Our Labor Day Week

On Labor Day, Zach and Heather and Brayden came over for a visit.

Almost all my kids.  Just missing Annaliese, who will hopefully be able to come for a visit before Josiah takes off for boot camp.

Active duty Air Force, almost Army reserves, and soon to be active duty Marines.  I'm thinking if we can talk Eli into joining the Navy, we should get our taxes waived.  I doubt Uncle Sam will agree with me, but it seems like we ought to get some sort of reward for providing all 4 branches of the military with strong and handsome recruits.  

Zach's sweet little family.

These guys had a great time playing together.

 Imagine kissy noises, and you'll understand the trepidation Katie is expressing.

Out to lunch with (almost) the whole family.

We actually homeschooled Labor Day morning, since Brianna and Eli were at school for football practice anyway.  It was pretty much a regular morning, just a little abbreviated.

Our first art project this week, was inspired by the watercolor basics video from See The Light.  We have reviewed a couple of their DVDs in the past, so I'm on their email list, and I thought the watercolor basics video might be helpful, since we tend to have seepage and blending issues with watercolors.  We used watercolors from a tube (as instructed) for these.  I think I want to try dripping our liquid watercolors onto wet paper now because of this project.

Our second art project this week was from ArtAchieve (see our review).  We did lesson 9, The Plate From Nepal, and we listened to Nepali instrumental music from YouTube.

Jack's still not crazy about this program, but Hannah enjoys it.

I felt like the kids weren't getting enough geography last year, so this year, we're working through geography books.  Katie is doing Beginning Geography, and we're working on things like maps, directions, symbols, etc.  It's a K-2 level book, and it's definitely challenging her.

Jack and Hannah are working through Daily Geography Practice.  We're actually working through it faster than suggested.  Each week, there's a lesson, a map, and 2 questions for each day of the week, that all refer back to the map.  The way we've been using it, we do M-W (6 questions total) one day, then Th-F and the "challenge" question the next day.  So even though we just finished up our 3rd week of school, Hannah and Jack have completed 6 weeks in their geography book.  This is a good thing, because that means that when they're doing "light schoolwork" for 2 weeks in November, they can drop geography and not get "behind."  More about that later.

We did a little "community service" this week!  We provided bag lunches for Eli's football team, and the kids helped me by decorating the lunch bags.

They also helped me pack the bags into boxes and distribute the non-perishables into the bags.

The next day, we made 36 sandwiches, assembly line style.  Let's hear it for mayo and mustard in squeeze bottles!

Eventually, all the lunches were packed up into 4 containers.

And we dropped them off at the school for the players to eat on the bus to their away game.

We have been hitting the library on Thursdays, and I really hope we can keep it up this year.  We used to go to the library all the time when the big kids were little, and I feel like the middle/little kids got short changed when we stopped doing that.

The kids have eclectic tastes in books, and I throw a few things into the bag each week, to provide other interesting options, once they finish their choices.  (Not pictured are the books they started reading in the car.)

Of course, having a park next door to the library makes it an even more popular choice with these guys.

Jack has started speech therapy.  The girls and I hang out in the school library while he is with the therapist in another building.

As a junior, Brianna is "TA" during one class period (teacher's assistant).  After hearing that she does things like grade papers and make photocopies, I think I need a TA around here!  My printer upstairs in the school room does not print any more (although it does still scan), so I have to make photocopies downstairs.  Which is not a big deal when I'm on my game and I make copies for the coming week over the weekend.  But for those times when I don't, chaos seems to always break out in the school room when I disappear to make copies.  I think I might need to rearrange the school room and change printers at some point, but I'm waiting until we can figure out if we can fit the other computer up here after Josiah goes to boot camp.  It would be helpful to be able to have the kids work on a computer without me losing my desk.

This coming week, we're off to Shriners again, this time casting Hannah for a new leg.

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Our Second Week of School

I seem to be all out of witty titles this morning.  Here we are, another weekend is here, and I'm blinking at the whirlwind that was the past week.

Katie recently presented me with this note.  Melt my heart!  Her writing is really coming along, and she loves to draw, too.  Even though last year was what I called, "half-assed kindergarten," I really feel she's going to do fine with first grade materials this year.  She finished her K math book the first week of school, and is zipping through MUS Alpha with no problems.  She's on track to finish her K spelling book and start Spelling You See level B in a few weeks.

