At our home, we have been working on setting chapters of the Bible to memory. Three of my kids are old enough to memorize the Bible and are each working on different chapters. My oldest is learning 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. My next child is learning The Beatitudes, or Happy Attitudes as he calls them. And my preschooler is learning Psalm 23. We have been using the books and CD’s from Thy Word Creations for this endeavor, so that we are also learning the chapters set to music.
I believe that memorizing the Bible strengthens our minds, besides giving a spiritual blessing. I believe that time spent in memorizing the Bible with my children will not be lost on their other school subjects, because I believe so strongly that it will strengthen their minds and actually help them in the other subjects, as well. And most importantly, I’ve been claiming this verse for my children, while I help them with their memorization: “Thy Word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:11.)
The passage that JD Boy just finished memorizing was the Ten Commandments. He had a hard time keeping the last six in order, so he decided that he would like to make a simple lapbook to help him visualize their order. Here are some pictures of his lapbook.
Each matchbook has the Commandment number on the top flap, a picture to go with the respective Commandment on the bottom flap, and the words of the Commandment on the inside. Here is the inside of the Tenth Commandment book.
Since JD Boy and I designed these matchbooks ourselves, I uploaded them to HSLaunch, so you can use them for free. I have also uploaded the pages that my daughter used for copywork when she memorized the Ten Commandments a couple of years ago.
I’m going to admit that I have a hard time without a computer. Perhaps I have an addiction. I’ve had the chance to see how much more I could get done each day without a computer around, since slightly before Thanksgiving actually. Which, by the way, was quite a bit. I had to use my husband’s computer to get on the internet. That worked okay, but my files weren’t on his computer. Anyway, I’m quite happy to announce that I’m the proud owner of my husband’s computer now and it has been reformatted and loaded with my stuff and bears my name on it. I am so, so happy about that! He has a new computer, lest you fear that he might go out of business without his computer.
So that’s the deal with my computer, but now to share what’s gone on around here for the last month and half. We’ve been as busy as beavers, going here and going there and spending time with friends and family. The holidays are such a great time for all of that. After all, the roads are covered with ice, so you take your life in your hands in order to see your loved ones or they have to do likewise to come see you. I’ve been considering rescheduling the holidays or moving to Australia. Not really.
First off, one fellow in our home had a birthday. Time goes way too fast. It seems like just yesterday that I was thinking that he was taking too long to make his debut. (I’m kind of impatient because he came a week and a half early, but I thought that was late.)
He got real tools for his birthday. Now, I’ll know who to ask for a measuring tape or hammer or screwdrivers. That will be nice! He also got a camera.
Everyone except the baby now has a camera. I may have to turn this blog into a photo blog. Even our four year old now has a camera.
We had fairly nice weather in December. We did not have a white Christmas, but we did have a white Thanksgiving, so here is a picture that we’ll just pretend was taken at Christmas time.
We did see some snow in December, however, while risking our lives on those icy roads on the way to grandma and grandpa’s house a week or so before Christmas.
Christmas was at our home this year.
We spent Christmas at our home with my husband’s side of the family. That made for fifteen people and two dogs in our house for the weekend. That’s two dogs more, but two people less than we had for Thanksgiving. It was cozy and fun. The house swarmed with kids. Some of the family has to drive some fifteen hundred miles to get to our house, so we feel quite loved that they keep making the trip out to see us, even on icy roads. (Thank you, since I’m trusting that you read my blog!) Fortunately, I think their way was fairly clear this year.
My husband plays the violin, our two oldest play the violin, my sister-in-law plays violin and cello, and my nieces play cello, viola and violin. We had lots of concerts at our house while everybody was here. It was a real treat. They all played for church along with some friends. It was so special.
The matching outfits were Christmas presents from Nana.
We made a few trips to museums and such, but that counts for school, no matter when it happens, so I’ll post about that later, as I required the kids to write reports on their trips to make it authentic!!
And through it all, the baby has continued to grow and change. Babies do so much of that.
Yes, I have a thumb sucker for the first time.
Well, now that you’re afraid that I have turned this blog into a photo blog, I guess I’ll stop. I do have to thank my kids for the plethora of pictures of the baby. I haven’t been taking near as many as I should be…she’s a fourth child, you know. But actually there are hundreds of pictures that were recently loaded on to my computer of her that I need to sort through. So she’ll have something for posterity yet! I suppose I could keep going and sharing more pictures, but I’ve got other things to get caught up on my new/used computer.
Whew! We spent so long studying about the Thirteen Colonies and Colonial life. We started this study when I was pregnant, and it kind of came to a hault when I was so sick. But we finally finished it. We decided that we wanted to finish it with a Colonial meal, then we realized that we were awfully close to Thanksgiving, so the kids agreed that that would make for a great Colonial meal. It did! We had a great feast–vegetarian style!
