Heads or Tails?

In math we played with pennies.  Malachi enjoyed counting pennies and putting them into the Bear Bank.

Karis and Malachi tossed a penny to see if they got heads or tails and then marked it off on a tally sheet.

Science was a bit of a flop, but here is what we attempted:  First we compared a pile of dirty pennies and a pile of clean pennies.

Then we put different liquids in cups to see which would clean the dirty pennies.  We used water, soap water, vinegar, lemon juice, and lime juice.  Here we are investigating the different liquids.
                                        

Then we placed a few dirty pennies in each cup and waited to see which pennies would come out clean.

Now this is where it all flopped.  The kids lost interest when they had to wait so long to see what happened.  And although the pennies were cleaner after this experiment than they were before, they were still pretty dirty. In order to be able to record our findings,  I had to convince Malachi that the lemon juice, vinegar and lime juice worked to clean the pennies (at least better than the other liquids).

Karis had a better idea as to what to do with here findings:

 Moving on to the letter H...

Hairy H's...

 

Hopping...

Hill-rolling...

 Hopscotch...  Malachi did this about, oh, one time.

Then he made an attempt to make his own hopscotch board...

Hopscotch was not that fun to him, because he had much more exciting work to do... He worked on this all week.  Here is day one:

And at the end of the week...

We listened to Handel's Messiah while water-painting these stain-glass coloring pages of a Nativity scene.

We played with our hand/number puzzle...

Then we traced our own hands.  Here, Malachi told me that he is drawing bones and germs onto his hands.

Finally, we numbered our fingers.

We ended our week by reading one of our new books, Mrs. Honey's Hat.  (Thanks Aunt Mel!)  This is a fun book with a real Mrs.Honey to act out the story.  We used this activity to also review the days of the week.

We completed another week... only because God's grace is abundant!

Princess Karis

This week we focused on the letter J and on recognizing numbers.

We loved making Jello J's for a snack,

and listening to Jazz music while we ate!

 We made a floor "clock" and practiced recognizing the

numbers by stepping from number to number as we counted.

Going with the J theme, we talked about the different

layers of a jungle and made a picture to help us remember.

The top layer is the really tall trees where monkeys roam...

Right below that is the Understory which is smaller trees and big ferns.

There is less sunlight here, and Toucans live at this level.

At the forest floor, hardly any sunlight gets here because all the taller trees block the sun, so a lot of fungi and moss grows.

This is also where a whole lot of insects live.

We counted pennies...

 Later, Malachi counted pennies in cups

and matched number cards to the correct cup.

We tried to learn how to do jumping jacks the right way,

but it takes a whole lot of coordination!

We try to count to 100 everyday, but it is usually

hard to focus on counting.  Mom discovered that using a

number chart to count is very effective!

We didn't have a geography lesson this week, but one evening I went into the living room and discovered Superman and Princess Purple climbing the Rocky Mountains, like the mountain goats we talked about last week.

Asher's "school week" consisted of painting...

 ... a horse book...

... gluing...

... and story time with Karis.

 

We enjoyed our new number puzzles (got to love hand-me-downs)!

To end our week, we made silly, colorful,  Jack-o-Lanterns.

We know it is not Fall anymore, but they do start with J.

The kids glued assorted pieces of black paper onto their pumpkins.

The finished products:

Most of our week was spent at Mam-maw and Pap-paw's, where we had an early birthday party for Karis.

Here the kids are helping make the goody bags for our party guests.

At the party, we made pizzas...

made necklaces...

and painted our nails.

 

Here the princess is enjoying some Kool-Aid.

The princess and her Princess Cake...

Mommy and her little princess...

We praise God for giving us Karis and are thankful that we have been blessed with her these three years.

Only by God's grace, have we made it through another week!

Back to Work

After a month long "Christmas School" (as Malachi called it and mommy translates as the "too much going on to have a set school schedule, and no time to blog" school), we are back to work! But, as you can see from a re-decorated tree, the kids had a hard time letting go of the Christmas decorations. This tree is decorated with Karis' jewelry and is complete with gifts of favorite toys wrapped in bath towels. I had a laugh when I walked back to the room and saw what they had done while I was taking down the other decorations.We started the week by making the letter N and n with noodles.

Then we wrote the letter N on circle stickers...

and went around the house sticking them on anything that started with the "n" sound.

We were supposed to be making the letter N with our play-doh, but when I turned to see how Karis was doing, she was so proud of the O she had made.

Here, Malachi is making the number nine with neckties.

We used this activity to help Karis learn that her birth date is the 19th of January.In math, we also estimated how far 100 noodles would fill up a jar.

We were all WAY off!

We all had fun searching for, and circling, all the number 9's.

Then we counted backwards and blasted off like a space shuttle.

In geography, we looked at North America in our atlas. We specifically looked at The Rocky Mountains and some animals that are found there. Then we taped pictures of the animals we found in our atlas onto our map.

In art appreciation we played a memory matching game featuring Van Gogh, Matisse, and others.

Asher especially liked the American School painting of George Washington on a Charger. Nothing makes him happier than a picture of a horse.

In a later round of the game, I was able to capture Karis' elation in finding a match.

The highlight of our week was visiting our friends and their new baby.

Our friends gave us this great pad of paper with paints and brushes, so we used their easel to have a session of art.

Asher's favorite part was stirring the water with the brush.

Their favorite (and mom's least favorite) extra-curricular activity was this:

Only by God's grace, another week completed!