(And All My) Work Be Praise

Even though we don't make a big deal out of Santa at our house, it seemed like the logical thing to do to finish up the semester's animal studies with reindeer. Besides, if you can't use your red sparkly pipe cleaners in December, when can you?! Always, always with the googly eyes. And a red pompom nose, of course. Because, besides not really knowing much about Santa, they really didn't know anything about Rudolph, either, we got on youtube to watch the 10-minute movie from 1948  and also to listen to Gene Autry sing it. Levi has been pretty taken with the song since, humming when he doesn't know the lyrics and asking to learn it on the piano. We have a few more animals to study, scattered over the next few months, but will largely be concentrating on the human body for several weeks after the holidays. Should be interesting!

Due to the lethal combination of seasonal busy-ness and house-wide cruddy coughing, we didn't actually read any books about alligators, fiction or non-fiction. If I'd had my wits about me, we would have at least pulled The House on East 88th Street off the shelf to re-visit our beloved Lyle the Crocodile, but 'twas not to be this week. Still, our little craft was too cute not to share! ( Idea found here .) Two handprints: one with only three fingers painted, opened in a V to be the mouth, and another with all four painted and close together as the body. Peel-and-stick foam cut into triangles for the spiky skin, and of course the ever-present googly eyes! Peeling stickers: great fine motor development. I decided our alligators needed a riverbank scene, and the watercolors were already out, so I took a turn with the paintbrush. :) Top right: Levi's scattered spikes. Bottom left: Owen's meticulous straight line of spikes. Aren't pe...

Levi brought me a small pad of paper today, on which he had written his first story (as in, not just told a story out loud, which he does frequently). Mostly for the amusement of myself and my family, here it is in its entirety, including spelling errors: One day there was a happy liveing lion and a little chicken liveing quite happley. Suddenly, BOOM. BOOM. It was going to rain. The lion ran away. But the chicken looked around. He saw rain. Lion running through the rain. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM That yellow squiggle is lightning. BOOM So the chicken ran away; to find the lion. He met her at 2pm. a fire [???] Hey, lion; the lion was asleep. The chicken yelled ahhhhhh. Chicken yelling at lion. (Those blue lines are sound waves.) The chicken woke the lion up. The End.

I haven't given a full list of Levi's curriculum for this year, but I've been mentioning his subjects here and there. I don't think I've touched on his literature study yet: First Favorites Guide (Vol. 2)  by Veritas Press. We don't do this every week; I've mixed the books from this guide in with other books I want to spend time on. These literature guides -- a mixture of all sorts of activities, like answering questions (full sentences!), fill-in-the-blanks, write a postcard, color a map -- are really perfect for Levi right now. Most  of the time I'm a big fan of reading just to enjoy reading, plus a craft or activity to make it fun. Levi started reading so early, however, that I've never been quite certain about his comprehension level, and this is helping me know what to expect when he reads books on his own. Included in this guide are two selections from a series I'd never heard of: Nate the Great . They're longer stories but not yet...

I didn't figure out what to do for Advent until yesterday. The first day (November 30), I pulled out an old Thriving Family magazine I'd saved with an advent-activity calendar. The first day's discussion was good, examining the Advent wreath (evergreen because God always keeps his promises, purple candle because Jesus is King, etc.). When I finally flipped ahead to see what was coming, though, I realized that it was still a bit too old (and complicated) for my little people. It'll probably be great when they're 5-10 years old instead of 1-5. The second day (December 1), we thought we'd give the Jesus Storybook Bible plan a go. It's not really a "plan" so much as "read one story every day." There are twenty-one Old Testament stories and three stories surrounding Jesus' birth, so it works out quite nicely to cover 24 days of Advent. And since every Old Testament story ends with a reference to Jesus, it's very Christ-focused. Th...

This year, besides our thankful chart , we focused a little bit more on the history of Thanksgiving -- you know, Pilgrims and Indians and all that. It's fun that the kids are getting older and able to understand and remember some of these things! Levi had two lessons on Thanksgiving in his history curriculum , but we went beyond that and used this kindergarden unit on the History of Thanksgiving  as well. (It's kind of hard to see the link on this page; it's in pink, sandwiched between two rows of social media links.) The unit includes books (we got two from the library and didn't worry about the others), links to videos on scholastic.com (which the boys loved watching), craft ideas (which we never got to), and more. I highly recommend it, and will be watching this blog for future units! (Actually, that's not 100% accurate. I get e-mails from freehomeschooldeals.com , and immediately download anything that looks like it might be useful some day. It's been a f...