Wordless Wednesday

taken by Celeste

Book Sharing Monday

Book Sharing Monday is back! I have selected a book about the Autumn Equinox, which was just last Tuesday, September 22.

"The Autumn Equinox: Celebrating the Harvest" is written by Ellen Jackson, illustrated by Jan Davey Ellis. It is a very informative book about the rituals surrounding the coming of fall and the celebrations of harvest, throughout history and the world.

"Long ago, the Chinese relied on the movement of the phases of the moon to tell them when planting and harvesting should begin. The Chinese called the moon the Queen of Heaven, and they celebrated her birthday soon after the autumn equinox. To prepare for this holiday, special birthday cakes, round as the moon, were baked from the newly harvested rice."

Outdoor Hour Challenge ~ Autumn Series ~ Fall Tree Study

We chose to study the new birch tree that we planted this summer in our front yard for this challenge. We will observe this tree over the next year, at each season. This birch tree is quite small right now, but we have big hopes that it will grow big and tall!
We decided to include its height on our nature journal page (6 ft 4 in.).
Over the next year, we will discover more facts about this beautiful tree and share what we find here.

Outdoor Hour Challenge ~ Autumn Series # 1 ~ Cattails

We are continuing with the Outdoor Challenge, the Autumn Series started while we were away, so we are catching up!
The first one is about cattails. I honestly didn't know if there were cattails within walking distance from our house, so I asked Andre if he had seen any while playing outside. I was surprised when he said "yes!", he told me they were near the fort that they had made and played around last year, which is just by the farmer's field near our house. He offered to take us there :)
Adrienne took charge of filling out the information for our nature journal, and I took pictures.
There wasn't any water at the foot of the cattails, but the ground appeared damp. It was a small patch, growing in a ditch, next to the farmer's field.
We observed how some cattails were in the process of changing, some were deep brown while others were lighter brown, and some almost white.
We took two cattails home to dissect. We broke apart the cattails and found all the soft seeds. Adrienne suggested the seeds would make a very confortable pillow in a fairy house...

Mystery Caterpillar

We have been trying to identify this caterpillar..but without success.
Anyone know what he is?

Thanks!

Our Vacation

Our vacation was perfect. The weather was almost perfect, only had rough seas the first night on the cruise and heavy rains on our drive back home.
I took over 300 photos, so it was difficult to choose just a few to share! I created a slideshow that you can visit by clicking on the link below:




The Disney Wonder is a wonderful cruise ship for families. Lots of fun activities for the kids, and quiet (if you want it) for the adults. To be honest, whenever our kids were busy having fun in their programs, my husband and I didn't really know what to do! We're just not used to it! We did enjoy some quiet moments by the swimming pool and walks on the beach at Castaway Cay.
Castaway Cay is Disney's private island in the Bahamas and it's my favourite place to be. We wondered if anyone would noticed if we "accidentally" missed the boarding call at the end of the day...The boys went snorkeling together for the first time, and Andre loved it. The kids and I participated in a crab race. We chose our crab's name and cheered him on as 8 crabs raced to the finish line! Lots of fun stuff..We kept away from the high heat in the early afternoons by visiting the movie theatre on board, seeing Up and G-Force for the first time, both in 3D.

We were up late every night..a pirate party one night, followed by a viewing on the top deck's huge TV screen of the Pirates of the Carribean movie, another night was a first..watching the soon to be released blue-ray version of Snow White, seen outside, top deck, under the stars..another night was a Broadway-style show..

We also lucked out with our dinner mates, we were paired up with another family, with 3 children from Texas, and had great dinner conversations!

So much fun on board the Wonder, my post could go on and on about all that we did!

The other half of our vacation was a stay at another Disney property, this one on the Atlantic coast of Florida, in Vero Beach.
Vero Beach is a beautiful, relaxing spot, with still lots of fun stuff to do with the kids. A great pool with water slide, mini-golf, a small splash-pad, and of course the beach!

