I've been a snail or a slug!

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I blogged last. It has been a busy couple of months for us. I did some traveling, my dh did some traveling, my kids did some traveling. We're all back for a few weeks then dh is off to Europe for ten days. Then the holidays hit! Where does the time go?

So, I can't think about all I haven't blogged about in the past 6 weeks. What is going on in our lives now?

I just made a bluebird Halloween costume for Thing One. He wants to say "Trick or Tweet"! I took some of his falling apart onesie pajamas, cut them up to use as a pattern and turned a couple of yards of blue felt that I bought for another unfinished project into a costume. I made some simple "wings" that I attached to the back of the arms, and I attached a simple tail to the back below the zipper. I used a helmet pattern from a knight costume to make a hat. I sewed a blue feather boa onto the helmet and onto the edges of the wings.

Thing Two is either going to be a pumpkin (borrowed costume) or a ghost (hand-me-down from Thing One).

DH and I? who knows. We usually throw something silly together at the last second.

School is going fairly well, although it has been somewhat inconsistent with all our traveling lately. I have workboxes out in the classroom, and downstairs as well. They are varying complexity, so some are good for each child, and some are good cooperative activities and games for all of us to do together. I've been letting the boys pick when they're ready.

I also ordered a new curriculum that arrived yesterday. I will have to report on it later, but the one lesson we've done from it today went well and was engaging, except for the "practice writing letter B" page. It's called Moving Beyond the Page. I ordered one unit (environment) to see how we like it.

We've been doing lots of Halloween activities. We did a cool painting technique called watercolor and ink resist. It made a nice Jack-o-lantern painting.

I have tons of beautiful photos from my trip to Santa Fe, and our trip to Ocean City while the kids were with their grandparents. That will have to wait for another day!

What's Thing Two Been Up To?

Looking Cool

Sticker backgrounds

Glue and glitter art

Poingo books


Perfecting his golf game

Milk lid letters

Stamping

Playing King of the Mountain
Riding his scooter

Sticking things in styrofoam

Swimming

Birthday parties

Looking cool!

Fruit Week

We had a really fun week studying fruit! We took a walking tour of our neighborhood to visit a crabapple tree, a fig tree, blackberry and mulberry bushes, and a plum tree. We examined our strawberry bushes in the back garden, which are making fruit for a second time this season.

We had a fruit scavenger hunt at the grocery store. I glued some pictures of fruits onto a sheet of paper, put it on a clipboard with a pen, and Thing One marked off each fruit as we found it.

Some of the books we read include:

Apples to Oregon by Hopkinson (very cute, this was a big hit)

Yes We Have Bananas by Hughes

The Apple Pie Tree by Hall

Beautiful Bananas by Laird (Thing Two really likes this one)

How Do Apples Grow? by Maestro

Jam and Jelly by Holly and Nelly by Whelan

Peach Heaven by Choi

Children's Book of Virtues (George Washington and the Cherry Tree) by Bennett

The Fox and the Grapes, Aesop's Fables

The Story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent

James and the Giant Peach by Dahl (the runaway hit by a mile. Friday we rented the movie.)

We checked out two CDs as well and really liked both of them. As in, I want to buy them. Billy Jonas What Kind of Cat are You? and Cajun for Kids! by Papillion.

We played a file folder sorting game called Fruits and Vegetables from http://www.filefolderfun.com/. I was able to fit this one onto half a file folder folded in half.

After learning about fruit grows and what makes a fruit a fruit, we examined some fruits closely with a magnifying glass, then our EyeClops Bionic Eye television plug-in microscope.

We made bread machine jam. This is one of those things I've been meaning to do since we got the machine eight years ago and never have done. So that was a fun experiment for me! We made biscuits Friday morning and ate them with our strawberry jam.


We tried a few new fruits and fruit products, including red bananas (very starchy like a plantain), plantain chips, pomegranate juice, and mangosteen juice. After the kids were in bed, I tried some Haagen Das passion fruit ice cream.

We cut an apple sideways to see the star. We were a bit disappointed that our apple star only had four arms! Our apple prints also turned out pretty poor. We could never get a good print.

