Our Christmas Card Photo

Here is our Christmas photo we sent to everyone this year. It was actually taken six months ago in June while we were on vacation. Hard to believe it has been that long ago already and that there was snow icy snow still available on Hurricane Ridge,Wa in late June. I hope to update all of you soon. We are knee deep in holiday preparations around here.

Take care and blessings to all of you...

Thanksiving Photos to share

I know the Christmas decorating is now in full gear but I wanted to share with all of you some Thanksgiving photos. I enjoy the holiday very much and am always a little saddened how it is so lost/hidden between two of the most highly advertized holidays. Enjoy the photos and I hope to post a new post sometime soon on what we are currently learning about....

As you can see I love table decorating and home entertaining. One of these years I need to participate in our local fairs table decorating contest. The fun I have is making the people I host treated as fine guests. If you have china plates why not use them. I enjoy using mine especially since I only get to use them a handful of times throughout the year. This is the kids table centerpiece. I found the idea in a Family Fun magazine issue. Luckily I had the turkey face from a craft that my kids had done at a school event.
There is a fun story that goes along with this table cloth. We added a new table in our holiday event this year and I didn't have a table cloth to fit its size. I didn't have time or money to spend on a new table cloth. I came up with a quick fun alternative. We had an old sheet from our Revolutionary War tents and I set it outside with some paint and the kids had fun painting turkey hands all over it. It was good messy fun. What made it more memorable was that we had to beat the incoming rain that was lingering overhead as well.

I hope you enjoyed a few Thanksgiving pix.

Blessings,

Amy

What board game are you???

What Board Game Are You?

You Are Boggle
You are an incredibly creative and resourceful person. You're able to dig deep and think outside the box to get things done.You are a non linear thinker. You don't like following directionsYou draw your inspiration from the strangest places sometimes. You're constantly inspired.

Blessings,

Amy

Egyptian Pyramids

If you are looking for the Christmas projects, I did post them. Please read below. I needed to post something again to hide the cover post from my little ones.

We are currently learning about Ancient Egypt in our history studies. It is simply amazing to myself and my kids historical and Biblical accounts of Ancient history. We are learning just so much. Today we had fun learning about the pyramids. After the kids read some books about the pyramids we added a write up for our lapbooks. I had them learn and find information about the three different types of pyramid that were built in Ancient Egypt. They are the step, smooth sided and the bent style pyramids. They added pictures of each kind and researched where in Egypt each one is found.

Next the kids got messy with sugar cubes and glue to create a step pyramid. I think they had more fun eating the cubes than building. It was quite tricky for my two younger ones. This is where Math concepts stepped in and Math patterns were formed. I will need to remember to look up some more pyramid Math problems on the internet for my oldest to solve. He enjoyed it immensely. Here are a few photos to share with you in our building process.

Hope you enjoy,

Amy

Christmas project photos to share

Well, I finally got around to taking a few photos of some of my finished Christmas projects that I worked on last weekend. Sorry I can't post all of them. I wouldn't want to spoil the fun for family reading this blog.

The first one I share with you is for Dancer. She loves to cook and the apron that she has now is in sad shape. I also wanted to make a matching one for one of her American Girl dolls. Sadly, I just had enough fabric for two. I have been trying to use up a lot of my fabric I have had stored away for years. Believe me I do have a lot. Four large storage bins filled. The color came out terrible from this angel. It is lavender with a pink rick rac trim. The one apron took me about four solid hours one night. I was up late that night after the kids were in bed sewing on my machine.

The next item I share with you is a real necessity. My oldest son Sport has a large baseball hat collection. I just don't have enough hooks or wall space in the boys room. I found the Simplicity pattern for this on sale for $1.00 over the holiday weekend. I was even blessed to find jean material in the bargain bin to be use for this project.

This next project I share with you is a very easy and quick. I finished this project in about 2 hours. All I used was a red turtleneck purchased from Walmart. I had a few different styles of Christmas fabric for Dancer to choose from. She chose the teddy bear print and I measured the desired length for the dress. I cut enough fabric to go around the whole end of the turtleneck with plenty of extra for gathering. Rule of thumb is to double the measurement of the circumference of the turtleneck. I don't thing I did exactly that but it worked. Cut the material and add a hem with lace or ric rac or another trim if desired. Run a gathering stitch and add to the base of the turtleneck and sew in place.
I even had lace left over to add some at the neck of the turtleneck. It sure is easy and she now wants me to make one for her doll to match. We shall see. I'm not sure I have enough fabric on hand but I may be able to pull something together.

I sure had fun with these projects and now I'm off to create some more.

Blessings and I hope you are inspired to create something homemade this holiday season.

