New school year - new goal

So today was the first day of school! *ahem* Notice how I'm totally ignoring the fact that I haven't been here since April *ahem* I can't believe I have THREE school kids now!!!! I haven't taken a coolio picture of all our school materials yet - but I will after the rest of the haul arrives.

We decided to switch gears a bit and not do My Father's World with the older two girls this year. Instead, we are using a mix of things - Mystery of History, Apologia Anatomy, Bob Jones reading, Time4Learning, Lutheran Study Bible and the small cathechism to name a few. Sadey is doing MFW's Kindergarten program though. We're only on day 1, but so far so good.

Day 1 wrap up: Bible, Art, Music and PE for the older two and discussed day 1 of Creation with Sadey. She also learned about the letters Aa and Bb and went on a scavenger hunt for the number 1. She loved that. She started her Creation Book today. I could not convince her that God made light without making the sun even though she knows that He made the sun on day 4....so she added it to her picture. I can see how that would torment her little noodle.

First Day of School 2009- 2010

And we're off!

I can't believe it's already time for school to start. It seems like we just finished up the last year. Oh wait, we did :) We had a short break, but now we are ready to get moving again. We are using My Father's World again this year. We focused on American history last year with Adventures. This year we are using MFW's Exploring Countries and Cultures and working on world geography with a special focus on missions and Bible translations. Here are some of the books we'll be using as the year progresses.


We had our first day on August 3, 2009. The girls were uber excited and were dressed and ready to begin long before I rolled out of bed in the morning. Here they are for our traditional first day of school picture. Cute, aren't they?

Sadey is in Pk4 this year. For those of you who are as clueless about these things as I used to be, that just means that she's a 4 year old preschooler. We'll be using a combination of things, but mainly Before Five in a Row and Letter of the Week. I'll come back later and post links to both of those programs - too lazy to do that right this moment :)


Hard to believe it, but Delaney is officially a 2nd grader! She's doing ECC with Sydney, but she's also working hard at math and language arts this year. We are using Math U See, Primary Language Lessons, Children Liberty Press's Nature Readers and we'll be doing something for spelling. Not quite sure what yet, but definitely something.


Sydney is officially a 5th grader. It's her last year as an elementary student *sniff sniff* She's doing ECC, and will also be using Writing Strands, Intermediate Language Lessons, Math U See and...something for spelling. I should probably choose a curriculum before the year gets away from us.

We have our books and took some pictures - guess we're ready to get this school year started! Stay tuned. I hope to actually post more updates this year.

Veteran's Day Parade (11/11/08)

The girls marched in their first parade this year! And no Angie, I'm not counting the lame event that Sydney and Lauren did with the ballet class as a "parade." That was just sad. But I digress...
This was the big Veteran's Day Parade and it really was quite large! I think we were like the 115th group or something like that. Thankfully the weather was nice and the girls were all well-behaved and the whole event afforded a great opportunity to learn about veterans, service to our country and patriotism. Homeschool and Girl Scouts. A perfect marriage.

Awwwww. Aren't they cute?




Here's Delaney with her Daisy troop. They may be small in size, but they are HUGE on energy.

Here is most of the girls' troop posing with their leader (in the green shirt). Sydney (green vest, pig tails) and Delaney (front and center) had so much fun.


I promise that they were more organized when the parade actually began. Here they are trying to figure out where everyone is supposed to stand and practicing their Veteran's Day chant.

I don't have any pictures of Sadey, but she had the luxury of being pushed along the mile long route in her stroller while she and mommy passed out candy. Next year she'll be a Daisy and she WILL be marching :)

Tyndall Air Force Base field trip (11/13/08)

One of the coolest things about living where we do and being involved in the homeschool group we are in is that we are close to the Air Force base and actually know a few of the fighter pilots. One of them was nice (or crazy - you decide) enough, to get us onto the base so we could tour the hangers, check out the fighter jets, visit the control tower and "play" with the flight simulators. The kids had a BLAST!

Because it's an AFB, I couldn't take a lot of pictures, but I did snap a few.

Inside the cockpit of the F-22 Raptor

Delaney LOVED being inside the jets. I don't think I've ever seen her smile bigger. She says she wants to be a pilot when she grows up *eek*


This is a shot of the air field taken from the deck of the control tower. Here's your vision test...See that row of trees? Behind that is East Bay and behind THAT is another row of trees. We live just behind the other row of trees. Can you see our house? :) Seriously though, we do live just across the Bay from the AFB which means we get to see and hear a lot of jets. We LOVE it.

You can tell F-15s from F-22s by looking at the tails. I may be wrong, but I think it's the F-22s that lean while the F-15s stand up straight. I hope I got that right, but it might be the complete opposite!

Here's the family standing on the aforementioned deck of the control tower. Notice Sydney holding on to the bulding for dear life. She has developed her mother's love of high places *ugh* And look how happy B and Sadey are....

That's because Sadey hated nearly every minute of this field trip! She was so freaked out by the loud noises that she cried the whole time.

