Ooooh Isaac...

I told Isaac it was time to go potty.

And that he needed to take off the princess dress to do so.

He yelled at me.

I went with it.

And then took a picture.

Because that's what a good mom would do, right?

Kansas countryside

Brian took the camera with him last time he went hunting, and snapped some pics while he was moving from spot to spot. It is interesting to me how dry, brown, western Kansas has become some beautiful to me. Definately it's own unique beauty.

Here are some of my favorites from the photos he shot.

In the middle of this pasture there is this huge, random rock wall. There isn't any other indication of what the wall may have been there for, but it is huge as you can see in the picture below. 

He went hunting on what is called "WIA" land, which is essentially private land that for tax reasons, conservation reasons, etc. is kind of leased to the state. The owner gets tax breaks for not farming or grazing the land for a specified number of years, and the hunters get to use it for hunting.



So that means he looks across the road and there are cows grazing, like here between the trees.

Because this is Kansas :)

We Wish you a Merry Christmas...

Merry Christmas! Just thought I'd post some pictures of our house all prettied up for the holidays

Our front door wreath, kinda different but I like it...and its our lone outdoor decoration that actually got put up this year! We were just a little lazy with our decorations this year.

My favorite part of our Christmas decorations, our Nativity. It was an engagement present from my parents. My mom always put a candle next to ours, so I always do, too...

 On the piano I have a Christmasy runner, and a Hollyberry candle that was a Christmas gift to me from my little piano student. So sweet :)

Other than that, in this corner we also have...

Our Christmas card display thingy. I bought the "seasons greeting" sign on clearance for 50 cents and made a bow with really long tails and hot glued it behind the sign. Then I use clothespins to hang up our cards...I want to paint them silver, but I haven't yet.

Our advent wreath! Making a "real" one was on my list to do this year but I just haven't gotten around to it yet...and I just love this one so much! The wreath on the bottom are the kids' hands, traced onto green construction paper, cut out and glued together. The "candles" are toilet paper tubes colored in with markers and tissue paper flames. we also glued on some glitter polka dots, because Noah wanted to :)

Our tree! Yay :)

Typical "family with small kids" tree...with all the breakable ornaments above the middle of the tree. All the little things on the floor in front of the tree are our Advent countdown books...that folder on the right side has little books about the story of Jesus and you read one each day, and then hang them on the tree. When you read them all together it is the whole Christmas story.

The kids love to look through them, so they don't stay on the tree for too long.

The basket to the left side has a bunch of Christmas books and toys...although it seems that about half of them are missing and probably scattered all over the house...

I don't put the presents out very far in advance. It started as a logistics issue (how to keep a toddler from ripping into them early...) and we realized it actually made total sense. We put the books there to have pictures, stories, etc. to remind them of the real meaning of Christmas versus staring at presents for a month and forgetting about the whole point.

Our felt tree in the basement, idea courtesy of Pinterest. Just a big felt Christmas tree and a bunch of cut out felt ornaments and things so the kids can arrange and rearrange and rearrange and rearrange the ornaments to their hearts content.

 Noah made a nativity from some of the felt peices So cool...the stable with a star on top...and Mary is the one with the round belly (how appropriate!), Jesus in the manger in the middle, and St. Joseph is the one with long legs on the right.

Speaking of things that Noah made, here are some of the decorations he made for me! I was whining expressing my frustration to Brian that I had this whole list of decorations to buy and make for Christmas this year and hardly got to any of them. Noah walked in while we were talking about it and must have heard me, because he made me these decorations!

I especially love the nativitiy scene he drew for me! I had him cut it out and glue it to the construction paper and write his name on it...and he was so upset when he realized he wote his name backwards!

I, however, think this adds to the charm...

The candycane he made to hang on his own wall.

And of course no Christmas decor would be complete without some pretty goodies displayed :) The apotecary jar has cinnamon hard candies, and the trays from top are Rosemary Walnuts, Sugar Cookies (at least whats left of our first batch), and Sweet and Salty Chex Mix. Yuuuum. We still have more baking to do!

Merry Christmas!!

Random acts of cuteness...

I can't remember where we were coming home from this day, but whatever it was...

...the day was overcast and the lighting was really cool...

...the kids all looked super cute in what they were wearing...

...they were all being extremely onery so I told them to run to the end of the block a couple times before we went inside...

...and as they were running I realized how adorable they all looked and ran inside for the camera.

These are some great pictures. So glad I went back in for the camera.





Drummin away...

Bella shaking her booty.

If you ask her where she learned this she will tell you "My Mama Nana showed me!"

