Yes, this is school!

This little guy is so creative. Well, once I take away all electronic games. First he started off just with domino's then he added the hot wheels set and his cars with the domino's. There were so many layouts he did trying to see which one works better. This was just one picture of the many layouts he did.

We all have to drop what we are doing and come and see him make the car go around and start the domino's off. Sometimes it's nice when they can come up with some fun ways to play and still be learning. I wonder what else will pop into his head tomorrow?

Fun School Day

Monday's are always hard days to do school. For some reason the 'kids just wanna have fun'. That reminds me of a song about just wanting to have fun. LOL Anyway, we started off slow today. The kiddos got to go outside for PE. They ran around, rode bikes and just enjoyed throwing sticks. I'm so glad our extra TVs broke down and died. I see more creativity now in finding things to do since there is no TV to entertain them.

Our weather has been getting more spring like. If you live down in the southern part of Texas then it's time to start preparing gardens and planting. Not trying to make you Canadians jealous at all. hehehe So our project this year is to seriously start a garden. I've been looking at a blog at My Nature Journal which she shows square foot gardening. So that is what we are starting this year. I hope ours come out ok. We have just started so we will see how it goes as time goes on.

After spending some time outside we came inside and worked on our math lessons. It took us around 30mins and that was with me running back and forth from one to the other and keep encouraging to finish. We did finish and there was no crying about not wanting to continue.

We also did my notebooking page on Sergei Prokofiev. It was an easy page and just a page to review what he had already learned.

Oh and sometimes it helps for my son to wear headphones to keep him focused and to work faster. They were happy to have done this page. It will go into our Art & Music Biographies binder.

Then it was back to playing outside. AAHHHHH nice productive day!

Lapbooking Fun

I've embarked on a new adventure. What might that be? Well, I am now a Rep. for In the Hands of a Child. I've always liked their lapbooks. I have also been a Super Member with them for a few years now. So, now I have enough lapbooks that I can choose from when I need them.

Have you ever tried a lapbook? I love doing them especially when everything is done for you and ready to go. An old friend turned me on to scrapbooking some years ago after seeing her beautiful scrapbooks of her family and now lapbooking is as close as I can get to scrapbooking without my camera and still call it school.

This year we did a lapbook on Marco Polo. You can see about it here and here. It was so fun as you can tell in their faces on the pictures I posted. We also made one of the Vikings which I posted about here. Right now we are working on several more and will be done by May.

So now that I have talked a little about what we have done let me tell you also that this year HOAC received an award which doesn't surprise me. They got the The Old Schoolhouse Award beating out other well known unit study companies. It was 1st place for their unit studies.


If anyone is from Texas look for me at the the Home School Book Fair in Arlington this year and stay tuned for more on our lapbooking.

We Are Reading

We use Pathway Readers for reading and it is going good. My little one is 6yrs old and using First Steps which is the Grade 1 preprimer. I am hoping to finish up with this book by March and start with the next one.

Reading is not magic. There is no one solution to getting your child to read. Each child reads at their own time. Although there are signs to show us as parents that there is something wrong to prevent reading.

One thing I can't stress enough is just to read. Read to them. Have them read to you. What I did was read one sentence then have him read one sentence. Then it progressed to reading a paragraph to him reading a paragraph. Then it went from me reading less and him reading more. I like the Pathway Readers because there are small paragraphs per page with pictures so it looks like they are reading so many pages. They get excited to know they read 4 or 5 pages in one day.

The books do get progressively harder. More words to a page and less books per year. Grade 1 has 3 small books. Next year he will read 2 books for the year. The other good thing is that they are inexpensive. Oh, and they are good clean books.

A Boy, A Bird, A Duck and more....

Another creation by yours truly. I love making notebooking pages to go along with what we are studying and learning. This time around was Sergei Prokofiev. That's the Peter and the Wolf guy! I have always loved listening to that. I remember hearing it for the first time when I was in school. That was many, many moons ago. I enjoyed it! I could actually see the whole thing going on even though we only heard it when I was in elementary.

We will work on this one tomorrow. Maybe the little one will want to hear it again. I sure do hope so. This page is going into our Art & Music Biographies binder.

