Happy Halloween

Last night we carved pumpkins and roasted pumpkin seeds. Grace is already in her costume and can hardly wait to go trick or treating with her buddy Ava.

Have a Happy & Safe Halloween!

Sarah Brightman

This is just too... well... umm- just watch it!

Keeping Up

I find that I don't blog unless I have the photos to back it up. Silly, huh? Especially since my camera has had dead batteries and someone (Shawn swears it's one of the kitties) keeps unplugging the charger.

Well I have found a new addictive soc-net site (Facebook), after days of being glued to the TV and Internet searching for news on the fires. One came mighty close to us, and 3 different surrounding fires poured their ashen overlay out across our skies for several days. We were lucky though compared to the many who lost homes and were affected by the disasters. At least very few were injured or worse...

I've got 3 new lapbooks to upload photos of (A Rainbow of My Own, All About Me, and Daddy's Birthday Week- our own creation) and we started a new unit study (The Art Lesson from Homeschool Share) this week. Ava joined us for the first day and the girls made sidewalk chalk, which they have not been able to try out because the air quality has been so bad. Next week...

Dental Folder

Tomorrow is Grace's first dentist appointment, so today we created a Dental Folder. I downloaded a variety of printables and other resources from several of my favorite sites, and we put it all together. It will be something she can take to the dentist with her- it has several activities that she'll be able to do in the waiting room, and a couple of charts - one for brushing, another for first lost tooth, and some templates for coloring & writing about each visit to the dentist.

We only had blue paper, and some of the folds weren't exactly what we envisioned, but it came out lovely. I really think it is something that she can keep and can grow with for the next several years as she learns more about dental hygiene and caring for her teeth.

We also acted out a visit to the dentist: waiting in the waiting room (playing the Tic Tac Toe game in her new folder) taking x-rays, the oral exam, a cleaning; plus I gave her a numbing shot with rubber coated tweezers to give the pinch feel, and "drilling" with my own sound effects. It gave me a chance to really get in there and floss her good, too since she was in a reclining chair and willing to show off how long she could hold her mouth open! It was actually a lot of fun- she is looking forward to tomorrow.

Homeschool Study Report

A great bit of news out of Canada...

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/commerce.web/newsrelease.aspx?nID=4933

Friday Family Fun Night

We all got into making something I hadn't made in years- I don't know where the inspiration (or memory of how to even do it) came from, but we all had a great time. I never did finish my creation - a jack-o-lantern - I was too busy cutting squares of tissue for my beloveds!

Make a slide show, scrapbook or ecard

All About Me Lapbook

Earlier this week I was reading a message from one of my Yahoo Groups that led me to http://www.liveandlearnpress.com, a nice little website with "Learn N Folders" (yet another way of presenting graphical learning)... the sender of the message had just completed the All About Me "Learn N Folder" with her 5 year old son. Grace saw the photos and wanted to do one, so I printed off the pages (luckily it was one of their freebies) and we were finished 2 days later! She really enjoyed doing it, and I was surprised at how well it provided some great "in the moment" learning adventures.

Here it is (click on any picture to see it larger)...

The rest of the week we worked on our A Rainbow of My Own Unit Study from Homeschool Share. We decided to do a folder with this one, because it is a very short unit (meant for preschool really, although several of the "assignments" in the Activity Guide are geared for older kids). It isn't quite finished yet, just a little more artwork she wants to add, and I need a new glue stick to adhere the stuff we did.

We created a new fall board to display all the units we have studied this season so far...


And we played "hide the scarecrow"- one of us went out and planted the scarecrow she made, then took a picture of it. The other had to guess where it was by looking at the picture before they went outside to re-hide it. It was fun and made for some interesting pictures! Slideshow here... at Snapfish.

She also did her own personal lapbook- just for fun...