Nesting

 

The Boys Room!!!! This picture makes me so happy.  River and Ryder have been in the same room for about 3 weeks now and they are doing great.  It's like they were meant to share a room.  No jealousy, no missing their "own" rooms - the transition really has been fairly easy and I'm so grateful.  It's a good sized room so it works really well and they have plenty of room to play cars : )  Tony and I had a big toy clean out and packed a big bin of toys to rotate because there was no way to fit them all in their shared room, but I'm not ready to let them all go just yet especially with another little boy on the way.  Thanks to Nana, they have fabulous matching bedding (which also matches baby's bedding : )

 

Tony also hung these rain gutter bookshelves in their room so we'd have more bookshelf space for toys and the books would be more accessible and visible.  This is something I've been envisioning for a while and I'm beyond thrilled to see it come to life.  It's amazing how transforming even a simple thing like a book shelve can be. 

A Board Book shelf!  We have a million board books all over the house and while I'm thrilled that Rdyer loves them and reads them nonstop, I've been trying to figure out a better way to house them than just piled up in bins.  They are so short that it seems silly to use a whole book shelf for them, so I've been bugging Tony to help me figure out a way to make a smaller shelf for them.  While we were organizing the boys closet, we realized it would be a simpler solution that we thought.  Tony simply raised the shelf up a bit and... voila!  I got my board book shelf!  Happy Day!  Again, amazing the effect these bookshelves are having on me... 

I have been dying to get some see-through drawers in the top of the boys' closet to put their outgrown/ off-season clothes so that I know where they are for the next boy that needs them.  Too often, when clothes go into a bin in the basement, I totally forget about them or can't find them until after the season they would have been used for, etc.  Or worst, I end up buying something new because I didn't realize we already it packed up somewhere.  I call this the "boy store" and everything is labeled 2t summer, 18mos winter, etc.  I am so, so so happy to finally have this done!  Thank you to Nana for hooking us up with the awesome drawers!  

  

Baby boy's room: updated by Nana : ) Still waiting to put his name on the wall - when we finally see his little face and decide...

Freezer meals!!! I wasn't sure that we were going to get a free day to get this done, but this past Sunday God gave us a blessed open morning and just enough energy to prep 11 meals.  It was the best I had felt in a while.  (After prepping the meals, we all cleaned the whole house and then I went to SipNPaint with some girlfriends.  It was such a fulfilling day for me.)  They are frozen and ready for Tony to toss into the crockpot or oven.  

2 lasagnas, 2 red beans and rice, 2 sweet and sour meatballs, 1 chili, 1 spaghetti sauce, 1 tortilla soup, 1 chicken soup, 1 teriyaki chicken.

Homeschool Summary Spring 2014

HISTORY
The Story of the World Volume 2 - The Middle Ages
(chapters 21 - 36)
I am so incredibly thankful for this series.  We really build our entire home school curriculum around it.  We focus on 1 chapter a week.  Scout and my "reading time" centers around the recommended books that go with each chapter.  I read the Story of the World book to her like a novel Sunday night before bed and/or Monday morning.  Throughout the week she reads the books we check out from the library to me and sometimes we take turns reading to each other depending on the reading level of the books.  She reads the non fiction books related to that time period/region during "rest time" in the afternoon and then colors the coloring sheets while listening to the Story of the World audiobook.  Usually on Tuesday of each week we do the map work and narration together and then post the colored map for the remainder of the week for reference.  It has just been such a great fit for our family and for our weekly schedule and I'm so glad we "fell into" this curriculum so early on in our homeschooling adventures : ) I would like to do more of the projects for each chapter, but I think that will happen when River joins us in the next couple of years.  Our plan is to finish up The Middle Ages over the summer and then dive right into Volume 3, Early Modern Times by August.
 