Ha. My mom will never live that down!

...along with all the other things she's taught her...

  



Lining up for  a race



 

Looks like Isaac forgot what we were doing...



"Oh yeah! A race!"





Hmm...wrong way... 





"Noah forgot me!"

Such a convincing pouty lip...

 We love our Mary...she is right outside our front door so we always say "Hi May-wy!" and "buh bye! Maw-wy, miss huhr".

Well...at least thats the way Isaac says it.

Uh oh. Refusing flowers.

She got quite an earful for this one...

You never turn away flowers from cute boys!

But its okay. Momma will always take more flowers.

Ooooo...big muscles....



Tough guy Noah.

Happy Friday! Hope you enjoyed our pictures!

Our First Day of School!

 Tuesday this week was our first day of school.

One of the perks of homeschooling, I guess, that I can pick a totally random starting day, way later than most people would ever even conceive of starting. That also means I was terrified out of my mind to do anything really structured--convinced I was going to screw everything up--until Brian finally convinced I just needed to get started. With something. ANYTHING.

...well...that and Noah begging every day to do school and use his new books that he knew I was buying...

He helped me realize that no, I was NOT going to mess up their education if I didn't pick the exactly, perfectly right tools or curriculum.



Teacher getting ready for her first day...coffee in hand, of course!



The good thing about the way that we are with our kids already, though, is that our house is really already pretty well set up for learning.

Not that we had a lot of education tools or teaching aids or something. What I mean is that we've never thought "we'll just let them learn that in school." Anything that they've asked about or been interested in, we look into and explore until they're bored with it.

Guess we were "unschoolers" and didn't know it.

Basically, the attitude has always been extremely pro-education and providing small learning opportunities wherever we are. My parents were amazing at this and I've tried hard to incorporate this in our family.

  

There is an interesting book called Catholic Education: Homeward Bound; A Useful Guide to Catholic Home Schooling By Kimberly Hahn (a really great Catholic autor) and Mary Hasson. In it, they talk about how you've been teaching your kids their whole life- their colors, potty training, dressing themselves...so "You have actually been home educating all along, whether you knew it or not! The question to ask yourself, then, is not "Should I begin home educating my son or daughter? " but rather "Should I continue to do so?""

So true.

So, basically...all we're doing is adding a more structured curriculum and some set guidelines and routine to our day to get some "formal" learning for a few core subjects (things like religion/bible, math, reading, handwriting, etc.) to what we've been doing all along. The basics, basically (Wow, that was redundant...guess I need to teach them how to be a better writer than Momma!). But as far as sciences, history, social studies, geography...I think we'll add those in as the kids get interested in them. Maybe do some unit studies or something... And of course, the garden is one of the best natural science lesson they can have.

Opening our first day with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.

I guess our official decision to homeschool was mostly spurred on by looking into our preschool options for Noah. We had assumed we were going to put our kids in the Catholic school here because, well, we're Catholic and they're going to go to school.

Then we visited it. And I was pretty terrified. 

So we looked around and weren't comfortable with any of our options. I'd casually thought abotu homeschool, but didn't think it was anything I was going to do. And then all the sudden it was like all these lightbulbs turn on, and I started meeting people who homeschooled, getting mailed homeschool catalogs (even though I'd never put my name on the mailing lists), coming across REALLY great homeschool websites....

It was so interesting. This is what we're called to do for our family, and so far it has been really great. 



My little pupils on their first day of school! Click on this one to enlarge it and see the look on Isaac's face.

We've decided Noah is in kindergarten, which totally makes sense for what he already knows...but if he was in school here, he'd be doing pre-k for another year. Which, as anyone who knows this kid would know, would totally bore him. Bella is doing "pre school" and Isaac is doing a "tot school"...which basically means I have some activities lined up for them that are kind of learning foundation type things, and will keep them busy while I'm working with Noah.

Every kid has their first day of school pictures, and here are ours! My mom always had us do one facing forward and one to the side, so that's what we did...

 We couldn't get a side picture of Isaac...we were kind of lucky to snap this one of him! He was a little uncooperative about pictures that morning...

And we were lucky that Bri was able to hang around a little in the morning and help me snap pictures! 



Ready to go!!



 SO. For our first day here is what we did:

We started with our prayer and Pledge of Allegiance, and went into religion right away. My mom gave me a book about a year ago which is a series of kids' bible studies based on the life of Jesus, so we're starting with that and some more activities. We're going to start with the Anunciation and work forward.

