November, A Little Late :)

I figured I shouldn’t skip over our month of Thanksgiving so I’ll give you a little re-cap :). October starts the craziness around our house with my kiddos birthdays and that craziness just kept right on going through November. We actually stayed at our house for Thanksgiving and had some family come to us instead of us traveling back “home”.

We celebrated our thankfulness all month long with our turkey. We added feathers throughout the month with things we are thankful for. It was a fun way to record what we are thankful for and he also made a very cute decoration on our table.

Some of his feathers read:I am thankful for….

Mommy and Daddy..Our Warm House.. The Zoo Sunshine.. Our Veterans..My Wonderful Family..Keenan and Trinity..Football..Food

We had a great visit with my parents for several days before Thanksgiving. I actually made my first full Thanksgiving dinner, turkey and all the trimmings! I can’t take all the credit though, my Mom showed me the ropes of the whole roasting a turkey thing and dinner turned out DELICIOUS! As for the turkey…. it was way easier than I thought it would be, if you’ve never tried it, you should it was super easy.

My parents left Thanksgiving morning and Gabe, the kids and I watched a little bit of the parade and took naps and my in-laws arrived in time for dinner. We had roast,  ultimate mashed potatoes and a few other yummy sides. We also had a great visit with them and our boat now has a nice new custom made cover!! Gabe and my father-in-law worked on that the whole weekend and it turned out spectacular, much better than the blue tarp (that had a few holes) that wasn’t big enough to cover the boat!! Thanks Doug for all the time, effort and materials!!!

We also made a banner to remind us to give thanks! We learned about the first Thanksgiving and made Squato’s Snack.

Squanto helped the pilgrims learn how to hunt and plant good yielding crops. He taught them to plant two dead fish with three seeds of corn in little hills of earth. This would give them the best yield of corn.

Oreo’s=hill of earth                   Candy corn=corn                             Gummy fish=dead fish

We continued our lessons in life and in the books. Gabe helped Trinity make a scale for our math lessons on comparing weight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a hit with everyone! The kids enjoyed playing (aka learning) with it for several weeks.

We made pumpkin pie!!! (One of my favorites) Keenan helped stir the pie filling, it was very yummy! He loved it, with a little cool whip on top of course!

We had a good month of family and thankfulness and as is tradition in our family we put up our Christmas tree :)!

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving

It’s Apple Time

We have been studying apples, can you tell?

Apples Apple Graphs Apple Crafts                                           Stained Glass Apple

Apple Print Wreaths

Apple Books

Apple Tasting

Trinity ate it too fast to get a picture, but her favorite apples were the Pink Ladies that we found in the produce section of Meijer. I think the fact that they were “pink’ made them taste better ;).

 

Apple Food

Peeling Apples for Apple Crisp

Sliced apples for Apple Pie

Apple Cider

We have had a great time learning about and exploring apples.

To wrap up our unit study we visited an apple orchard (well, two to be exact)!

The first orchard we visited you weren’t allowed to actually pick apples or even walk through their orchard but we enjoyed their playground and enjoyed some apple doughnuts and an apple slush!

View Full Album

We also enjoyed looking at their section of a bee hive!It was really neat for Trinity to see actual bees doing their thing inside their hive, we also found the queen :).

Our apple studies just wouldn’t be complete without picking some so we visited another orchard that allowed U-pick. Daddy got to join us on this adventure since we went on the weekend!

View Full Album

Fall is a very busy season at our house, two birthdays and an anniversary, so this was a great way to kick off the season! Now we have been blessed with fall weather :) to make it even better. Next fall leaves, pumpkins and Halloween!!

We made it!

Week one of school was a success! What I mean to say is that we survived, Trinity learned some new things and Keenan enjoyed playing along side us and he learned some new songs:). We are all adjusting  wonderfully to the schedule, although I am trying to figure out how to still get other things accomplished (like housework, errands, etc.). I am working on a daily schedule on a two week rotation for keeping the house clean, or at least kinda clean (I hope to share it in a future post).

I am still excited about watching my own children learn new things!!! This week we reviewed shapes (describing, comparing,  drawing) started our word wall (including family names, a few sight words and color words) read books that contained our new sight words, played beginning sound games, created artwork with our shapes and read books (lots of them) to learn about story elements and journal about our favorite part.

We chased a frog around the yard, played outside, made banana bread, played board games, colored, found caterpillars and cicadas in the yard, went to the farm park and the grocery store. And the beauty of homeschooling is that we learned while doing all of these activities, traditional school activities as well as living our lives!

The Start of School

We started school this morning, after much begging from Trinity to do so!! She has been asking me for several weeks if we could start because she knew I was planning for it.  Well today was the day!! It went great and now I can work out some of the kinks that I knew I would run into. Some things you just can’t plan for until you actually start and know how things are going to go :). And then again there are some things that you just can’t plan for…..period!

Trinity’s First Day of School

Keenan insisting that he do the same thing as Trinity :)!

I am looking very forward to seeing where this journey leads us and I am very excited to see my own children “get it” (whatever subject or discovery “it” might be )! I hope to share some of what we do here, once we get into the groove.