Our Week with an Autumn Craft

As usual, lots of things happening around our house.  We even had a visit from Grammy and Annaliese this week, but I'll share those photos in a separate post.

Hannah is working on a new online review, so she spent some time on the computer this week.

Katie is drawing bamboo with our Kwik Stix.  She is going to dress as a panda for Halloween, and pandas eat bamboo, so it makes perfect sense.

Milestone this week!  We finished up last year's spelling books (D) and started on our new books (E).

It's hard to see the blocks from this picture, but I'm loving the two letter vowel blocks in our Can Do Cubes set.  Seeing and touching really helps cement concepts like "two letter a."  They go really nicely with Katie's phonics program.

Katie and Hannah wanted sparkles on their apples, so they applied a layer of glitter glaze to them.  Jack declined this step.  This is one of the slowest art projects we've ever done.  Now they're waiting on me to do the next step.

I got out my laminator this week!  It's a popular theory that to be a great homeschooler, you must have one, so I bought one, but the truth is, I very rarely ever use the silly thing.  But when we got out the new spelling books, I realized that my teacher's manual is downloaded to my computer instead of a hard copy.  That will never do for daily use, so I printed the first 18 lessons, double sided, which turned out to be only 3 pieces of paper altogether.  I knew they'd see a lot of use, so I decided to laminate them to keep them in good shape.  When we get to lesson 19, I'll print and laminate the other half.

Katie seems to be working on the floor more and more lately, so I'm trying to think of a better solution for her.  At first, I'd suggest she sit on the floor for math, because the box of math blocks takes up a lot of space, and her math always seemed to crowd Jack and Hannah.

We got back to art this week, with eye droppers, liquid watercolors and diffusing paper.  I kind of love the diffusing paper.  It's pretty cool stuff.

The next day, after our "pretty paper" was dry, we used wooden leaf cutouts to trace leaf shapes onto the paper.

After cutting out the leaf shapes...

We glued them on brown construction paper...

To make Happy Autumn signs.

One is hanging in the front room, where it goes nicely with the orange throw pillows currently on the couch.

Very happy to have made it back to the library this week!  Last week, we skipped library day because we were on the go so much.

Katie finished a Hatshepsut poster with one of our Figures in Motion (see our review here) that she started while we were listening to The Cat of Bubastes.

Sam was home this week, and I happened to catch him napping.

We've finally got the room that used to be Eli & Jack's all cleaned out.

Paul has started patching the walls in preparation for painting, hopefully in the next week or two.

Miss Katie is now reading level 1 readers with very few "helps."  We discovered the Biscuit books with Jack, and they were absolute favorites of ours, so it's fun to hear another child reading them aloud.  This particular one came home from the library with us, but we have quite a collection of them around here, too.

This coming week, we're looking forward to visiting a pumpkin patch and enjoying the beautiful warm fall weather we've been having before the rains come.


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