Our Father beads.
Next, we strung the Hail Mary beads and the Our Father beads on a thick rope.

Once we strung the 50 Hail Mary's and 4 Our Father's we took a different color flower shaped noodle for the center piece and continued with one more Our Father, 3 Hail Mary's and one more Our Father.  Next was the cross which we used a blue pool noodle for.

Power Point Online Class

I have always wondered if the kids would enjoy taking an online class.  Well, today we found out.  They watched an online class to learn how to use Power Point.  The kids loved it!  Today they just learned the basics of what all the different buttons are for which are located on the ribbon.  Even I learned something new.  She demonstrated how to use some of the cool tools to add pictures, graphs, etc.  So of course after watching the class they had to try it out for themselves.  I let them play around with it for a few minutes until we had to get back to the regularly scheduled school work. But it was well worth the $20 dollars it cost to register.  Plus they have three more classes and a lot more to learn.

Disorganized and Messy

My house is a mess, I am 6 months pregnant, we have started school early this year and I am trying to declutter and reorganize to get ready to sell our house!  This definitely is not how I normally like to start out a new school year. We are disorganized, unprepared and books are EVERYWHERE!

Since we have way too many books, I have to take everything off the book shelf that we are not currently using and put them in boxes.  So hopefully I can get this cleaned up quickly.  One thing I did do was make new cubicles for the kids and myself.  So even though it looks like a huge mess there is some organization going on.

These are some of Christopher's new books that we are using.  The General Science book from Apologia so far he loves.  I have really liked the Apologia science books but in this one I came upon some anti-catholic information that I was not to happy about.  Here is a small quote from the book:

"Sadly, some of the most ardent support for the geocentric system came from the Roman Catholic Church.  As more and more scientific evidence came pouring in indicating severe flaws in the geocentric system, the church tried to resist any movement away from it .....  In the end, it took hundreds of years of scientific data (and a few people being thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church) before the church was convinced to give up on the geocentric system.  Unfortunately, by that time, the damage had been done."

Here are a few of Emily's books.  She is doing Saxon for the first time and it is going well.  Christopher and Emily are both doing the Student Writing Intensive with Andrew Pudewa.  They are enjoying the lessons he gives on DVD.  One less thing I have to teach, yeah!!!

I also have some fun activities for Amber to do this year.  She loves having her own school work to do.  I also purchased the Little Saints Preschool Program which I plan to start next week. As long as I can pull everything together and get a little more organized.