I took part in a beach clean-up, picking up garbage as part of the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup. I was the only guest that showed up for this activity, which I thought was sad, but I really enjoyed spending the time to help out with the resort staff.

I also went on a nature beach walk where I witnessed the Disney Animal protection people (can't remember their title!) dig up an empty sea turtle nest. They do this after they know the eggs have hatched to count the eggs and log the information with the state of Florida. That nest had 128 eggs! Only 3 were unfertilized, all the rest had hatched! It was amazing to see.

During both of these early morning activities, my kids were catching up on sleep! We had many late nights on the cruise!!

We spend one day with my husband's grandfather, his wife, and grandaughter, and my husband's aunt also came up. They all live in Florida and it was so great to see them and spend the day together.

We are back!

Just arrived back last night, catching up on everything and will update with lots of photos soon...

Vacation time!

We will be on holidays until September 22. See you soon with lots of photos!

Wordless Wednesday

Before we leave...a homeschooling report

I enjoy reading other homeschooling blogs and their weekly reports, so I thought I would try sharing a little of what we do.
I keep track of what we do every day in a Lesson Plan Book. It is what works best for us. When we first started homeschooling in 2005, I used to write down what we were supposed to do, more like traditional lesson plans, but found after that first year that it was really not helpful to us. So I quickly switched to writing more of an overview of the year, broken down by subjects and child. We knew what our plans were, and how often each subject needed to be done to complete in that school year.

I had decided that since we were starting in August because our vacation in September, we would start with just the bare necessities to slowly ease into our routine. We did want to have most of our days free to enjoy the summer!

Here is a report of our last month of "school".


Math:


Adrienne = Pet Store Math, completed May, June, July, August, and September.
Andre = Singapore Math, completed lessons and corresponding exercises (28 to49)
Celeste = played a variety of counting games and started calendar work with me

Handwriting Practice:

Adrienne : practiced traditional cursive handwriting in Happy Scribe copybook (20 pages)
Andre : practiced italics cursive in Happy Scribe copybook (20 pages)
Celeste : completed all the handwriting readiness sheets from Donna Young website, and the tracing drawings from the same site (she loves those!), also practiced making letters of the alphabet with her Wikki Sticks

Grammar:

Adrienne: completed lessons 2.12 to 3.7 in Growing with Grammar

Writing:

Adrienne: completed 2 book reports on novels read (The Case of the Missing Marquess, The Robe of Skulls), also completed the Sweet Inspiration assignment for Roald Dahl Day
Andre: completed book report on Magician in a Trunk (Time Spies series) and the Sweet Inspiration assignment, wrote a letter to her pen pal.
Both also worked on writing all the mini books for our Ocean lapbook.
Celeste: wrote a letter to her pen pal (told me what she wanted to say, I wrote it and she copied it on her letter).

Reading:

Celeste: completed with me the first 19 lessons in The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, played on Starfall
Adrienne: read many novels, graphic novels and magazines on her own, and read aloud selections from the Elson Reader.
Andre: also read novels, graphic novels and non-fiction books on his own, along with selections read aloud to me from the Elson Reader. Andre also reads a lot of picture books to Celeste.

Science:

We learned about the Ocean, using books, dvds and the internet; completed an Ocean lapbook together.

Art:

Adrienne and Andre : Completed the Drawing Level Exercise in Drawing with Children, also completed the cactus pastel/glue project.
Andre completed a couple of drawings following instructions in how-to books (shark, Egyptian eye)

Nature Study:

We learned about five different animals near us by completing the challenge from Outdoor Hour challenge

There is our report. It seems like a lot maybe, but we had every afternoon free! What I have enjoyed the most over the past month, is seeing my children get back to reading again, for pleasure. They didn't read as much while they were attending public school, and it's just nice to see them enjoying that again. My oldest daughter is devouring books again. We have to keep going to the library for more every couple of days! My son is also back to picking up books on his own, and discovering new subjects that spark his interest (ocean at the moment!).

We will soon be leaving for our vacation, so this blog will be quiet for about two weeks.
See you soon!

Book Sharing Monday