Valentines party

I never got a chance to post about our Valentine's Day.  We started the day out with chocolate hearts on our oatmeal...

 A local homeschool group was having a valentine's day tea party, but it was too early in the day for us to attend and I thought our own would be just as much fun.  While the boys were napping, I decorated the playroom so that it literally dripped hearts... then spread out a table with heart shaped almond butter and jelly sandwiches, strawberries, fresh blueberries (special treat since they are not in season, although not in theme), and heart shaped watermelon.  The tea was actually chocolate milk...  all in all, a great way to wake up...

We participated in a homeschooler's valentines exchange by mail, so after we ate we opened valentines.  I gave the boys blank US maps, and they colored in the state each valentine came from before they opened it.  Next year, I am going to try to sign the boys up on different lists so their completed maps will be different because they were constantly comparing which states they had colored in -- I think the maps were more fun than the actual valentines!  Although, they certainly loved all the goodies they got too!  And, they've had tattoos on various parts of their bodies ever since!

starting over

It's been a few weeks since we started classical conversations, and 2 (maybe 3) more families are going to join us on the journey so we are going to start back at the beginning again.  It's ok, since we haven't really completed an entire week yet...  but we've gotten in the groove now so it should go well (although I'm still unsure about the latin...).  So, week one again -- here we come!  We meet on Mondays which works well since you wait for the group meeting to introduce the new work for the week and then reinforce it at home.  The thing I love the best about it is that it literally takes us about 20 minutes to do the recitations a day and then I feel freed up to do whatever we want without having to worry if Nic's learning enough...  its awesome!  And Joey is learning a ton too, although he comes and goes as we do the work...

There are pieces to the program that I don't understand.  The geography section is just memorizing place names, so I copied the map and blew it up... and we trace the place as we say the name every day.  I covered it in contact paper and while it doesn't totally erase every day... it erases enough.  My children WILL be able to read a map, locate wherever and hopefully have a better sense of direction than their mother... who can LITERALLY get lost in a room with one door!

A Valentine wreath...

It's time to change up our wreath again.  We reused the Christmas wreath and just changed it up to make it Valentines-y.  The old decorations came off easily leaving a few glue spots, but nothing they couldn't cover over with the new decorations.

We raided the local AC Moore to see what we could find (suprisingly, NOT a lot!) and came away with a bunch of wooden hearts to paint and a garland to cut up.  We painted and glittered the hearts ahead of time... and they came out so cute that I couldn't put them outside.  So, they're decorating the tree that just won't fall down and I scavenged around the house and came up with some flowers they could use on the wreath instead.

Joey wasn't in the mood to be photographed, but Vin filled in quite nicely.  I LOVE our new wreath!

changing it up...

It's a new year, and we're changing things up around here. While I am not 100% on board with a real curriculum at this age -- and even less sure of a classical one at that, the boys and I are about to start a voyage on the classical conversations ship. We've found a few friends that will sail along with us, and we're ready to ship off next week. We are starting with cycle 1 (the national group is on cycle 2, but we're not worried about syncing up with them).

We've also started online piano lessons using adventus childrens musical journey. So far they've both done the first two lessons. I need to find a way to include one lesson per day (they are quick lessons for now... they are just learning high keys/low keys/middle c. The high keys are the bird notes, the low are the whale notes and middle c is a hairy guy in a boat... In the beginning, you "read" the birds and whales like music. The third lesson is short/long and the beginnings of rhythm. It incorporates a few nice elements: Beethoven is his teacher, and he defines a lot of vocabulary along the way. They play a lot of classical music at the start/end of each leson/practice and let you know the title and author. I don't really like that the program isn't smart enough to know if you get a concept or not. Nic is sitting next to me doing lesson #3, and I don't think he gets rhythm at all, but they just passed him along -- it wasn't even obvious when he did it wrong or right and they let him advance to the next lesson. I would prefer he master the concept before advancing... For now...I'll say its worth $11.00/month -- much cheaper than a real instructor...