Some of our favorite books from this unit:
Favorite Medieval Tales, Saint George and the Dragon, Lives of Extraordinary Women, Tales of Robin Hood, Liang and the Magic Paintbrush, Fa Mulan, The Paper Dragon, Clay Boy, The Littlest Matriyosha, Baba Yaga, The Legend of the Persian Carpet,The Duchess Bakes a Cake, The Adventures of Tom Thumb, Musicians of the Sun, Moon Rope, So Say the Little Monkeys,

      

READING
Scout's Independent Chapter Books: Moonlight on the Magic Flute,  Gooney Bird Greene series by Lois Lowry, The Never Girls series,  Because of Winn Dixie, Little House on the Prairie, Geronimo Stilton, The Caroline Books, The Three Swords for Granada, The Sword in the Tree, The Kanani books, The Samantha books, Boxcar Children book 2, Anne of Green Gables, The Isabelle books,

 
                
      
Family Read Alouds:  The Boxcar Children, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, The Story of the World - 2  The Story of the Orchestra, Lyle the Crocodile books, Mary Poppins from A to Z , Mary Poppins in the Park     


River:  Teach your Child to read in 100 Easy Lessons (lessons 65-80)

Independent Readers:  BOBs books, Levels 1 - 5 from Carrie Lane's "book boost" list
            
PHONICS/ WRITING/ READING
River:  Explode The Code level 1.5
River was VERY excited about starting these books after doing all 3 primer levels.  He LOVES it and it meets several needs and really simplifies things for me.  Scout had a tendency to rush through these and get into some bad habits without me realizing it, but River likes to go nice and slow and really makes sure everything is done well, so this series is working really well for him so far.

Scout: Writing With Ease - level 2 (weeks 21-36) FINISHED!

All About Spelling - Level 2 - steps 15 - 25  FINISHED!!!




                            
LANGUAGE
Scout:  First Language Lessons - level 2 (lessons 51-100) FINISHED!!!



MATH
Scout - Saxon Math (level 2, WB 2)  FINISHED!!!    Teaching Textbooks - level 3 (lessons 20-60)
River   Saxon K and MUS Alpha (lessons 1 -18)

FINE ARTS:  
Artists:  Rembrandt, Linnaeus, Gainsborough, Degas. Monet, Morisot, Da Vinci, Michelangelo
Music: The Orchestra /Composers (Baroque to Modern)

MEMORY WORK:
Scout and River:  Ephesians 6:13-24
                               CC Cycle 2 weeks 13-24
Scout:
The Goops, The Year, The Little Bird
CBS - Mark memory verses and Job memory verses

The Orchestra and Lyle the Crocodile

For the second year in a row we have started off the new year with a unit study of The Orchestra.  It feels like the prefect fit after studying Tchaikovsy and Handel throughout the holiday season.  The kids love, love getting to read through The Story of the Orchestra and listen to the excerpts that go along with each reading.  This year was even more fun than last year because River was able to understand so much more and Scout remembered a great deal from reading through the book last year.  Throughout our study we also read the following library books and had 2 Fantasia move nights (1 at the Hawkins house and 1 in Cheyenne with Nana and Poppa on "the big TV screen" : )

True to our tradition, we ended our study of the Orchestra by attending the Inside the Orchestra Concert at the Wildlife Experience.  We were invited to this concert 4 years ago by a dear friend and we haven't missed it since.  Scout and River drank up ever second of the concert and loved me so close to all the instruments we'd been studying.  Ryder actually blew me away by how great he was - I think he was a little overwhelmed by the whole experience; he just sat in my lap and stared at the violins and the conductor : )

That same dear friend that invited us to the Inside the Orchestra concert years ago, also invited us to see the spring Children's Theater production at the Arvada Center for Performing Arts.  We saw a production there last year and it was fantastic.  This spring's musical was Lyle the Croccodile, based on the popular children's book series.  

We checked out a ton of the Lyle books and read them in preparation for the play.  I'm glad that we did, because the play followed the storyline pretty much exactly and it was so fun for the kids to see the book "come to life."  We are always so impressed with the productions at the Arvada Center.