Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Gingerbread house and Christmas Tree Forest

We decorated our Gingerbread house on Tuesday this week. It was just one of those kits from Walmart, but the kids loved it. The two older kiddos decorated the front and the back, and Little Guy helped me with the roof since it is far easier to make stuff stick on the roof. He was a little resistant to getting frosting on his fingers, but in the end peer pressure won out over his sensory issues and he joined right in.

As far as school goes, we have been doing lots of seasonal folder games in addition to our online programs. We will be doing mostly fun crafts and activities next week of course. One of my favorite things to do for the different holidays is to have "seasonal bins" that can be played with in different ways. Right now, we have a bin with small ornaments that look like wrapped presents that I got from the dollar store and some small stockings. The kids like to play with them with their dolls and stuffed animals. I assembled that bin last year and pulled it out again this year. This year, I added a bin of the small fake decorative pine trees that are meant to be used with the porcelain villages. The kids have so far enjoyed making Christmas tree forests for their farm animals and their fisher price people. The trees haven't made it as far as the dollhouse or the playmobil sets, but my guess is that is what will happen to them next. :) Either that or spiderman and Batman will have a nice holiday!

Little Guy's Speech Progress!!!

Well little guy has come a long way as far as speech development goes. You can't understand a lot of what he says, but he tries to carry on little mini conversations now which is so awesome. He went from about a month ago, having a jump in words he was trying to say on his own to really using those words to communicate more. Here's an example of him actually negotiating with me. He comes over to me wanting a cookie. He says, "Tootie?". I say, "No, no cookies right now, Baby". He says "Yeah, tootie!" I said no again, and he looks at me putting up one finger and says, "one?" (he usually asks for two, so he was negotiating lol) This was the longest back and forth conversation we had ever had and I was so impressed with his attempt at negotiating instead of screaming that I gave in and let him have one. He has really come a long way in just the last month and I am so proud of my little guy.

Craft Foam Christmas Tree

Well I can't take credit for this craft in any way. It is just a craft foam tree kit that the kids saw and just had to try from Walmart, but the point is we had a blast putting it together this afternoon. I am sure it would be pretty easy to make a DIY one out of craft foam as well, but hey the kit was only five dollars and we couldn't pass it up.

First Snow Day 2011

This collage customized with Smilebox

Holiday Freebee

We get a lot of printable units from CurrClick and this week they have an awesome holiday freebee unit.  It is called "LBC Christmas Holiday Helper", and it has printables, recipes, and copy-work in a PDF book.  Here is a link if anyone is interested LBC Christmas Holiday Helper.  I think it is only free this week so hurry!  I am sure we will be using bits and pieces from it.

Christmas Tree Decorating

Well we had a nice quiet Thanksgiving with nothing overly eventful happening.  Everyone had a good time, and then yesterday and today we decided to dig out all the Christmas decorations and start going at it.  For some strange reason we couldn't find our stand to our Christmas tree so we had to go out and buy a replacement which unfortunately didn't quite fit right.  We rigged it up anyways but if the tree in the pics is slightly leaning, that it why!  haha  Oh well, we got it up anyways.  The kids had fun decorating and Little guy even got in on the action.  This is awesome because he used to be afraid of Christmas trees and tinsel.  Speaking of little guy, he has been attempting to talk up a storm.  He is not real understandable yet, but his therapists are hugely impressed at his new willingness to try!  So Merry Christmas to us!

Anyway, we had a good time today watching Christmas cartoons on Netflix and getting the tree all set up.  I am sure we will be doing tons of Christmas projects for school starting next week.  Hopefully I have time to post pictures.  With the baby's due date closing in, we are really crunching on time between Little Guy's therapy appointments and my increasing OB appointments.  It is going to be a crazy holiday season this year!  We are starting a unit on Reindeer using http://www.thesimplehomeschool.com/.  We really love their interactive online unit studies.  They are awesome for science.  I think it will tie in perfectly with what's on the kids' minds right now.

Curriculum Reviews

Well, we are almost halfway through our school year so now would be a good time to review the homeschooling materials we have.  First we have been using Alpha Omega Publishing's Horizons math.  At first I was hugely impressed.  The lessons are colorful and engaging and they integrate the review problems right in with everything else.  However as we went further into the year, my son became more and more frustrated.  For him I think it might just have too much review.  It is a lot of busy work for him and not enough to keep him fully engaged.  He tends to pick math up very quickly so having to re-practice that many problems a day just became a battle for him.

Now for Science and Social Studies we started out using Alpha Omega Publishing's Lifepacs.  I decided very early on that I really don't care for Lifepacs.  I love that they are Christian based, but they are very wordy and put a high focus on memorizing vocabulary while I prefer a more hands-on learning experience for him.  I also found the curriculum to be very lacking in pictures which is horrible for my very visual learner.  I found myself having to read the lessons to him with my laptop at my side so I could google illustrations to help him understand what they were talking about.  Really I was adapting it so much that we quit after a couple of units and started just using science and social studies related books for a while.