Veteran's Day

Happy Veteran's Day!

We had a long weekend. Over the weekend I was able to get a jump start on my Christmas to do list. I enjoyed sewing most of the weekend working on holiday gifts for the family. I will try to post pictures soon of my different projects. Two of them are so quick, easy and cost effective. I promise to share them soon as well as our Science lapbook we are finishing up this week.

Today the family and I spent most of the day at the Richard Nixon library & museum for the Veteran's Holiday observance. The kids enjoyed putting their election skills information to the test. My oldest was amazed at how votes were tallied in years past elections. Both Dancer and Sport also remarked on how the electoral college state votes have changed since Nixon's era.

I hope you had a great holiday.
How did you spend your Veteran's holiday?
Blessings,
Amy

Easy Fall Craft

Here is an easy fall craft I did last week with the kids. We had gathered some acorns a few weeks ago from a local live oak tree and wanted to use them in a fall craft. I decided to make some fall napkin rings with the kids to decorate our Thanksgiving table.

Here are the supplies listed that we used to make these:

several paper towel tubes or toliet paper tubes

felt in fall colors

hot glue gun

raffia

acorns

First we roughly guessed the desire size for each napkin ring and cut each cardboard tube into sections. We got about 4 rings from each cardboard tube.

Next we measured and cut a piece of felt long enough to stretch across the tube and glued it into place. Lastly, we decorated each napkin ring by adding raffia and acorns.
Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday or Not So Wordless....

Do You Need a Hug this Morning???

Mesopotamian Lapbook

This past week we wrapped up our Mesopotamian Unit we had been working on. I had the kids create another lapbook with their studies. The end result came out great and they shared this this past weekend with grandparents and with Daddy later on Sunday while tast testing some dates. Here are a few photos to share. Most of the print outs found come from a printable book titled History Pockets of Ancient Civilizations from Evan-Moor. Others we such as the Mesopotamian art picture and gods pictured from a site called http://www.karenswhimsy.com/ . The rest of the ideas I put together myself (empire and Science/Technology inventions) with the help of display organizing from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ . We had fun with this unit and look forward to doing the same with our next unit Ancient Egypt.

Having Fun in Science

How many of you enjoyed Science in school. I particularly don't remember Science in elementary school. I had some good teachers in High school but the teacher I had for Chemistry was a teacher that spoke in a thick accent. It was very hard to understand him and he never really taught to the class. He just enjoyed solving equations. So the year I had Chemistry are known as the Mad Scientist years and I always thought Chemistry was just too hard of a subject to understand.

Now that I am teaching the kids elementary Physics this year we are having a little dose of Chemistry in our books this year. I am trying to make it fun and creative for them to understand. Here is a fun activity to share with all of you that we did this week....

The study of an Atom and learning the Elements

Just to add we did these activities on Tuesday afternoon after we had read in our Science books on Monday.

First we talked about the Periodic Table of Elements and reviewed some of the more common ones that they may have heard before such as helium. I had the kids find items in our home or outside that were made up of elements and we located them on the periodic table. Then I had them recreate the element hydrogen by standing in a circle each kid was either a proton, neutron or an electron. Then I had the kids do a matching game that I found. They matched the element name with the abbreviation and matched it where it is found in the environment. For instance, Chlorine CL is found in swimming pools. Here is a picture to share.

Next, I had the kids work together to pick out 8 elements from the chart to find out how many protons, neutron and electrons that each of them had and to record them. After using the internet to find the information we made a sugar cookie of what each of them looks like. The kids had lots of fun with this one.

We used Reeses Pieces. The orange colored ones were the protons, neutrons were yellow and the electrons brown.

I encouraged the kids just to talk in Science terms to help them get acquainted with the new terms that we were learning.

It worked! Aside from the sugar high Science was fun and non intimidating and less boring.

Have some fun and bake up some Atom cookies they are yummy!!!

Girls just love Dolls

American Girl Place October 2008


Hi Everyone!