The other big hit with the boys were two interactive games. The first was a poem about shaking an apple tree. I had Thing One hold two pretend apples in his hands and pretend to be a tree, and when I shook him, the apples fell down. The second was a poem about a worm crawling through an apple, and the boys took turns being the apple and the worm. The apple stood up with legs spread, and the worm got to crawl through the apple's legs. Of course, I took a turn as the apple too. The loved learning the song "Down by the Bay." They made up their own verses for the rest of the week.

Thing Two's activities this week included a big stack of cups. We stacked these, and I introduced Thing One to the "hide the toy under one of three cups and try to find the toy" game. Thing One also played a lot with our big bin of toy food, and our set of Melissa and Doug food cutting game.


We also made a fruit pizza for our Independence Day BBQ. It looks pretty here but the crust stuck terribly to the pan! I recommend lots of grease on the pan with this recipe!

Thing One is allowing me to choose next week's theme. I'm thinking about the Chesapeake Bay.

Penguin Week

It was a long but good week at our house. Dad was in a class every weekday evening for two weeks, so it was long days for Mom. But we are done with that, thankfully. Some of the week's highlights follow.

We took a field trip to a museum in our hometown. They hosted a kids' open house with story time, crafts and a tour.

Some of our favorite activities this week were parquetry blocks from and some Magnetix we bought at a yard sale ($2 for a bin full).

Thing One played with cuisinaire rods for the first time this week. They are a math manipulative to go along with Miquon Math in the fall. The instructions suggest allowing some free play time with them before beginning lessons. Thing One liked making patterns and seeing if I could copy them.

Thing Two enjoyed playing with buttons. I was recently gifted with 13 pounds of buttons by a friend at my quilting guild. The possibilities for these are endless! Sorting by size, shape, color, making jewelry and crafts....Today he just loaded them into his toy trucks and carted them around.

Another favorite was this balancing game (I don't know what it's called, it was a gift):

I also read a nice idea to "Paint with Popsicles." The original idea was to put a bit of powdered tempera paint onto paper, and give the kids popsicles, which will melt and mix with the paint. I pulled out our Aquadoodle pad and we went outside as a lower-mess version. I used colored craft sticks. If I do this again, I will use plain popsicle sticks. The craft sticks turned them nice colors, but Thing Two wanted to eat his as much as draw with it, and I wasn't sure if they were food-safe. And they dyed our hands colors. I used a popsicle mold, but you could use ice cube trays as well.

We made a penguin lapbook. Thing One did about two of the little activities each day. I grabbed these from about ten different websites. His favorite, much to my surprise, were the penguin puppets. He performed a "puppet show" for Thing Two and Daddy while I read a poem, then he made up several scripts for them himself while I cooked dinner. We sang some penguin songs, played some computer games and an interactive tour of Antarctica.

We watched March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. We read tons of books, many non-fiction about penguins. The favorites were a series of books about Tacky the Penguin by Helen Lester, and Gon: Volume 2 (graphic novel) by Masashi Tanaka. Thing One made some nice drawings of penguins because "coloring pages are boring." Thing Two enjoyed the watercolor/crayon resist art activity I had planned instead.

Another big (surprise) hit were some Landmark flashcards I picked up at Target for $1 in the dollar bin. Thing One knew quite a few (White House, pyramids, Statue of Liberty) and enjoyed learning about some new ones (so did I!).

We played lots of Lego (I'm told the plural is Lego with no "s" by someone whose name starts with John). Even one of our worthless cats got into the act, I mean box.

I even had time to sketch this week! What a pleasure to just sit and draw a while.

We spent lots of time outside enjoying the beautiful sunny yet not-too-hot weather. I threw 20 pennies into the digging hole one afternoon, and the boys enjoyed sifting through the dirt to find them. We planted a few new seeds, watched our mystery plant grow out of our compost pile, and investigated a moth caught in a butterfly net and a beetle found on the patio.

We also encouraged Thing Two in his potty training endeavors. He's doing so awesome!

I Love Mondays!

I understand why most folks in the workaday world hate Mondays. I used to have the boring 9 to 5 job that I dreaded returning to on Mondays.

