A large family, homeschooling, adoption, special needs, whatever strikes my fancy, sort of blog.

A large family, homeschooling, adoption, special needs, whatever strikes my fancy, sort of blog.

Friday, October 16, 2015

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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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Faith of our Fathers


We were asked to review Faith of our Fathers, which we received on DVD.  I'm so thrilled that wholesome movies are improving in quality!  It used to be that Hollywood was the standard, and Christian films were cheesy low budget impersonations.  That tide is turning, and FishFlix.com has you covered for a nice selection of family friendly media.

FishFlix.com Review no 2

Since this movie is about 2 men whose dads died in the Vietnam War, I asked my teen boys to watch it with me.  Eli is 14 and Sam is 17.  My husband, Paul, watched the 95 minute film with us, too.


Faith of our Fathers is 80% road trip.  The two men meet when John Paul starts cleaning out his mother's house after her death and finds a box of memorabilia from his father's military days.  He sets out to find one of his dad's friends, but instead finds the friend's son, Wayne.  Wayne and John Paul head out on this road trip to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and hopefully learn more about their dads and how they died.


Along the way, they have adventures and mishaps, like any good road trip.  They meet a couple of celebrities, too.  I've never seen Duck Dynasty (I know, I'm probably the only one) but the guy with the beard plays a shopkeeper in the movie.  Rebecca St. James acts in the movie, too, but I won't spoil things by telling you what surprising thing her character does.

The two men receive help in a crisis from an unlikely source.  By the time they reach The Wall, they have found what they were seeking.


I appreciate this image, showing the fathers reflected in The Wall as the sons walk by.  Seeing The Wall in the movie inspired us to look it up online.  Wow.  I had no idea there were over 58,000 names on those slabs.  It's a very sobering realization.  This film would be a good resource for homeschoolers learning about the Vietnam War, or that time period in general.

My kids often tease me because I cry watching almost everything.  They'll ask me, "What's the Kleenex rating on this one, Mom?"  This was a 2 tissue movie for me.  I found myself wondering what my kids will learn from my life and how they will remember me when I'm gone.  Am I making an impression on the world around me?

Although the movie is rate PG-13, I would allow Jack, who is 11 to watch it.  There are scenes from the fathers' time in Vietnam, including how they died, but there is no swearing, sex, or nudity.


Poking around on the FishFlix.com website, I see other movies I would love to watch with my family, including a 2 movie set based on a favorite book of mine, The Hiding Place.  They also carry well known favorites such as the Love Comes Softly and When Calls The Heart shows, as well as the hit Narnia movies.  I've heard good things about Beyond The Mask, and may end up ordering that one.  Their prices seem very reasonable, with Faith of our Fathers currently on sale for $9.99.

FishFlix.com Review no 2

We were blessed to be able to review a different DVD for FishFlix.com earlier this year, and you can read that review here.  You can connect with FishFlix.com on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, G+ and YouTube!  To read what other Crew families have to say about the 5 different movies the Crew reviewed this time, please click the box below:

FishFlix.com Review No 2

Crew Disclaimer

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Monday, October 12, 2015

Even Better Plane Tickets


Last time I mentioned we had a surprise involving plane tickets, it was when Luke came home.  This time is perhaps not as life-altering, but very exciting nonetheless!


Can you guess?


No, we're not adopting again.  (Like probably ever, especially if you ask Paul.)

Hannah at an agency sponsored "camp" in 2009

When my girls were in China, our agency sent people over to meet, interview, and photograph the children in their orphanages.

Katie in May 2012

In fact, it was during one of these trips that one of the directors met Katie and immediately thought of our family.  She emailed me, and the rest is history.

Now, not only do I get the opportunity to meet that woman, I get to go one one of these advocacy trips myself!  I'm so insanely excited, I can barely sit still.  I'm going back to China!

Prepare yourself for travel photos and lots of pictures of precious children who need families!


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Saturday, October 10, 2015

Our Week - The Toddlers Have Gone


Several in our family have been fighting a cold this week.  I'm of the opinion that mothers of many should be exempt from illnesses, but apparently Mother Nature does not agree.


Despite my friend not being able to watch the Little Ones any more, we still made a stab at getting some school work done.


Katie is working in her big floor pad I Can Do Fun Activities from Fundanoodle.  Finding the animals that are exactly the same and matching them is a good pre-reading skill for learning to differentiate between similarly shaped letters.


This week in science, we learned about dolphins and marsupials (mainly kangaroos and koalas).  We even watched a movie about animals on SmartKids Media.


The teens got their school pictures back.  Brianna has decided to try for a re-take so she doesn't have her hair in her face.


Eli's picture turned out nice.  He's enjoying his first year of classroom school.  --Maybe not all the classes, or all the teachers, or all the work, but he's enjoying the social aspect.  I often hear on weekends, "I'm bored.  I want to go back to school."

...And Sam hasn't managed to bring his pictures home from school yet.


I'm getting ready to order another shipment of English paces for Hannah and Jack.  We've been without an English program for a couple years, figuring that the kids would pick things up through reading and writing, and I think that was a mistake.  Fortunately, I was able to have Jack take a placement test that shows where his gaps are, so we're able to backtrack and pick up things like homonyms that he hasn't absorbed through our previously relaxed approach.


More Fundanoodle time for Miss Katie.  I had to explain the difference between "color" and "trace" again this week.  Her writing book and her Bible study pages require her to trace, so when the instructions asked her to "color the 9 circles yellow" she traced them instead.


One of the beauties of homeschooling is accepting that learning doesn't have to happen in a desk.  Or only Monday-Friday.


We recently started a new Bible curriculum!  I'm pretty excited for this one, since I scrapped the one that came with My Father's World after exactly one day.  (And no, I'm not teaching the children that Nyquil was available during Old Testament times.  The white board sometimes serves as a grocery list reminder.)


The best thing so far about this program is that all 3 kids can learn the same thing at the same time, but their worksheets are at different levels.  More info in an upcoming review.


Katie had a huge break from "schoolwork" while the toddlers were here, so when I gave her a cutting practice worksheet, it was not surprising that her skills had deteriorated.  We'll have to work on that.


Katie and Jack continue to use Reading Kingdom.  If you missed my review, you can find it here.


Yesterday, Katie had a world map placemat and said to me, "This one is like that one up there!" pointing to the world map on the wall of the school room.  I agreed told her they were both maps of our world.  She then started pointing out, "Norf America, Souf America..."

Having had such success with our beloved continent book, I decided it was time to move on to numbers.  I bought the number book and this interesting little toy I recently saw on another blog.  We'll work on counting and identifying numbers for a bit now.


We have Hannah's old walker out for Lukey.  This photo is misleading, because you have to keep one hand on the crossbar in front of him, and one hand behind him when he's using it.  His inclination is to lean back and have you pull him along.  When he's in the right mood (and pointed at his high chair), he can make quite a go of it.  You have to guide the direction of the walker, though, as he's not "pointing" it at anything yet.


The Little Ones have gone.  Someone came to pick them up Thursday after naps.


We're in recovery mode, putting the house back to the way it used to be, taking down extra equipment.  (Getting diapers out of my room, huzzah!)


These guys came over to hang out and have dinner one night.  The kids love to play with Brayden.


We ended up pulling out Snake Oil and Clue over the course of the evening.  (Josiah is threatening me with a rubber band gun.)

We're still working on Week 5, despite this being the 7th week of school, because with this cold, I was not able to do much reading aloud.  This worked out in the kids' favor, because they got to listen to an audio drama (review coming soon!) and do an art project.  As soon as I can read without coughing, we'll get on track again.


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