The Rubber Band Band

We taped the kids trying to sing "This Land is Your Land" with rubber band guitars way back in August, before we started our official curriculum. Since I just figured out how to retrieve these videos, I am posting it now!

Huyler's Bridge Crossing

We went to Lynx Lake the other day for a bird watching assignment. (More on that later) I took this video of Huyler doing a trick I did long ago at the Redwood Forrest. I'm pretty sure our old home movies have a clip of me doing this. I remember thinking I was hot stuff! My phone only takes 30 second clips though, I guess, so it cut off me telling the story to Huyler.

The 100 Party!!!

Our 100th day of school we added the last number to our 100 chart and the last straw to the cup! Then we each contributed 100 of something to the festivities—Sticker collection books from Mom, marbles from Augie,
colored tissue paper from Ardara, and poker chips from Huyler. We divvied up 100 cereal balls and 100 mini marshmallows and got to work on a 100-piece puzzle!

Well, we can count to 100 now, can you?

Star Student Awards and the Red Goblet

"Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, When it is in the power of your hand to do so.”
- Prov. 3:27

When the school year started off, I had the great idea to fill a treasure box with little prizes, like you get at the doctor’s office, to motivate the kids to pay attention, work hard and be “Star Students”. This lasted the whole first semester. The only problem was that their focus was SO intent on the star student awards that it was a horrible disaster when they didn’t actually earn the award. They would have a fidgety, complaining day of school and then expect the award at the end of the day. But it was really too much when they started complaining about their awards not being good enough and fighting over who should get what, etc. I did away with the Star Student Award Box, and told them I expected them to perform well out of their own desire to learn instead of the desire for a prize. Amazingly, it worked! But I missed having a way to really honor their achievements. Then I read about an old custom called the Red Plate, where a red plate is placed at someone’s dinner setting when they have any achievement to honor. Since we already have red dinnerware, I chose a red plastic goblet from the seasonal patio section at the grocery store. It has been fun to put it at someone’s dinner plate and have everyone guessing WHY they got it. It also has them going out of their way to be extra helpful for me! Even Daddy got the Red Goblet the other day for getting out his bike, his bike pump and the kids’ bikes and just riding around our lane with the kids for a couple of hours while I got some quiet time!

X is for FoX

For the week on Foxes we spent a lot of time reading fables. We did learn about actual foxes too, but I think our main reason for studying foxes was to learn that God’s Word makes us wiser than our enemies. The fox in old fables is always crafty and sly, just like we are told the devil is. The only way to get wisdom that overcomes the lies of the Devil is to read God’s Word. Because /X/ is the final sound in the word fox, rather than the beginning sound, we used that as an opportunity to learn more about rhyming. We played some rhyming games and wrote poetry. We also talked about how the letter X doesn’t make the sound /ehcks/ but just the sound /cks/. This is why there are so few words that start with x, and when they do, it sounds more like /z/ than /x/. We took careful notice of words like “exercise” and “excited” that seem to start with the /x/ sound, but actually start with the short /e/ sound, just like “elephant” did. For fun fox activities, we sang “A-hunting we will go” marching in a circle, Elmer Fudd style, and when we came to the part that says, “We’ll catch a fox inside a box, and then we’ll let him go” we would catch one person, like you do in London Bridges, and then let them go. We also made a comparison chart of dogs and foxes, to see how they are different (one is wild and the other one is tame, etc.) We gathered pictures of animals and classified them by different habitats they live in. We tried to make up our own fox fable that would teach a good lesson. Make sure to visit Ardara and Huyler's blogs to read the kids’ own fables. A really easy memory verse to learn for this chapter, was Psalm 119:98 “Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me.”

F is for Frog

Frogs are always a fun subject. Huyler was disappointed that we didn’t dissect a frog. (I’m saving that for Junior High years at least!) Instead we studied about the life cycle of a frog. Eggs, tadpoles, froglets and frogs. We learned about different kinds of frogs, like poison dart frogs, goliath frogs, bullfrogs, dwarf frogs and tree frogs. We learned how they eat with long, sticky tongues, how they breathe through their mouth and through their skin. We learned that they have to stay damp to be able to breathe through their skin. We learned about their diet of bugs and minnows. We learned about the different sounds that different frogs make, from chirping to croaking, and how this attracts a mate for the frogs. We found some funny frog jokes (see the back page). And we wrote a story book. We modeled it from the old classic “Over In The Meadow”. But ours is called “Over In The Pond”. We had to come up with pond animals and rhymes that would fit and still be sort of accurate about the various animals. It took us a whole school day just to do five! Here is a slide show of it.

We also made our own “FROG FACT BOOKS” where we illustrated several facts we had learned about frogs.

Our lesson to learn from frogs is to use our tongues wisely. Just as a frog waits until the exact right moment to snap up bugs, we should wait and consider how to use our tongues the best we can.

B is for Butterfly

The first week of March was on butterflies. We learned about the life cycle of a butterfly. We acted out their life cycle by hiding under a plastic box for “egg”, crawling on a green blanket on our bellies for “caterpillar”, wrapping up in a blanket for “chrysalis” and then wearing wings made from grocery sacks for “butterfly”. We did crafts showing the four stages of their life cycle, and we learned all about what they eat, how long they live and so forth. We learned about tropical butterflies, their different wing shapes and patterns, their mimicry, and their predators. I ordered a dozen butterfly eggs from a butterfly farm in Florida. They hatched and the caterpillars wouldn’t eat anything I had for them! So they all died. So, we went hiking in the Watson Woods Riparian Habitat and found another caterpillar. He was lethargic, but did eat and poop regularly. We waited for him to make a chrysalis and become a butterfly. We named him “Blackout” because he is black and the butterflies we saw in the Watson Woods were also mostly black. But now we think perhaps he is a grub. Oops! We also drew pictures of Monarch Butterflies, trying to get the markings just right.
Our Bible lesson for this week was from the teaching on regeneration in the New testament. “God can make me new” became our motto with verses like “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone and the new has come!” 2 Cor. 5:17