The kids dressed up in their Colonial clothes for the event. They’ve had so much fun with these clothes. It’s a little sad that they are going to grow out of them. The cousins that were here for Thanksgiving, also dressed up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes. What fun!
Now for what we’ve studied for the last long while on the subject. We read some really good books on the Thirteen Colonies. We continued to enjoy This Country of Ours. We really do enjoy that book. The kids enjoy listening to the audiobook version while they work on their lapbooks. We also enjoyed some other books about different people and experiences of the Colonial time period. Some of our favorites were Roger Williams by Mark Ammerman, Tattered Sails (this one for it’s illustrations rather than the writing), Old Silver Leg Takes Over(Kids loved that book!), The Carving Tree (about Roanoake). We read several others, but these were the ones that we really, really enjoyed.
Of course, we did lapbooks on Colonial America too. Here are some pictures.
My boys love to build things. What boys don’t? So when I can think of something useful for them to build, we’re all happy. It gives them a great opportunity to develop hand-eye coordination as well as some math skills (measuring). You know me, I’m always happy to find ways to teach school subjects with real life. They get permission to bang on something. That always brings smiles! And it gives them a nice sense of accomplishment when it’s finished. So here is a project that I did with my boys recently.
I didn’t like the way they just piled things up on the floor of their closet, so I decided that if they built a rack to put in their closet, they would get all of the great benefits of building, plus they would be so proud that they would determine to keep the bottom of their closet nice and clean. It worked!! Yea! Score!
We measured their closet, then we went to Home Depot and figured out what would work and purchased a kit. Building with them is fine and all, but I did not want to have to get out a saw to complete the project, so I limited our choices to kits.
Here’s a before picture of the closet.
Here are some work in progress pictures.
And here’s the completed project.
They’re quite proud of their work. They’ve faithfully been lining up the their shoes and toys in there now. They have even been keeping their closet floor vacuumed now. It might not make it into Better Homes and Gardens best organized closet, but I’m thrilled with and so are they. Just think of all that we got accomplished with that task.
Just wanted to share a few pictures of the littlest one in our family. She is already 4 months old. (These are the same that I posted on Facebook a week or so ago, so you may have already seen them.)
My kids love to make crafts. Lots of crafts. They make crafts that go along with what we are studying at the moment. They make crafts from craft books. They make crafts from everything. And there are crafts everywhere sometimes. Here are some of the most recent creations that were just creations for the fun of it. The ones that they’ve made to go along with our unit studies will have to wait until we finish the unit and can show off everything. I purchased a package or two of wikkistix at the last homeschool convention that I attended. I don’t know how they have stayed unused for so long. A few days ago, I had a lot of work to get done on my computer and I wanted my kids to be doing something constructive (rather than destructive, you know) so I pulled out the packages and said show me what you can make. This is what they made.
Note: Oops, I’ve just been informed that what I thought was a tulip plant and some corn stocks is supposed to be a house and a barn and I put them upside down for this picture.
The farmer and his tractor, mostly by JD Boy.
The boy and his Bedtime Story book by Zippy.
The four-wheeler by G’tums.
I like to make sure that there are fun things around here for my four-year-old to do. He asked me if I would be okay with finger paints. I was a little hesitant, because well the mess that they can make, but then I thought that I couldn’t deny him the fun of finger paints just because I don’t like cleaning up, so I got them. When he got them out to start painting with them, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to finger paint, so did the “big” kids. Here are some of his creations.
We recently finished a unit on classical composers. We decided to just do an overview of them. We gathered up resources from a few places and really enjoyed every single one of them.
We listened to every CD in the “Story of Composers” series. (Here is a link to the one on Bach. You can scroll down to find the rest of them.) We listened to two CD’s a week and the ones we enjoyed most, we listened to several times. Now if I name nearly any one of the composers that we studied, JD Boy will be able to start humming the melody of one of the pieces from that composer. Have I ever mentioned that he is my auditory learner? It’s amazing!
This is a really enjoyable set of CD’s. We plan to listen to them many more times. I would recommend them to anybody. A couple of pluses on this set, besides the fact that they are just excellent, is that they provide a great way to do homeschooling in the car or, as in my case, do some homeschooling while the mama is sick. The other plus is that they are really inexpensive, which is always nice.
While we listened to those CD’s, G’tums colored pictures of composers that were printed off from the History Through the Ages Timeline Figures and JD Boy and Zippy made a timeline of the composers from the History of Classical Music Timeline by Beautiful Feet. (Both of these timelines are scrollable so please mouse over them and then start scrolling to see the whole timeline.)
Zippy’s Timeline
JD Boy’s Timeline
We also enjoyed reading the book The Story of the Orchestra and listening to the accompanying CD. From this book we were able to learn better how to distinguish the different instruments in the orchestra. This is a really nice book for a wide age span of children. All of my kids enjoyed it from the preschooler to the fourth grader.