For each Bible story we'll read it every day until the Noah and Bella can tell the story back to me, Noah will have a memory verse, and we'll do a variety of activities to help reinforce the story--coloring pages, puppet shows, act them out, crafts, etc.

We also read a lot anyway, and have a good selection of stories about the lives of the Saints, Mary, Angels, and various aspects of the Catholic Faith such as Mass, the Eucharist, the Rosary, etc. I plan to just read them at random like the rest of our story books. Our kids have already soaked up so much just by reading on demand.

 Then we moved on to some different activities. I set these up after seeing ideas like these on other homeschoolers' blogs and message boards. I thought they'd be especially good for keeping Bells and Isaac busy while I'm working with Noah, but also for him to use too.

 This first picture is of our sensory bin. I read about this idea on a couple different websites. Basically, you fill a tub with items of different textures, sizes, etc. and provide some scoops, funnels, bowls, or whatever. It is supposed to provide a good sensory experienc ethrough the different textures, appearance, and sounds the objects inside make; some fine motor skill development; and then some skills development such as color identification, sorting, patterning, etc; and imaginative play.

I'm pretty much employing this because I thought it would keep the younger kids busy :)

But it has been nice to work with, especially with BellaBean. As you can see, our bin is primary colors right now, with dyed rice, pasta, and some colored feathers. So Issybean and I have been going through and identifying the colors, Noah is working on patterns and placement vocab for math so we've been using the colored pasta.

I didn't think it would really develop fine motor skills very much...and then I watched Bella pick all the rice out of the carpet. I really need to get like a tablecloth or something underneath this thing...

Our pink tray is set up with a cheap muffin tin I grabbed at the dollar store and some colored pom-poms, for sorting colors. This was really easy for Noah but tricky for Bells.

And Isaac just dumped all the pom-poms on the ground.
The blue tray is just set up with a simple matching game.

My idea for the trays is basically that I'll keep the same tray out there until the kids seem to get bored with them, or master what the tray was supposed to teach them and then we'll switch them out.

The blue tray is just a simple matching game. Played by a super-cute cutey pie with an adorable smile just like his Daddy's...

After Noah played with the activity trays for a while we sat down to get to our one on one work.

For math we have a basic kindergarten math book, gifted to me from a good friend of mine, and are working through that, plus a math coloring book--123s of the Bible--for fun when we learn to write our numbers. I've also put together a bunch of activities to go with each topic and we'll get to those as get there.

The picture at right is Noah working on his handwriting. He can write his name and a few other letters already, but has trouble with some so I decided to take a step back and work on simple tracing--lines, circles, squigglies, etc--to work on correct pencil holding and following the lines.

For reading, we've been working through a book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It is incredibly dull, and scripted, and to be frankly honest, I bores me to tears. But it is working SO WELL with Noah. We've been working through it a couple months, and going back and forth int he lssons as needed, but it is working.

I got a jumbo box of hot dogs the other day at Sam's. I promise, this really is related to homeschooling. It was the store brand so there weren't any pictures on the outside of the box and Noah asked what it was. I asked him if he could sound it out...and about 3 or 4 minutes later, he goes..."Hot dojjes?" we worked on the "g" sound for a minute, and he look up and just said "HOT DOGS!! Momma, are you buying me hot dogs?"

I did, indeed, start crying in the middle of Sam's.

Since then he's looked at a lot of different small words during church, in the car, reading at home, etc. and sounded them out for me. He's always been such a reader and it makes me so happy to see him figuring it out for himself.

 I didn't plan on doing anything formal with Bella at all. But I think that will be changing. She has been asking to do some "work with Momma" and asking if it is her turn, so I think I'l be putting together a little binder for her like what I did for Noah and do some worksheets for her.

Maybe colors, shapes, letter identification....anyone have any other suggestions?

So that is basically what we're doign this year. I had decided a while ago to make our own curriculum vs. buying a packaged curriculum or enrolling in a homeschool academy because I am really picky about what our kids are learning. There are certian things that are very important to Brian and I that the kids learn taht they would not get in a school (whether at home or a brick-and-mortar school). And there are lots of things with institutional schools and even some of the homeschool academies that i'm like...really? What is the point of even studying that? That I'll feel free to just...skip.

I feel like I've done a good job so far, because the kids have been asking "Can we do school again?" "Is it time for school?" It makes me really happy that they've been so receptive of it!

And...completely unrelated...Noah grew this watermelon on his own, in his own little garden. He is SOO proud of it! I couldn't resist posting this picuture of his adorable little smile...

Well, it is related. Science, right? That's our hope--lots of living classes.