when your 5 year old gets a hold of the camera.
We’re getting her a camera for Christmas… not sure if that’s a good idea or a bad idea…
BTW, the shirt she’s wearing in this picture is one of Matt’s. She been sleeping in one of his shirts almost every night since he’s been out of town. It’s cute. She’s very excited for him to come home – she told everyone at church he’ll be home in two days and this afternoon she made him a card that said “I Heart U. Come Soon.”
Matt is back in the states for some training, so for the third year in a row, he missed Halloween with us… At least he was here for Madison’s birthday this time, and this is definitely not the worst holiday he could miss. Luckily he hasn’t had to miss Christmas yet, and he did get to take her to a Halloween party on base before he left.
On the 30th, we carved pumpkins. Last year, my dad was able to visit a couple weeks before Halloween and carved a pumpkin with Madison, so this year, she kept saying how sad she was that Pap wasn’t here to cut everything. I think she thought I was incapable of carving a pumpkin, but it turned out really well. Madison drew the face herself and I cut it out. And she actually reached in and pulled out some of the guts herself…
I also took Madison to a Halloween craft class on base the day before Halloween. They made bags for collecting candy. She made hers all by herself and was very proud of it.
Then, for Halloween, Madison was (surprise!) Supergirl! Maybe she has gotten all of that out of her system now. She was a very cute Supergirl though.
Our neighbor’s kids were Tinkerbell and a tornado. I thought the tornado was a very clever idea. I’m going to keep that in mind for the future (for any sons I might have…)
Halloween in Japan was… interesting. Apparently, Halloween is not something they traditionally celebrate here, but they all seem to want to. Americans can sponsor the locals onto base and they can go trick or treating here. And not just the kids – there were adult locals trick or treating too. Very strange. While we were trick or treating, I think I heard as much Japanese as I did English, and when I was passing out candy, kids were thanking me in Japanese. Which was cute and was definitely a unique experience. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to say Happy Halloween in Japanese. I guess they probably understood anyway…
FYI, all of our Halloween pictures are online at Flickr if you want to check them out 🙂
Or “Our trip to New Mexico, with captions…”
Standing in front of the Rio Grande.
Playing with blocks.
At White Sands National Monument.
Feeding/Petting the chickens with Grams.
Running through Papa’s pecan orchard.
Playing in the tree house.
At the Las Cruces Railroad Depot/Museum.
Helping in the garden.
The only thing that would have made this trip better for Madison is if some of her cousins had been there to play with her! Still, she told me that she wants to go back and visit again, by herself 🙂
Week 15:
This was a great week! We used The Art Lesson, by Tomie DePaola and these lessons from Homeschool Share to learn more about art in addition to our regular schoolwork. Madison loved it! I have long known that art is her favorite part of school, but she really really loved this. Now she is excited because she thinks that adding fun back into homeschooling means doing art every day, so we’ll see how it goes this week…
Some of the fun things we did:
UPDATED – Here are the pictures 🙂
We also went to the Oklahoma City Art Museum – we live across the street from it, so I was glad we made the trip before we moved. It would be kind of sad to live so close and never make it over there. Madison loved the museum, especially the interactive art that made noise and stuff. We also have a great blown glass exhibit by Dale Chihuly – it is amazing. I think glass blowing is going to be one of our unit study because Madison loved it so much. She tells me she is going to be an artist or a photographer when she grows up, and I believe it.
This picture is from the art museum, and the multicolored glass thing in the background is by Chihuly. It is 4 stories high!
The rest of our days were the same old, same old. I’m planning on a Headsprout update later in the week, so stay tuned for that…
Week 16:
I actually planned to have a little bit of school this week, so I am still counting it as a week, even though we did absolutely nothing. Literally. She stayed the week with my mother in law and Kansas and had a great time.
I also had a great time, although I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish and I accomplished very little. That’s ok. My DH did not have to work very much, so we enjoyed have time together with out being interrupted every other breath. We went to the movies (Leatherheads… I liked it, he didn’t), and slept in quite a bit. I went grocery shopping by myself. It is amazing the things you appreciate. But I did miss her a lot, and was very glad when she decided to come home on Friday instead of Sunday 🙂
I had planned to make several blog posts (including this one), make a new memory CD, finish up the human body unit we are doing this week, along with some deep cleaning. I did manage to clean the homeschool shelf, and I also made amazing progress on my reading list – and those of you who know me now understand why nothing else got done…
Today:
We skipped school again and went to Red Rocks Canyon State Park with DH, who had the day off – more on that tomorrow.
Have a great night!
Hiding under the table at Uncle Don’s house because she woke up grumpy (and probably a little confused…)
She does NOT want her picture taken. That’s what she’s telling me, in case you were wondering.
And one where Madison is being sweet. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea – she’s not full of attitude all the time…
Maybe in a few days I’ll get the Easter pics up, now that they are all on my computer. Maybe.
I guess that would be called a monthly report.
I am a bad blogger. I really wanted to stay on top of weekly reports – you know, keep my family informed, hold my self accountable, blah, blah, blah… I don’t know if I am ever going to get around to doing that for the past few weeks. Acutally, yeah, I feel guilted into to it. That is the main reason I started this blog. I will do it now.