Here we are halfway through the year and I am struggling to get him back on track.  We signed back up for Time4Learning which I really think is the best thing for us right now.  We are using it primarily for Math and Language arts and some for Social Studies.  For science we are trying out The Simple Homeschool's online interactive unit studies.  We are working on the Solar System Unit right now which is a tad over his head since it is for sixth graders and he is only in fourth grade, but it is on sale right now for only $5.  Really he seems to be enjoying it and we will probably sign up for a full subscription soon so we can access all the different unit studies on the site.

Meanwhile, I am going to sell what is left of my Lifepacs and Horizons and stick with more computer based school for now.  Really, Horizon's Math is great and I still highly recommend it, but unfortunately isn't a great fit for my Little Man.  Lifepacs on the other hand, I was not very impressed with for any child and I don't recommend it.

Slow cooker Dairy Free Pumpkin Pie Pudding (yes it is a re-post but a yummy one)

Well considering that Thanksgiving is well on the way here, I decided to re-post my recipe for Dairy Free Slow Cooker Pumpkin Pie Pudding.  I was digging around for the recipe and I plan on making it tomorrow so why not re-post?  Anyways, my Little Guy is still allergic to all dairy products.  We did a re-trial of baked in dairy a few weeks ago and unfortunately he still reacted, so more dairy free holiday fun this year.  I am afraid that even if he does outgrow it at this point, he may never like dairy.  He is very particular about even his brand of soy milk, so he might be on it for good anyways.  It would be nice to not have to check labels on everything someday though.  He's going on three years old and still hasn't outgrown it, though so I am not sure what the odds are that he will.  Oh well, here is the awesome recipe that I just love myself anyways!

Ingredients

• 1 (15 ounce) can solid pack pumpkin
• 1 (12 ounce) can coconut milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup biscuit/baking mix
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
• 2 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients and transfer into a greased slow cooker and cook on low for about four hours.  I use a slow cooker liner because this one does tend to make for sticky cleanup.

Candy Corn Pizza and Painting pumpkins

More Halloween fun!  We painted our smaller pumpkins yesterday and made candy corn pizza the day before.  Candy corn pizza is just cheese pizza with a ring of cheddar sprinkled on before baking to make the slices looked striped.  We make it every year and the kids loved it.  We also watched It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown which is available via  Hulu if you missed it on TV like we did.  We had read the book, so the kids really wanted to watch the cartoon. We also went to a Halloween party last night which was great fun until my eldest managed to get poked in the eye on the hayrack ride!  That child is so accident prone.  This is the second time he has ended up in the ER with a scratched cornea.  Boo!  He has to wear a patch for 24 hours which means he should get it off in time for Trick or Treating tomorrow night which is good.

Halloween Fun

Well all week we have been celebrating Halloween and of course centering school around it as well.  I printed off tons of folder games for the kids and made some of my own, and we are doing lots of projects.  Here are some pics of some of our favorites!

Painting with Halloween cookie cutters was tons of fun!

We made monster mouths with apples and marshmallows.

Of course pumpkin carving is the all time favorite!!

We made spiders out of oreos, pretzels and smarties.

These are just a few activities that we have done, and I am sure we will have more to post before long!

First Grade Math Coin Sorting

We have been working with my Princess on her money sorting and counting.  Now with my eldest, we had all this play money for this purpose and a workbook, but we decided to skip all that with her and go for the real thing.  I have a little basket where I throw spare change, so we dug that out and just set to work in a very hands on manner.  I had her sit at the table and spread a bunch of change in front of her.  We talked about the different coins and what they are worth last year so we started with some review.  I showed her each coin, and told her the name of it and what it was worth.  Then I had her hand me random coins and tell me what they were worth.  Next we took a pile and made a sort of graph on the wipe of board and I had her sort out the coins by what they are worth and compare amounts.  We repeated these activities for a week, and then moved on to counting money.  So far she is doing good with the counting dimes by tens and we haven't moved on to nickles by fives but that is our next goal.  Right now she can count the dimes and pennies together fairly well.  Yay!  I am really enjoying working with the actual coins with her rather than pictures of coins or paper punch-out ones.

I really should take a picture of little guy too!  He loves attempting to sort the coins with her, and can sort the pennies out from the silver colored coins.

My Little Man is Growing up!

My eldest just turned 8 on Tuesday!  I can't believe how fast kids grow up!  He had a super fun cookout party on Monday.  This was actually the first year that I can remember it ever being nice enough to have his party outside.  Thank goodness for a bit of an indian summer!  We had a fire and hotdogs, and cake and ice cream of course.  We blew up the jumper and everyone had a good time.