Zippy also worked diligently on making a lapbook about music as we learned about the composers and about the orchestra. Here are a few pictures from her lapbook. If you’d like to see the rest, you can visit my Composer Lapbook set on Flickr. Most of the components for this lapbook were taken from the Composers Activity Pak by Homeschool in the Woods.
The Cover (Unfortunately water was spilled on it before we got any pictures, but Zippy has decided that it makes it look more artistic this way.)
The inside showing the book on periods of music, which describes each of the major periods of music; music definitions, which gives the definitions of each of the words printed on the piano keys; and the “Pieces with a Purpose” pocket, which has several little booklets that tell that different music was written for different purposes, i.e. some as hymns, some as patriotic music, etc.
This is what you see if you flip up the center panel from the previous picture. In this picture is a map showing the birth cities of all of the European born composers; a bunch of little booklets with biography information about the composers; a booklet defining godly music; and a booklet with the five main types of instruments. There are also some stickers used for decoration.
This is the booklet on godly music. I just thought this was such a great quote about heavenly music that I had her copy it and add it to her lapbook. During this study we also took the time to discuss what music is appropriate for Christians to listen to and what is not.
This is the inside of the little booklet on Beethoven, showing what type of information she found about each composer that we studied.
We all really enjoyed this unit study. It helped all of us to learn to appreciate some of the lesser known composers as well as the famous composers. We also were able to identify a few composers, whose pieces we didn’t enjoy. Now we are going to go back and study our favorite ones deeper and see if the kids can learn a piece on the violin or piano as we study them a little deeper.
One of the benefits of this unit is that it worked well while I was feeling ill. I just made sure everybody had the right stuff that went with the CD that we were to listen to and then I pushed play and laid back and listened.
So I decided it was time to get back in the swing of doing regular nature study every week. (It was pretty sporadic when I was pregnant and sick.) We had a little powow and decided that we wanted to learn about Maple trees and start another year long study of cattails, since we didn’t keep up with the last one. We chose Maple trees first since we have some real beauties around our house right now and we set out with our nature journals, paints, colored pencils and our Handbook of Nature Study.
Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as the whole family had their shoes tied and were out the door, JD Boy remembered that he had a better idea. So off came his shoes and he ran upstairs to grab his butterfly net. Then back on went the shoes and he nearly flew out the door. He raced and jumped around the backyard and then hollered with delight. He had caught the subject of interest–a dragonfly.
He brought it up to me for my approval and then got another bright idea. He’s full of ideas! He ran off and got the butterfly cage (or whatever you call it) and quickly, I mean carefully coaxed his dragonfly into the cage. Then he was off again. Between he and Zippy, we managed to capture three dragonflies.
So you can guess that our Maple tree and cattail study were not a go. We studied dragonflies. I don’t really have any idea of how to identify dragonflies, but I found this blog post by the Dragonfly Woman that recommended a couple of books, which we have since been able to check out from the library. The titles are Dragonflies through Binoculars and Dragonflies and Damselflies of the Westand are both quite easy to use. JD Boy thinks he has an identification of the dragonflies that we caught, as well as two or three other species that he’s seen around here several times.
I have a whole bunch (and I mean A BUNCH) more pictures that I want to share. These are from a trip that we took to Stehekin, which is at the north end of Lake Chelan, Washington. We spent three days with my family and some friends. It was such an enjoyable trip. We definitely want to go back again.
Somebody windsurfing on the lake.
My sister enjoying a dip at Rainbow Falls.
My dad enjoying a moment to draw the scenery.
JD Boy taking a break on a hike.
One of two planes that water taxi people up there as there are no roads. We took the boat.
My younger siblings and a friend ready to go on their flight back.
Zippy hanging out on the bridge railing.
Me with a backpack and a frontpack. It’s the life!
The view at the south end of the lake. The top of the lake and the bottom of the lake are like two different worlds.
Actually there are several more pictures, but I didn’t want to make it so that this page would never load. So if you want to see more, here is the link to them Stehekin Photo Set.
One of the fun things about moving to a new house is that we now have a new school room. I actually am in love with our school room. It is in the attic and only has sky lights for windows. It is a long room, with lots of wall space for books. It was the bonus room, but the previous owner was an artist and used it for her art studio, so she put a sink in it and some cabinets and drawers. Maybe the idea is that that area is a kitchenette, but for us it is just perfect for housing all kinds of stuff, like games, art supplies, manipulatives, you name it.
I had to purchase new bookcases, because the walls aren’t full height, so my old cases were too tall. (I’ve put them to use though in the garage. They are now being filled with canned food.)
We had been storing the kitchen table that we had used back in the early days of our marriage, until we had children and couldn’t sit around it anymore. That now serves as our school table.
We need to work on decorating the room a little more, but that will come with time, hopefully.