One of the nice things about starting school up again is ART!  This week, we did the next project from ArtAchieve, which we reviewed a few months ago.

While working on their pictures, we listened to African music from SmartKidz Media, which was another review product.  Reviewing has really enriched our homeschool.

After drawing and coloring, they wadded up their pictures, then smoothed them out and painted over them.

Here are Jack and Hannah's finished Tanzanian Kitenge Tree pictures.  The crinkled effect was supposed to mimic batik fabrics.  I think if Jack had done the crayon part darker, the paint would have resisted better.

One of the fire trucks needed some work done on it, and when it was finished, Paul picked it up.  The truck hung out at our house for a few hours before it was time for him to head in to work with it.

Jack got to start the fire truck.  My kids have had a lot of exposure to fire apparatus over the years, but this is the first time one of them has actually turned one on by themselves.

Our Little Friends are back with their mama now.  The leggings that I showed in last week's post turned out to be a little bit too big for them.

Nightgowns too small, leggings too big...  Ah well.  They're cute enough to pull of a rolled waistband, right?

Also from the sewing room.  Katie got a new nightgown when I realized that the Hello Kitty ones were small enough that they'd have fit our little guests, but Katie was still wearing them.  More than 2 years after I made them for her.  I have another one cut out for her, but I haven't managed to sew it together yet.

Big news for this guy this week!  Josiah has enlisted in the US Army Reserves, and will be leaving this month for boot camp!

I took Josiah and Sam out to dinner to celebrate.  I feel very... safe when I walk around between these guys.

You know those linky parties where you see all sorts of neat ideas, but most of them you never actually do?  Well, I saw the fingerprint dandelion on one of those, and printed it and we got out the stamp pad and did it!  I thought they turned out cute.

Eli's team had football pictures last weekend.  I've got sports pics of most of the kids now, and I need to come up with some way to display them.  Right now, most of them are taped up on the back of a bookcase that separates the sewing room from the master bedroom.  I need a blank wall and a bunch of matching frames.

Our California history book is backordered, but we've been working through a California coloring book, and we read about the Gold Rush in Story of the World this week.

You remember the Can Do Cubes I recently shared about?

We like them a lot, and everyone played with them as they passed through the school room, so I decided to get the word version.

We spent some time building, making sentences, and just enjoying the cubes.

Then we sorted them into "noun, verb, or other" bags.  We'll get more complex with this as we go along, but it was a fun way to begin.

Our Home Art Studio project this week was Asian Landscape.  We listened to Chinese music as we worked on it.

First, we drew our picture with Sharpies.  Then we colored them with watercolor pencils.

If you haven't played with watercolor pencils yet, you're missing out!  You color (left) and then you brush water over your picture to turn the pencil into paint (right).

Katie did this one with us, too.  Even though this is the "5th grade" art DVD, I find that the projects really appeal to a wide variety of ages, both younger and older than the suggested grade.  When we reviewed the 2nd grade DVD, Eli was in 8th grade, and it was not at all too "babyish" for him.

Thursday has become our library day, since the library is only open a couple days a week in the mornings.  We had lunch at the park and played for a while before going in to return last week's books and check out new ones.

We had more books than my card limit, so Jack got his first library card!  We usually get the kids their own card when they turn 12.  Jack turned 12 in April, so this worked out perfect for us.

Friday night was a home game, so we got all purpled up and went to watch Eli play.

Brianna (kneeling) is one of the water girls for the team.

And there's Eli.  Both JV and Varsity won their games this week.

Jack was more excited about the half time snacks I brought than anything else.

The girls mostly played in the dirt.

If you look closely, you can see Eli's team in the reflection of Josiah's glasses.  This will likely be the only game Josiah gets to see, since he's leaving soon.

On our way home, we stopped to pick up sandwiches for a late dinner, and the firefighters were there, doing the same thing.  One of the guys gave the girls sticker badges.  Jack (who got to start a fire truck just a few days prior) wasn't interested in a sticker.

Even though summer, the season of free play, is over, I'm happy to see free play still happening.

We also went to an adoptive families picnic, but I didn't take a single picture while we were there.  It was great to sit and talk with other parents who "get" adoption, and it was good for the kids to see other families like ours.  I got to see a couple friends I haven't seen in a while, and that was really nice.

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