My daughter and I took our very first trip to the American Girl Place doll shop in Los Angeles this past weekend. My daughter worked so hard to save up for her second American Girl doll. The first one she received as a Christmas present last year and she has been hooked ever since.
She decided to purchase Kit. She fell in love with the books and the recent summer movie. Since this was our first trip there we were simply amazed with everything we saw. If you have never been there and you have a daughter who is American Girl doll lover at heart you are in for a real treat.
I will attempt to give you a quick over view of the store. When you walk in the bottom level features the current popular doll. Clothing and accessories to match for you and your doll. There is also a beauty salon for those dolls with nasty knots to have a new hair style for a fee. The second floor is a museum and store wrapped into one. Each doll have a cove of sorts that displays clothing, accessories, books, games, tapes and other items that feature that doll. Dancer took off for the Kirsten cove because this was her first American Girl doll. I treated her to a new outfit. She was so excited and had a difficult time trying to pick out just one.
After finally making our purchases we headed for the cafe area. We didn't have a reservation but checked to see if there was any cancellations . Luckily there was so we treated ourselves to a scrumptious lunch that was worth the fun and to see the priceless smile on my daughters' excited face. She wasn't expecting this treat at all. After the waitress seated us she handed us two doll highchairs for my daughter American dolls. Our lunch consisted of a first course of sweet and sticky cinnamon rolls. The second course was veggies and dip, tiny cheesy potato skins, and egg salad cherry filled tomatoes. The third course was our main course Dancer chose the Tic Tac Toe pizza (very large portion) and I chose the sun dried tomato quiche ( it came with a small herb salad). Our food was yummy! The grand finally was a small flower pot filled with chocolate moose, a sugar cookie and a small heart shaped butter cream cake. There were a couple of souvenirs to take home hair ties (napkin rings) and the daisy fake flowers that filled our moose flower pots.
My daughter had such a great time that she is already planning on her return visit once she saves enough money again to purchase her own new American doll.

Blessings,
Amy

Things the I have been up to Lately...

As always it has been very busy around here. I don't think there is ever a dull moment. I'm sure I will have plenty of these in my later years of my life but for now I'm enjoying every minute I have with my young kids.

I have been doing some redecorating in my living room. I became very inspired from reading the Nester blog. I went ahead and tried my hand at window mistreatments. They did not come out exactly how she suggested so I did do a little sewing to make them long lasting in the years to come. I also finally dragged out my fall decorations from the garage to get my home in gear for one of my favorite seasons. I just love fall and spring. Both are completely on the opposite spectrum. Here you have spring and new life is being created all around. Easter is a glorious celebration of the new life we receive in Christ once we accept him into our hearts. For fall it is the foliage. It is nature's last hurrah until winter approaches. Here in Southern California I can only dream what fall foliage really looks like as seen in pictures. With the warm temperatures our trees are still changing colors even in the winter. There have been many warm Christmas afternoons around here with highs in the upper 70's and fall leaves piled high.

I have added a few more subjects in our school time this year. Finally, I have been able to add Art appreciation and Music appreciation to the mix. We shall see if they will last after the holidays that is the true test. We are currently learning about Bach and just finished Mary Cassatt. Today I had the kids participate in Home Ec. After morning devotions we worked in the yard for an hour to clear our vegetable garden area in preparation for a winter garden. We just worked for an hour before running inside to escape the soon to be 100 degree temperatures. Later after the rest of our studies I had the kids copy a recipe and bake some yummy lemon bars. Daddy will just love today's Home Ec lesson.

We as a family have also been following the elections and the bail out debates. All of us have our many opinions mine is of prayer. This is a great opportunity to reach out to others to offer prayers and help when needed. Yes, we all depend on money but money can't buy you salvation and you can't take it with you when you die. If we put the Lord first in our lives every thing else falls into place.

I will try to post some pictures soon. My prayers are with all of you who read this blog regularly. May God grant you His everlasting Peace!!

Blessings,
Amy

Some Fun Projects to share with you...

I have two projects to share with all of you that we have been working on in our schooling this year. The first one is an beautiful craft project I found on the the Crayola website. I love snatching quick and easy projects from that site to do with the kids. I'm afraid I don't remember the title of the project.

It was quite simple to make and the result is a beautiful fall craft display for your home. First, take a pice of white contruction paper and have your child fold it into fourths. Basically fold once and then a second time to fold into a square shape and unfold. Next have them choose four colors and have them color very dark with a marker into each box. Once that is done have them collect four leaves around your yard or neighborhood and these will be painted on one side with gold paint and pressed down on to each separate colored square as shown above.

Once it is dried you will carefully slit lines with an exacto knife about a half of an inch apart. Be sure not to slit all the way to the bottom of the sheet. Once that is completed have your child take some bamboo sticks (we pre painted ours gold) and carefully weave the sticks in a basic weave pattern on to the art project. Here is a photo of it.

The other finished project that I can shre with you today is our dinosaur lapbook. Here it is finally. You can find all the links to make one for yourself at http://www.homeschoolshare.com/

Sorry for the long Break....

I apologize for my absence. I have been neglecting my blog lately. Life has been busy around here lately. What have I been up to you ask. Well, aside from schooling the start of every group that our family is involved has now begun. What are they you ask. Soccer for the two boys, ballet for my Dancer, AWANA and Bible study and Homeschool Park Days. We have added a couple of new ones to the mix too this year. Contenders of the Faith for the boys, American Heritage Girls and a twice monthly Friday School. The last two groups luckily only meet twice a month right before our scheduled park days. Otherwise I would not have signed up for either of these.