Bible is moving steadily along. We are on Lesson 50ish and I think we will be able to finish Unit 1 before we move. I am happy about that. We added Hymn Study since Madison keeps asking me to “tell me all the words” at church when we are singing, so I would really like her to know the words because I like to sing 🙂 Scripture memory is also going good, although we have not made a lot of progress because we are out of town more than we are home (and it looks like that trend will continue for April and May and probably June. Ok, probably until we leave for Japan…)
We are making decent progress with reading. Madison is more than halfway through Headsprout, but still just reads ok. I think I had this great expectation that she would be reading easily and fluently when she finished the program, and now I am starting to see that that was not realistic. One problem I notice is she is not carrying what she learns in the program anywhere else. She will read the Headsprout books or other readers I get from the library, but she is not motivated to sound out words anywhere else. She stills asks me what stuff says, even when I know she has the tools to figure it out herself. My solution to that is more practice reading. Her first books are now really easy for her, which I guess I should take as a sign to chill out and it will come to her, but that is not really in my nature.
We finished ETC books A, B, and C about a month ago and are now working on ETC Book 1. Madison does not love it, but is so good at it! She is now reading and spelling almost all CVC words – she is really great with spelling (so far). The only words she has trouble with are words with short e, and that is because we haven’t really learned to use that sound yet. In Headsprout, they teach the long ee sound first, and I didn’t want to confuse her (until I had too).
We are moving along in math too, but I am afraid she is not retaining as much information as I would like her too. Sometime in the next few weeks, I am planning to order Singapore 1A/B and add some of those pages in as 1) reinforcement and 2) a way to slow us down a little. I really don’t want to move too far ahead of grade level in math, which is something I didn’t consider when I started schooling her. But, I don’t want to stop and have her forget what we have already learned, so we will slow down. (Also, anyone using Horizons math – we are in the 50’s and are already working on adding with 20’s. At some point, it will come back to adding one digit numbers and doing drill? Or is that something you add in yourself later?)
Of course, with all our traveling, you know we haven’t been doing science or art or violin or Japanese. I am hoping to get back on with that this week (we did good yesterday). We are going to start the Green Hour Challenge tomorrow, so we will be way behind, but that’s ok with me. It looks like a great, fun science activity and I am looking forward to it. Although I am still not sure where we will walk to since we live in downtown OKC. Also, we have been sorta doing Sketch Tuesday. Last week, Madison’s something blue was a car. She draws pretty good cars.
side note: as I am sitting here blogging, which I should not be doing right now – I should be getting Madison ready for the day, taking my dog for a walk, getting dressed,doing the dishes I left in the sink last night so I could read, I could go on and on – Madison is standing here talking to me, and it occurs to me that she is so big! Long legs and a skinny body, she looks just like her dad. Sometimes I wish she would stay this age forever – and sometimes I can’t wait for her to grow up 🙂
So that is pretty much our month. Among other activites we did, we went to Virginia (I posted about that earlier), my brother got married, we went to Storytime when we were in town, went to the Museum of World Treasures in Wichita (which, by the way, that place is pretty awesome, especially for homeschoolers. If we were going to be in OKC semi permanently – and by that, I mean for more than 6 months – I would buy a season pass. There is so much cool stuff there about everything. Although it is organized a little… well, lets just say it is not very well organized. I’m sure we did other stuff, I just can’t think of it right now.
And I have so much more to blog about! I have been thinking about stuff I want to write down for the past month, and I never seem to be near a computer. Now that the weight of this weekly report is off my shoulders, maybe I can get back to doing some regular blogging.
Wow, I haven’t updated since last Wednesday 😦 Sorry… I really am going to. We got back home Sunday night, late. Monday was laundry and cleaning, Tuesday was grocery shopping, so maybe today I will have time to do some sort of an update… maybe…
In the meantime, here is my Wordless Wednesday post – another picture from our vacation, this time at Jamestown. Hopefully next week I will have some wedding pictures!
After taking turns being sick all weekend, Madison woke up at 10:30 this morning, sick again. She hasn’t thrown up, but after she woke up, she laid in bed for another hour while I read to her, then laid on the couch for 2 hours, not watching TV or anything, just laying there, saying her stomach hurt again. She ate a bowl of oatmeal and drank a glass of orange juice, then went back to bed at 5:30 tonight. This is so out of character for her.
Needless to say, we didn’t do school. So, after our not-so-great-week last week and our start today, I made the executive decision that we are not doing school at all this week. Well, I shouldn’t say at all. When she feels better, I am going to have her do her reading lessons because I don’t want her to get out of practice with that, but that is pretty much all we are are going to do.
Matt is also pretty much off work all week, so I thought I would take advantage of having him home in order to take some field trips we’ve been meaning to take. I am hoping the weather will get warm enough that we can go to Red Rocks State Park to do our first nature walk, and hopefully we will also make it to the capitol building (we are trying to visit all the state capitols, and we have lived in Oklahoma City for almost 3 months and haven’t made it to the capitol building yet…)
And, since it seems like it has been a while since I posted a picture, here are a few from one of our last capitol trips to the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson…
Enjoy!
RED HERRING? 