Nowadays, I love Mondays! Our weekends are always full and fun, and usually exhausting. Monday is our slow down day in a way. It's our get-back-into-the-routine day. It's usually my catch-up-on-chores day. I always have a lot of energy on Monday mornings. I always seem to get a ton of stuff done. And I love that feeling of accomplishment when I get a lot of stuff done.


Last night I prepared a few activities for Thing Two (who happens to be two years old). He has seemed content enough to be included in a few of our school activities (if we do a crafty simple workbox I prepare enough supplies for two, and I've been planning at least cooperative play activity per day that all three of us can do together). He likes to play by himself downstairs most of the time. But I felt a bit neglectful and I want to offer him more structured activities. He may refuse them but I feel like I at least need to have some prepared in case he wants to do something. So I made him a mailbox out of empty oatmeal canisters and a shoebox, and a packet of empty junk mail envelopes, play "stamps" (stickers), old postcards, and a small shoebox that he can make into a "package" to send or receive. This turned into our daily cooperative game before 7:30am! Both boys loved it. I remember Thing One loving it at this age.






I also prepared some cut up straw segments and a couple of pipe cleaners to thread them on. He mostly filled up his dumptruck with them and said they were pipes. I bought a bag of multicolored popsicle sticks and he liked building roads for his trains and cars with those. We also laid them out in shapes for a few minutes. I made some animal matching cards, and a new shape puzzle. He wasn't too interested in those today.












Thing One's first workbox is the weekly treasure hunt box. We've been doing a treasure hunt each week. Upon completion of a "puzzle" (usually a worksheet or physical puzzle), he gets one word in a five-word sentence clue. For example, last week's clues were "The opposite of wetter is" and he had to figure out "dryer." His wooden treasure chest was hidden in the clothes dryer with a whole dollar bill inside!


Today he had to complete a new puzzle of a world map. He's been bugging me for one for months and I found one in the Target dollar bin.






Our theme for the week is Penguins. He chooses each week's theme. We did a couple of small lapbook activities from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/. I've printed out a couple of games from http://www.filefolderfun.com/ for later in the week. We usually do one or two lapbook activities Monday thru Thursday, then put it all together on Friday.

We also did a file folder game of the sign language alphabet. Thing One has become very interested in learning sign language. I think because some of our friends at church know it and use it as a family. He also likes to make up his own secret signs, and often chooses to communicate with me in strange gestures that he assumes I can understand. He likes making up all sorts of things like this. Stories, yoga poses. He's always inventing.








We played a rousing game of Scrabble Junior, on the difficult side of the board today. Thing One was learning how to play his new words onto the existing words.










Then we played the generic version of Jenga (Jumbling Blocks $4.99 at Target). I picked this up because Thing One has been playing a Wii game called Boomblox, and it has a Jenga-inspired section. He didn't really understand the mechanics and physics of it. So I thought playing the real game would be fun and would help him understand. It certainly did, and he loved building towers and playing the game. Thing Two loved lining up and stacking up the blocks as well.





At lunch break while the boys played, I finished up the laundry for the day, and then started baking. I set out two loaves of bread to rise. DH is playing around with a recipe from mother earth news that says you can have freshly baked bread in five minutes per day. You mix up a big batch on the weekend and leave the dough to sit in the fridge for up to two weeks. You take a chunk, let it come to room temp then bake it. It turned out pretty well. I forgot to slash the top so it busted open and isn't pretty to look at but it tastes yummy. It develops a sourdough flavor the longer it's been in the fridge. This one is about 8 days old.


While two the loaf pans were rising I made blueberry cornmeal muffins from a recipe I got from Family Fun magazine. My kids love blueberries, and love corn muffins so I thought I'd give this a try. I've been looking for good easy breakfasts. We each had one at lunch. I love them. Thing One picked out the blueberries. He says he doesn't like them cooked. Thing Two didn't really eat any of his. On to the next muffin recipe, I guess!





While Thing Two napped, we watched March of the Penguins, read Tacky the Penguin, Gor Vol. 2, and played a simple animal classification file folder game. I made it from a worksheet I got from http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com/.








Then we played outside, blew bubbles, dug in the dirt, ate dinner, took daddy to class, had a bath and story time, and I put the boys to bed. Whew! It's been a great Monday.