Our Week - With Pumpkin Art

The bunnies were sitting on a laundry room shelf, drying after I washed all the bedding from the Little Ones' stay with us.  The pack & plays have been taken down, the diapers have all gone to Luke's room.

I think all their laundry has cycled through, although I wouldn't be surprised to find a piece later on.  The feeding chairs are gone, the carseats are gone.

Our house and are family are getting back to "normal," whatever that is.  Although it's not the normal we had before they arrived, because Luke is back.  Even though this was a challenging hosting, I'm still glad we were able to be a Safe Family again one more time.  I know we wouldn't have been able to take them on if Luke had been here when the hosting started.

Confession?  This pumpkin artwork was finished last week, but I was too lazy to download the pictures for last week's post.

These lovely pumpkins were a project from the Home Art Studio DVD we're doing this year.  They were drawn on black paper with soft pastels, then cut out and glued to the green paper.

And I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was working on glittering my pumpkin from the pumpkin patch.  I thought about doing a How Not to Glitter Your Pumpkin post, but in the end decided to just show it and pretend that it was as easy as it looks.  If you're planning on trying it, do the bottom first.  I love the way it turned out, but one of my boys loathes glitter and hates it.

A little bit more cutting practice for Miss Katie.  She's doing much better at straight lines again now.

Last weekend was homecoming.  Brianna looked beautiful.

This is Hannah's first year homeschooling, and she's adjusted to it beautifully, as she does to everything.  I've had some surprises along the way, but she takes it all in stride.  She's a good worker, too.  She almost always finishes her nap time work on her own without issues.

Our homeschool mascot.  I feel sorry for poor Wheelie.  First the toddlers, and the baby gates.  Then his bed used to be in Paul's office.  But Paul's office got turned into Luke's bedroom, and there's a gate across the door now.  And since Luke scoots now, Wheelie's food bowl had to go outside because Luke was scooting over and eating cat food all the time.  After we moved the food outside, Luke started digging in Wheelie's sandbox, so that had to go, too.  Poor kitty.  He's old and sneezy and not thrilled with the changes.

I'm pretty excited about the Bible program we're reviewing!  I like that Katie gets to participate with us on her level.

It's challenging my artistic abilities, as well!

Our art project from the DVD for this week was root vegetables!

We used oil pastels for the carrots and watercolors for the sky and dirt.

I love that these projects require no prep work.  Watch the DVD, pull out the supplies, do the project.  Easy peasy.

Katie is working on numbers and is counting to 10 now!  Working on identifying and writing numbers 0-10 next.  Freebie dot marker page I printed for her.

In science, we're learning about birds and fish (which dovetails nicely with the Days of Creation study we did in Bible, no pun intended!).  So we made mixed media aquarium art projects.

Jack used silver origami paper for the sides of his aquarium.  He wanted me to mention that there are clown fish hidden in the anemone on the left.

The passage that Jack and Hannah have been working on in Spelling You See this week was about the Liberty Bell.  Since we're in colonial times in history right now, it seemed like a good idea to take it a little further, so I found a Liberty Bell page for them on Super Teacher Worksheets, which they did and added to their history notebooks.

This impressive creation was Brianna's history homework.  She was required to bring in an artifact from Ancient Greece or Rome.  She made this helmet out of clay, and painted it bronze after baking.  Then she added a green wash to make it look rusty/oxidized.

I was trying to get a shot of my students writing for an upcoming review, but I got Jack in a deeply contemplative pose instead.

I sometimes let the kids doodle on their sketch pads while I read aloud.  This was Jack's depiction of the 30 Years War in Europe.

I've given myself permission to skip a few things in order to get us back on track.  If you've used My Father's World curriculum, you know that there's a LOT of stuff assigned in a week.  I have no problem skipping one or two things from time to time, but this week, we skipped several.  This allowed us to finish Weeks 5 and 6.  I feel okay with that, since we add plenty of other things with review items and other extras.  For instance, we're using the Bible curriculum we're reviewing instead of the one that came with MFW.  In a similar way, I decided we could skip God & The History of Art this week, since we were doing Home Art Studio and our fish scene and free drawing.

So, in summary, 8 weeks into the school year, we're done with 6.5 weeks of curriculum.  And I have 2 weeks to catch up before I leave for a week in China.  Which seems kind of irresponsible of me as a homeschooler, but I'm so incredibly excited about the trip that I'd happily homeschool on Christmas Eve if that's what it takes.  I doubt it will come to that, though.  We're close to catching up.


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