Letter A

A is for Art
and Amazing friends!

A friend stopped over to visit today. The children all did some sand art together. I put some colored sand (stuff I got from the dollar store) in a container and gave the children caps with some glue in them and q-tips to paint the glue on small cards (card stock cut in quarters). They painted with the glue then sprinkled color sand over the glue and shook over the tray to take off the extra sand.

Vicky gave me permission to post picture of all our children crafting together. I am so excited about this! I think it is wonderful that I can share some pictures of my children doing things with other children that are around the same age they are. I worry our family members that live out of the area might think our children are never with other children because they are homeschooled. Vicky is also a homeschooling mom she has 4 beautiful, kind, and wonderful children.

Aren't her children cute?





This one below reminds me of when I was in elementary school. I remember my art class having short round tables, glue, and colored sand to work with. See it is just like school only it is in our living room. LOL! LOOK! in this picture every child is working hard on this project.
Below is a picture of some of the finished projects. Vicky if you are reading this I have your children's pages. I put them up on the kitchen table to dry and keep Demi from messing with them but then I forgot to give them to you before you left.
I love it when my children get to do things with other homeschoolers! I took the camera outside when we all when out to play but I enjoyed sitting on the porch visiting with Vicky so much I forgot to take any pictures.

This sand craft looked like it worked well for all the children. I like crafts that can be used for little and older children. If you don't like sand in your house you might want to do this outside. I never care if we have sand on the floor so it isn't a problem for me but I thought I should write to let everyone know some sand will spread out on the table and floor.

Groundhogs Day

Our Groundhogs Day. We got up early and watched TV for what felt like forever to see what the Groundhog had to say. He said early spring so we headed outside to take a look. We looked for a long time and we agree we couldn't see our shadows anywhere.

This is my happy son.

My darling daughter.

Looking for shadows.

No shadow here.

Look I see something.....
Animal tracks! This is my daughter pouting because she had to come inside.


We made groundhog masks, shadow crafts, and puppets but I didn't remember to take pictures.

This is Demi writing at the table. She wants to do school with her brother now. This is making school time a little harder. I will try to write about how I work with that next time.

Foaming soap play. A few weeks ago she cried when she saw the can of foaming soap. I was worried about her new sensory quirk. My hubby worked on it until she learned that soap play was fun not scary! LOL!
We had company most of the afternoon that day. After they left my son had enough time to make this! HOORAY! Our first snowman of the season. He stood about a foot high! LOL! He does have 2 button eyes one is lighter in color making it hard to see.

Music

This is silly I know. This is one of our music boxes. This one has toys from the dollar store in it. We use them all the time. In my house we use musical instruments we make ourselves from bottles, beans, tissue boxes, rubber bands, toilet paper cores, paper plates, and stuff like that more than any of our store bought musical stuff. We use musical toys from the dollar store almost as much. This is the sad part.... The expensive stuff we have doesn't get used much! I wish I would have saved all that money!! We are not the best at making music! Some would say it sounds like LOUD NOISE! We do have fun with it. I like to use music to break up our day. Right now my daughter has learned slow/fast, loud/soft, names of instruments,and to clap or stomp to the music. We have fun with it if she doesn't want to play along we all will follow her lead. My son uses a simple learn to play piano book and a cheap keyboard ($5-$10 from walmart) for some of his music lessons. He also has a learn to play the recorder set. I DON'T ever FORCE music lessons. I let the children have music time when they choose. I do suggest it often and most of the time they say yes. I feel that if I keep it fun that eventually they will find an instrument that they want to play and they will enjoy it. My son is 6 and the fine motor in playing an instrument is hard for him still so I try to keep it short and fun.

Our favorite music time is "Parties". We have what we call a music party often. When my DD uses the potty we have a music party. After hand washing and cheers of joy she marches us over to the music boxes and we all pick out a small instrument (noise maker) to play. She gets to lead us around the house in a marching band kind of thing. Some would say our "potty parties" don't sound like a marching band at all. LOL! We have music parties for lots of things. When my son finishes a level in a school book, when he gets a perfect score on a hard page, birthdays, any holiday (even flag day), and my favorite manners! When I see a child using good manners we will have a marching band with the polite child at the front leading us. It does seem to show my children that I am very happy with what they did and encourage them to do it more. My son likes to shout out STOP, MARCH, TURN RIGHT, TURN LEFT,HALT, and TO THE SIDE kind of thing when he leads us. When hubby is leading our marching band he likes to have us step up on chairs and jump over toys and duck under tables along the way. I like to sing when I lead I try to add in some dance moves! LOL! We must be a goofy thing to see!

Today.... The up side of homeschooling.

The I get to cut paper and make my children think I can do magic! LOL! My son thinks fringe cut from construction paper is magic! This is the first of our 3 kings. I hope my son will want to make the other 2 himself tomorrow. This isn't a craft I came up with on my own it came from a craft book..... Ice-cream cones or something like that. I will look at the name of it tomorrow if I think about it. My MIL gave me the book it is one she used with her boys.

We are reading about Norman Rockwell for our art studies. It doesn't fit into the time period we are learning about in our other subjects (Late Renaissance/Early Modern 1600-1850) but my son likes to look at Norman Rockwell's work so that is who we are learning about this year. We read how his art always stressed the positive. I got to talk to my son about being positive. We even roll played several times taking turns on how to find the positive if this or that happened. I decided not to go get out our art book to do a drawing class when we finished reading about N.R. I thought instead of reading about "how to draw we could try to copy "My Studio Burns" by Norman Rockwell. We spent time talking about our thought on how he told a story of the fire. You can see what we tried to copy http://tinyurl.com/ydxecg . This is my son's version. It is kind of hard to see but he is 6 and not a great artist yet. LOL!

My son was laughing. It was nice to talk about a fire and not have my son afraid! My son was happy to know that all the family bikes got rescued. I am glad that we went off course and skipped our planned lesson. I know that anyone who knows me in real life is laughing at that line...... I am a person who always gets off track when it comes to our days. We get done all I plan each week but we often take a round about way of getting it done. We use the Classical method for education but I try to never let the perfect unschooling moments skip by. I think that many people who use the Classical method would disagree with me saying that is how we homeschool. I should clarify.... We follow the book The Well Trained Mind. We follow what the book says to teach. I DON'T teach it the way the lessons say. We learn lots of the stuff by jumping, hopping, playing games and such. My children are very active and I guess I am not as structured as some other homeschoolers. We do learn all the stuff in the books (I don't even move ahead on a spelling lesson until my son knows every word) but how we learn the stuff isn't always by writing on paper reading books sitting at the table. This is what is working for us right now. Ask me next month and I might not think the same way I do now. I will try to post the down side of our day tomorrow. I need to get to bed.