Thank goodness Dad came along so, between the two of us, we were able to keep her somewhat subdued. But poor B though! He took the day off work for the field trip under the promise of getting to try out the AF flight simulators. Sadly, we ran out of time right before it was his turn!!! He was a trooper though. No temper tantrums from Dad.

What a beautiful sight

On the surface, these may just look like pictures of a kid eating lunch. But if you've ever had to deal with severe food allergies, you will understand how beautiful these pictures truly are. Here is my "milk, soy, egg, potato, chocolate, raw tomato and red food dye #40 allergic" 3.5 year old daughter eating a peanut butter sandwich for the first time in her life. Notice she is also eating yogurt!

We've been trialing her on milk products for the last few months and so far she's doing great. She's never had a problem with peanuts, thank the Lord, but bread has always been an issue* because it's always made with either soy or potato (unless you want to pay $7 a loaf for the allergen free stuff). This week we got brave and decided to try some bread with soy - and she did great! She loved it so much that she wanted another sandwich for dinner last night and lunch again today.

*Yes I know I could have made the child some allergen free bread - but that just wasn't ever going to happen.

School days

I'm in the process of posting about the last couple weeks of school, but in the meantime, here are a few pics of what we've been working on.

This year we are studying the colonization of America and spent the last few weeks reviewing where the first, non-native, Americans came from. Sadey loves the pointing stick. Above, she was showing us where she thought Jesus walked.

Sydney has taken over responsibility for choosing our "book basket" books. Those are library books that relate to the weekly topic that the kids can read at their leisure. They are not required reading, but since Sydney gets to pick them out and because she loves to read just about anything, you can usually find her looking through the book basket in her spare time. In the picture above, Sydney is reading a book with short biographies about the signers of the Declaration of Independence. (And yes, the couch IS ridiculously ugly - but it grows on you once you're over the initial shock.)

Delaney is a 1st grader this year!!! I keep saying it over and over because it seems hard to believe. At first, she struggled with the responsibility of having to read and write more on her own, but she's settling in and has made great improvements in both areas. In the picture above, she is copying her weekly memory verse. Nothing like knocking out Bible, memory work and handwriting in one easy assignment.

Buh-buh Boat!

Buh-buh Boat went off without a hitch! My goal for this year is letter and sound awareness - not mastery. And it's a good thing because Sadey insisted that B said "aaaaah" for most of the week and is now convinced that the letter is actually called "buh buh beeeeeee". It's a good thing she's cute.

I've kind of abandoned Heart of Dakota and am doing my own thing. I wasn't overly thrilled with the way the program is put together for this age group. I've heard good things about the other programs, but this one just wasn't a good fit for us. I do love the Singing Through the Bible cd that came with it. I believe that's available through Focus on the Family - but haven't checked into it. I think we'll just keep reading through the preschool Bible and listening to the cds and I'll pull my own craft and activity projects together to round things out for her.

I was also planning to use HOD with my co op class, but it's just too hard to condense 5 day's worth of activities into 1 two-hour class. Live and learn.

This week in co op, however, we were working on the letter B and the color red. We began the day with a Bible story about Noah and his ark (a very big boat). The kids did an awesome job of coming up with lots of B words like bananas, bugs, baby and buggy. We also read a Veggie Tales book about colors. The kids all seemed to know that Bob (the tomato) was "very red." After story time we got out the paints. This is by far the messiest part of our day, but who doesn't like to fingerpaint with 14 three year olds?!? After fingerpainting we made our butterfly craft. I'll have to post a picture later because they turned out sooooo cute. Then we had our snack time and took a nature walk. It was pretty hot outside, but the kids had fun. They were so excited to have spotted a lizard as we were first exiting the building. We went on to listen to the wind, feel the rough rocks, find a stream behind the building, a butterfly perched on a flower and a spider making a web. Talk about a great walk! We'll definitely be doing those more often - only maybe we'll focus on finding "letter of the week" things as much as possible.

I'm so grateful for the opportunity to teach this group of preschoolers. It's a lot of work, but a good reinforcment for Sadey since we are going over the same letter we are learning here at home. The kids are so much fun (most of the time LOL) and it's nice to see Sadey playing with some kids her own age. It's a win-win kinda' thing.

Ah-Ah-Adam

Speaking of hard to believe - Sadey began preschool this week! She was so excited about getting to do school work like her big sisters. We are using Heart of Dakota's Little Hands to Heaven curriculum and it's been going well. We began the week with her having no clue what an A was, progressed to her insisting that A says "meow" and just this morning she told me that Ariel was taking a nap on her A. Progress, no?

She did a lot of coloring, cutting and pasting but had the most fun just walking on her giant letter A and making the letters with her body. We read about Creation and learned a new song from her Singing Through the Bible cd called "God Made the Universe." It's a catchy little song - all the girls loved it and I even find myself humming it throughout the day :)

Stay tuned for buh-buh-Boat......