I've been thinking a lot about foreign languages as well. I took 2 years of Spanish in middle school, 4 years of latin in high school, a year of japanese in college and am fluent in... English. I REALLY want to teach my boys at least one other language (ideally a few!) and I've always wanted to learn Italian. It has been my intention until now for us to all learn Italian together (all my calendar materials are written in both). BUT, there are soo many resources around us for Spanish. There is an entire row of childrens books written in spanish in our library (two books total in italian). Lots of movies have both english and spanish versions (we have a few that have french options as well, but I have no desire to learn french). So much to ponder...

We're also going to start using handwriting without tears. Nic taught himself to write the capitals, but needs to learn the lowercase letters. ANd Joe doesn't write well at all, although he tries so hard. I think its time to do a few letter of the week activities and get some writing going on...

Lots to figure out... I'll probably find my groove right as summer hits... of course, the nice thing about homeschooling is that it really doesn't matter. We still have to fill our days with stuff... and since I refuse to do more than 1-2 hours a day on true school type stuff, we'll still have plenty of time for summer stuff...

A Christmas wreath...

I am loving my new tradition of having the boys make a wreath for the door for the different seasons.  We retired our fall wreath, and have made a Christmas one.  I let the boys pick out some decorations at the craft store, and while I was worried about what the finished product would be - I really shouldn't have.  They picked out two huge pointsetta flowers (which they later wouldn't use when I told them I'd cut the stems off), some sparkly stuff, some christmas balls, and a glittery plauque I bought for the occasion.

I helped them cut up the sparkly stuff and then they got busy with their glue guns... to create this:

Yes, they often do crafts while still in their pj's.  Regular clothes are a battle I rarely fight unless we're going out.  And, the boys were so proud of their creation and so enthusiastic in their posing that Vin (who was making sure that nothing fun fell on the floor while they were working) just had to jump into the picture as well!

Our advent tree...

The holidays have kept us uber-busy but there are a few things I want to write about so I can remember them for next year.  One of my favorites is our changing fall bucket list  tree which is now an advent tree.  All of the fall leaves have fallen and been removed -- what can I say? Once they were within easy reach, it didn't take the boys long to make them fall to the ground.  repeatedly. until they were mere pieces of what they once were...  They served their purpose so it was fine.

We made 24 ball ornaments to decorate the barren boughs instead.  I lined up a long strip of clear contact paper and let the boys go to town with christmas colored tissue paper.  Once they were done, I covered it with red, white and green construction paper.  We might have added a lil glue here to make sure it all stuck or not -- I don't remember now.  I traced a glass to make circles and cut them out and then we stuck them onto the tree to decorate it.  I used a sharpie to write on a few with things I wanted to do for advent.

Then I cut out a christmas tree shape from brown paper bags and had the boys paint it green.  We hung that from another wall, and every day we moved one ornament over.  Any time anyone asked when Christmas was, they were pointed towards that tree to count ornaments.  It was a game at first, then they stopped asking, and then it became exclamations of excitement when they could easily see how many were left.

The tissue paper pack had a few shiny silvery plastic-y type sheets, and we used that to cut out a star to stick on the top.

The ornament to-do's:
-Watch a Christmas movie
-Elf somebody
-Go Christmas shopping
-Decorate the house for Christmas
-Explore Smithville
-Write letters to Santa
-Have hot chocolate after playing outside in the cold
-Make some Christmas ornaments
-Christmas Baking
-Make presents for family
-Make snowflakes
-Decorate some Christmas foam shapes

A fall wreath...

Since one of my New Year's Resolutions was to decorate for each of the holidays, and since we haven't decorated anything since Valentine's Day...  we are going all out for fall/Halloween.  And one of the things I deemed we needed was a wreath for our door.  We started by gathering pine cones and acorns.  I bought a grapevine wreath and some silk leaves and we were ready to create.  The boys started by fancying up the pine cones.  We painted them with glue and dropped them into ziploc bags, sprinkled glitter, sealed and shook.  Even Vin got in on the action...

I didn't get any pics in progress - I feared for what would happen with all three boys working together...  We let those dry overnight and the next day we put the wreath together.   One glue gun, two boys (Vin was happily playing by himself while we worked) and some INTENSE concentration later...

 

We have a beautiful wreath for our front door...

The boys were so proud, but then thought it would be hysterical to make faces while I tried to get a group shot.