What a Year It's Been - Andy

Andy - Joseph and a shepherd

 A Little About Me:
Name: Andy
Age: 5
Favorite Color: Blue
Favorite Food: Peanuts
Favorite Activity: Scootering
Favorite Book: Joke Books

Andy loves all things about farming - especially the big machinery

 Highlights from 2011

Greatest Lesson Learned: Exercising
Hardest thing of the Year: Writing
Favorite Memory: Playing in the snow with cousin Brynne
What I loved most about 2011: Watching Robin Hood

Excited to do everything his sisters do.

 Looking Forward to 2012

Want to Learn: To build a spaceship
Want to get better at: Riding Scooter
Biggest Goal: Learn how to Read

My Mr. Fix it - or at least he tries to be.

What A Year It's Been - Kara

Happy New Year!  Okay, I know it's January 2 - but hey at least I'm not a whole month behind.  I thought it would be fun to share something from my kids their favorites from 2011 and their hopes for 2012. 

Kara - a shepherd and the Inn Keeper

Today I'll start with my eldest child - Kara Beth

A Little About me:
Name: Kara
Age: 7
Favorite Color: Rainbow
Favorite Food: Candy
Favorite Activity: Playing with my new Penguin (Thank you Aunt Sharon!)
Favorite Book: The Boxcar Children

An unused blackberry turned Mp3/Kindle/Camera/Video camera

Highlights from 2011
Greatest Lesson Learned: Math
Hardest thing of the year: Obeying (I'm so glad she was honest here)
Favorite Memory: Vacation
What I loved most about 2011: Getting a scooter

Contemplation - Kara loves losing herself in the beauty of God's Creation

Looking forward to 2012
Want to Learn: How to do cartwheels
Want to get better at: Handstands
Biggest Goal: To read all of the book Little Women

A wonderful servant (when it's her own idea)

Bugs, Lizards, and Weeds Oh My

This has been a fantastic week of school.Click the title to read this post.

Sugar Beets

The time has come to begin clearing out my garden.  This is a great lesson for the girls in beginning homemaking.  Thursday Lydia helped me harvest the beets.  We kept the taproot attached and then cut the stems to about two inches.  We brought them into the house where Kara washed the beets and placed them in the blancher.

We then boiled the beets until the skins were able to be rubbed off.  Both Kara and Lydia helped me skin the beets and then I chopped them and placed them in the pint jars. Adding a 1/2 tsp of canning salt to each pint then sealing it with a lid and ring.  This is all the girls were able to help me with.  I am always a bit nervous about using the pressure canner, so no kids are allowed in the kitchen when the pressure canner is building pressure up.

This was the first time I've used the pressure canner this year, so I had to do a quick review of what I was doing (by calling my very experienced gardening/coupon friend!).  I processed the pints for 30 minutes at 10 pounds of pressure (or 11 pounds on my canner since the extension office told me my gauge is off by one pound when pressure gets to 10 pounds).

After all the beets were processed we have 20 lovely pints of beets.  Now, hopefully the kids will enjoy eating them :)  I don't think I've ever fed them beets before - Total cost $1.40 for 20 canning lids (I already had the jars and rings, and the lids were purchased using $1 off coupons for .$69 each).

Homeschooling has begun

We have started our schooling up again.  If you are interested in following our schooling adventures, click here or on the homeschooling tab at the top of the blog.

From Reading to collecting bugs, we hope to make this school year a great year for our family. Please share any great activities or helps that you have used in homeschooling.

Home Schoolers Alert

For those of you who home school your children, or are planning to home school your children, please listen to this broadcast from Focus on the Family.

California's Threat to Homeschooling Families

Friday, March 07, 2008

A recent California ruling declared that parents have no constitutional rights to home school their children. What does that mean to you!? Join Dr. James Dobson and learn how these dangerous court decisions cut straight to the heart and soul of the American family.

Here is another website explaining the decision in California. I would write more about this right now, but my time is limited and I wanted to help you be aware of this.

Homeschooling Hump Day

Okay, I had intended to post this last week, but never got around to typing it up. My friend Carrie is posting about Homeschooling every Wednesday. Since Kara is only three, we are only beginning to enter the realm of Homeschooling. Here are a couple of my favorite resources.

The Well-Trained Mind is a book that can give every parent the confidence to know he/she is capable of homeschooling. This book also gives you many (and I mean many) tips and resources to begin using.

Phonics Pathways This is the book I am using to teach Kara to read. This book includes games and ideas to use to help teach your child to read. It is geared towards helping older children learn how to read, but since Kara already knows her letters and sounds (thanks to Leap Frogs Letter Factory DVD), she is ready to begin learning to read.

Here is our typical 1 Hour of preschool each day -- we have "school" after lunch when Andy and Lydia are down for their naps.

1:00 -- practice her violin -- Kara is beginning Suzuki Violin 1 -- a teenager in the church is giving her lessons. Right now until we officially start lessons, Kara is naming the parts of the violin and listening to the Suzuki 1 CD

1:20 -- we play reading games and work on the lesson in Phonics Pathways.

1:40 -- We read a Bible Story together and I ask her questions about previous stories and the current story for the day.

After the Bible story I'll read her a book of her choice.

Occasionally we work on writing, but I'm not pushing her very much in this area because I don't want to spend more than 1 hour a day on school. When she works on writing though, I write out all of the vowels several times on writing paper. Then, I give her a gel pen (there is something special about being able to use a pen to trace b/c she's usually not allowed to touch pens) and she can trace the vowels.

Hope this gives you some good ideas! If anyone else has good ideas on how to teach preschoolers to use scissors, or other things we should be working on, please let me know.

For today, I wanted to tell everyone about a homeschooling giveaway that's going on over at HsKubes' Haven at Home blog.