Start of Penguin week :-)

Today we started on the letter P and penguins. As I was looking at the blog today I realized that I skipped the letter H. I guess I don't have any photos from it other than this water color that Beloved did of horses for the children. The children painted pictures for the letter H and E as well, but they put them somewhere and I can't find them right now....go figure. Anyway....here are the pictures for Horses and Elephant (The elephant was fashioned after a picture in the book, Little Elephant Thunderfoot that I mentioned yesterday.)

Isn't the painting of the baby elephant adorable? I think it is. :-) And today the children practiced writing their letters in rice today. These pics are not the greatest, but it is all I have. They really enjoy doing this as they can "erase" their mistakes and try again and again.

I also wonder.....what I am doing wrong with this blog. It rarely ever gets any posts...I get posts on my main blog but it is as if no one bothers to come over to this one. I started the second one so the school posts would overshadow the other family activities we do....I dont' know......Just would like a comment every once in a while...you know?

Letter E

We are at the end of our lesson with the Letter E. (We finish up tomorrow) But today our home was invaded by ELEPHANTS! :-D See.....it all started with this one.

Then it was joined by a second one.....not so sure about the second one. Looks a little "iffy" to me. LOL

But then the elephants did tricks to earn some peanuts. Like, standing on one leg.

And here they are enjoying their hard earned peanuts. Oh wait.....that isn't an elephant....that's Sweet E! :-)

They wore these masks while acting out parts from a book called Little Elephant Thunderfoot as I read to them. It was pretty funny to watch. After that we did work on ready words and then painting with our excellent art teacher. I hope to show those paintings to you all tomorrow. :-)

Letter C

Boy, I haven't posted in a very, very long time. If you read my other blog you will already know that my husband lost his job on January 12th. We have covered the Letter C and the Letter H. I don't have many pictures because our camera is barely working these days. But, when we were covering the Letter C the children read a story called The Story of Ferdinand. They enjoyed the book and they even acted out the parts. They then chose this picture from the book.....

The children then painted their version of the picture. Here is Big T's.....

And here is Sweet E's picture.

And since Beloved has been home he has been a great help in our art department. Here is his version. I loved it so much it is now hanging up on the wall in our living room. :-)

So...there is a short version of what has been done. I hope to do much better in the coming weeks of keeping up with our school lessons. :-) Blessings to you all

Onward........

and upward! No...that doesn't sound right. LOL But we are moving on with our school work. We started with the letter C yesterday and may I say, I don't think this was a good week to start my new "diet." LOL :-) For, with the letter Cc, we learn about Cows. Yep...cows. Here is a picture of the children working on their Cc flashcards yesterday.

Even Little E got his school work done. He loves playing with these stacking pegs. He had to have at least a peg in every hole and if he didn't like how the color scheme was looking he would pull that peg out and replace it with another color until he found the look he was going for. :-)

At one point he gave me this look like, "Really Mama? I am trying to concentrate here."

But then today....today was the fun day. They got to make butter all by themselves (Well, I did have to help just a little.) We don't have access to milk from our very own cow. Don't think the neighbors would appreciate it. ;-) But using the cream from unhomogenized milk would work......but I like to leave that in with our milk. So I purchased some cream separately, we put it in a jar with a tight lid, and went to work! The children loved shaking the jar.

Checking to see if it is ready......

Nope...needs some more shaking, so Little E decided he needed to take matters into his own hands.

But then he realized he really wasn't big enough to do this, so he passed it back off to his brother.

Looks like we finally have butter!

Poured off the butter milk and.....

Spread some fresh butter onto crackers. Yummy! The children loved it, but I had to cut them off. Didn't want them downin' the whole batch we just got done making.

See, I told you this was the wrong week to start. One of the next lessons we are supposed to have a "dairy" party. We bought three different kinds of cheese, yogurt, some unhomogenized milk, and of course....ice cream sandwiches. Yummy. Why...oh why did it have to be this week. LOL!

Week G

The children learned the letter Gg this week and the topic was goats. We didn't get a lot into goats in general, but more of farm animals and babies and their mamas. I know this post is ridiculously short, but it's all I got. :-) Yesterday the children worked on puzzles. Big T is working on a puzzle that pairs up the mother's with the babies and Sweet E has a block puzzle with 6 different possibilities for pictures of baby animals. Tomorrow we start the letter Cc and Cows. Then the week after is Hh and horses. So these three weeks are all tied together with farm animals.

Week I

Well, we just finished out the Ii (insect) week today. Yes, it turned into about a 2 week unit instead of one, but we had all three children sick last week (still getting over it), traveling, and family gatherings...I think we will be fine. :-) We talked about ants, ladybugs, inchworms, spiders, and other sorts of insects. We even have some in our home. See..... ;-)

Aren't they cute? I never thought I would say that about insects. ;-) We have centipedes, ants, spiders, and even ticks. The children had fun making these and choosing the colors. Well, I better get ready to start the next unit tomorrow.

Insects.....

This week the children are having so much fun this week learning about insects and the letter I. On Wednesday we talked about the ant and the ant farm we had. All the ants are dead now, but the last one didn't die off until last week. They lived much longer than we expected. Anyway, yesterday we talked about the ladybug and that it is a predatory insect. So we decided to make our own ladybugs from rocks. The children chose the two small ones and we painted the larger one together. I know...they look more like Asian lady beetles, but that is what happens when we don't have black paint. Still haven't figured out why there are two shades of blue in the paint set we bought, but not black. You can make the other blue color by mixing paints. Oh well, I just need to go buy black paint. The children are happy with how the ladybugs turned out anyway. They want to put them out in the garden. I will put them on our back porch till spring and then I will have them put the bugs outside then. :-)