We also finished our dinosaur lapbooks and will be sharing those very soon. Today we begun our new spine book on Physics. Sport is looking forward to this and I'm hoping to add plenty of lapbooks to help spice things up too.

My hubby and I painted the living room this weekend. It came out very nice. We have had off white walls in our living room for years. We finally made the switch by adding some color and I just love it. It's funny, aside from our hallway being white every room is a shade of color.

Here is a picture to share with you before I leave you all again. It is from the kids first day of Friday School.

Blessings,
Amy

P.S. The cat picture at the top is our cat. Dancer and I have a lot of fun dressing up our cats.

Creation vs. Evolution Lapbook

Here are some pictures to share with all of you of our Creation vs. Evolution lapbook that the kids enjoyed creating this week. Please keep in mind that this was done with a third and fifth grader. At this young school ages my main focus was just on definitions, who Darwin was, to Compare and Contrast (just at surface level) and to give a few reasons why the theory of Evolution is false. Please excuse the spelling errors inside the lapbook that is one of our weak areas that I am addressing this year.
**Please excuse the website link on the lapbook cover. I should have had the kids cut that out before they pasted it. Oh Well.....



This is a photo of the Creation lapbook back cover.

To begin this lapbook I assigned each of my children a side to work on. Since my oldest is in fifth grade I gave him the Evolution side to work on and my third grader was assigned the Creation side.


Oh, I also would like to point out that these lapbooks were glued together as one giant lapbook. I hope that helps.


I had them also learn about the Scientific Method process. Something that was review for them from a couple of years ago. We talked about what are theories and how do they move from a hypothesis to a theory and them become a proven theory and ultimately a fact.

Here is a picture of the left side of the Creation lapbook. Many of the print ables for the Creation pages I got from Lapbook Lessons. This site is fabulous and if you have kids who enjoy lapbooking then this is the site to add to your favorites.

This is the inside center of the Creation Lapbook. The Garden of Eden picture I found just by googling it. My daughter loved it.

Here is the left inside of the Evolution Lapbook. The picture of Darwin was from Google.

This is the center section of the Evolution lapbook. Again the photos used here were found from Google.

This is the right and final section of the Creation vs. Evolution lapbook. The pockets that you see here were found at Homeschool Share website. This website is another one that needs to be added to your favorites list.

My son decided what the pockets were to be and he even wrote some information about each inside the pockets.

I hope you attempt to make a Creation vs. Evolution lapbook of your own with your kids we enjoyed making this one.

Blessings,

Amy

Creation vs. Evolution Our First Unit

Since our oldest Sport is in 5th grade this year I though that this would be the perfect time to cover Creation vs. Evolution and the age old question where is the evidence that the dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible. I not writing this to open up a debate for anyone but to share with other homeschooling parents out there that these are the ideas, text and other resources that have worked with this age range of children.

This is our first year using the Heart of Wisdom teaching approach so please bear with me. I ordered the Creation unit E-book and we have been using this as our spine for teaching. It is very informative and I have breaking it up into bite size chunks for my Dancer third grader to follow along with us as well.

This whole week our main focus was on the Creation story from the Bible itself. Reading from the Bible laying the foundation of the two groups of people who believe in Creation but the two differ in old earth vs. new earth. From the old earth there are three groups within that camp, the Gap theorists who hold the belief that their is a gap in time from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 1:2, the Day Age group that hold the belief that each day of Creation mentioned in the Bible was spread out over millions of years, and finally Theistic Group they hold the belief that God used evolution as a form of controlling the earth.

Now I understand what you are thinking how in the world do you teach that to a fifth grader if you alone don't understand it. Luckily, my Sport loves to read. We have been reading and taking notes. When we are finished I am hoping to have the kids construct a Creation vs. Evolution lapbook.

Another lapbook idea I found for my kids to do was a Creation one in itself. Even Racer made a Creation lapbook of his own. I found the information from Lapbook Lessons. A great site for ideas and templates provided.

I had the older two work on a circle Creation lapbook that I found from a homeschooling blog called Barracudas Lapbook Corner. She even provided a short video how to cut out and fold the circles to make the book. My hat goes off to her.

I hope these ideas will be of some help to those of you who decide to a Creation vs. Evolution unit with your children. Please remember this is an important topic to not only discuss with your children but to press God's truths on their hearts. To teach both sides to them so when the opposition arises they may know the real truth!

Blessings,

Amy