Guessing is Over

Yes, yes you were right! This is an ammonite. Now that I cleared that up, I can move on. Stay tuned for a few interesting posts coming up soon.

New Bird

This is the first year that we have had this guy in our back yard. I've seen him around town but not in our area. I was so excited that I took out my camera and took his picture from inside thru the window. I took a picture of his back so you can see his wonderful colors. This blue jay is a beautiful blue color.


Click on picture to see it bigger.

We had a shower for my cousin that is getting married. It was a lot of work but in the end it turned out nice. The one sister in red is the one that will marry my cousin. She was trying to hide behind that paper because I privately said something to her. hehehehe Now why do people get shocked when I say things....I will never know. hehehe Anyway, I'll leave it at that.


We played games. All the sisters were busy trying to figure out the crossword puzzle my brother made up. It was about women of the bible.


Then of course was the good stuff. I made the desserts. I made a cupcake cake. Hubby made the stand and I made the cupcake to go on it. I put a small trim on the edges of the stand. I think it came out great despite hubby not finishing up the project till Saturday morning. (That's a whole other story...called procrastination.)

Then I also made cookies. They were called Cowboy Cookies. Sooooo good. They had coconut, raisins and oatmeal in them. I liked the recipe because the cookies stayed plump. You know how some cookies go flat? Well, this one was nice and plump. Oh, and did I mention they were tasty too. hhmmmmm!!!


If you are wondering what those little dresses are in the back...they were little boxes in the middle and we put candies in them. The colors we used were pink and brown. Don't forget to click on the pictures to see them larger and yummier.

Now you know where I've been since I hadn't posted much. Tomorrow is back to school and hope to share a few other things with you all next week.

Till then.....

Nice but sad

On Monday the boys got to go to a special art class day. Their art teacher got permission to take them to a private collection of animals. They were there to draw animals and to see all these animals these individuals hunted from other countries.

I didn't get to go but made hubby take my camera. I could not miss out on this. I didn't know there would be so many animals.

They had fun drawing and being somewhere different. Of course, there had to be a silly picture in the bunch. hehehe

Our School Room

Well, I am done with getting the bookshelves in order. Almost anyway, hehehe, I can still do more. I have 7 bookcases along one wall. I have one more to bring in from one of the rooms. I want to get most of the books into this room. They can keep some books in their rooms but I want the majority in the school room. Sometimes it's hard to know where a book is or if we even have it if there is a bookcase in one room and a few in the other. So I am trying to get them all in one place.





This first set is reference books for school. I have a shelf for math one for language arts, one and a half for science, one and a half for history and then there are shelves for nature and guides and art.





Then there is an area for the books that we are using now for our curriculum. Also some binders for nature studies and art and music biographies.

If you look on the first picture you can see something on the floor. Can you guess what it is? Yes, it's a fossil. But, do you know what kind it is? I've seen some at museums so I think perhaps some of you might figure this out. These came out of Fort Worth area. My brother gave these to us. The biggest is so heavy that I have a hard time picking it up. It has got to weigh at least 50 or 60 pounds. I vacuum around that thing and pull out the attachments to clean on it and around it. Way to heavy to go picking it up to vacuum under it.

So take your guess. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think it is. Come on, don't be chickens. Take a guess!

Surprise with a Visit

Thanks to all of you that left me messages on my last post. I am feeling better. My headaches are almost all gone. I still get them but not as bad as that week straight that I had them.

Now, today we had an invite to go visit a friends home and they had her mother there too. This mother had given her daughter something of hers from when she was a lot younger. I'm sure you can see what it is.

Don't forget to click on the pictures to enlarge the pictures and see the detail.

She has records too!!! It works too!!! We heard it! How cool is that? We heard Judge Rutherford talk. This friend said she has a box full of records. What a cool experience for us all. The boys got to hear history. We all got to see the extra needles in its little round compartment next to the round part you put on the records. The piece under the part you put on the record is the crank that you take off of there and insert it into the side and crank away to make it turn.

After hearing that and playing a game of cards which my little one won we listened to hubby play his guitar. Now click on that picture of him too and you can see close up the guitar my hubby made by hand. This is guitar number 2 that he has made and he is on number 3.

So that was our day today. It was nice. Oh and the food they made was the best. They made a deep fried turkey. OOHHHHHH it was so good.