A Lost Tooth

Last night, Caleigh lost her first tooth. She was a little upset when she saw the blood, but it stopped quickly and then she was okay. The one next to it is really loose too and will probably fall out in the next few days. She's been carrying the money left by the tooth fairy around with her all morning.

I think Molly was more excited about it than Caleigh. She keeps asking Caleigh if she can look at her mouth. She's the one who told Caleigh to look under the pillow first thing this morning. Ever since we noticed Caleigh's tooth was loose, Molly has tried to say she has a loose tooth too. She talks about getting big and loosing her baby teeth all the time. She always wants to do everything her big sister does.

Aviation Museum

Yesterday we took a field trip to the Aviation Museum. Except for my trouble finding the place, it was a good trip. The kids liked looking at all the airplanes and even getting to go inside some. It was a little cold or they probably would have stayed even longer.

Here they are with their friends:



Caleigh in the co-pilot's seat:



Molly in the navigator's seat:



Colin

The Glorious Flight

I was afraid the girls wouldn't be very excited about this book, but they did well and Colin kept sneaking in to listen in when I was working with them. The book is about Louis Bleriot's flight across the English Channel. We located France, England, and the English Channel on our map. When I said France, Molly said, "That's where Madeline lives." We made a list of different ways to travel, talked about the parts of an airplane, learned Roman numerals 1-11, and Caleigh drew an airplane using the Draw Write Now book. We also read books about the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Law, and hot air balloons.



Here are the flaps open for the parts of an airplane and ways to travel:



This page has Caleigh's drawing and a map of the English Channel. There's also a Roman numerals booklet. I'm not sure if you can see from the picture, but when you open the numbers, you can see the roman numerals that Caleigh wrote.



I also got them small wooden airplanes to paint. They took them upstairs to play with before I could get a picture though.

Trunk or Treat

Last night, we went to a trunk or treat with my moms' group. Everyone decorates their trunk and then the kids go to each car to trick or treat.

Here's Caleigh as a telephone. I don't know where she came up with this idea. Chad helped her make the costume.

 

Little Ladybug

 

Scary Colin

The Big Green Pocketbook

This is the book we were working on last week when we all got sick. The girls loved this book. They carried it around looking through it and talking about the story even when I wasn't able to read to them.  It's about a little girl going out for the day with her mother to run errands. The girl carries her green pocketbook and collects something from each place they visit. I had hoped to take the kids on a similar trip. We were going to try to ride the bus and visit a bank, drug store, etc. and finish by going to a soda shop for ice cream just like the little girl. I'm going to try to read the book again sometime and do this because I know the kids would really enjoy it. The girls did make green pocketbooks and they took them to the mall.



I got these at the Dollar Tree and it came with the stuff to decorate them.

Here is the notebook page. There are cards inside the pocketbook for each of the items the girl collected. The shape book came from enchanted learning. Most of our stuff comes from there and homeschool share.





We read a cute book to go along with this called When Dinosaurs Came with Everything. A boy is running errands with his mom. Every time they buy something, they are given a real dinosaur. After a few stops, the mom decides to just go home because she doesn't want anymore dinosaurs.

Pumpkin Farm

We're all feeling better today so we decided to go to the pumpkin farm. Last year, we wore shorts when we went so it was nice to have cooler weather this time. The kids loved all the silo and grain bin slides they had at the farm. As soon as they got off, they would run back to go up again. They looked at some animals and climbed up and pretended to drive a very large tractor. Then we took a wagon ride to the pumpkin patch, where each of the kids picked their own pumpkin. Colin wanted the biggest one and Molly wanted to find the smallest one. After that, they all got ice cream cones.

 

Molly on the wagon ride.

 

Colin and Caleigh in the pumpkin patch.

A Rough Week

This week hasn't gone the way I had planned. It was supposed to be a very full week with classes or field trips every day. I ended up cancelling all of that except P.E. (it was basketball this week) on Monday. Chad got strep over the weekend. Then the kids started with runny noses and coughing. By Tuesday, I had strep too. We haven't been able to get all of our school work in either since a lot of it involves me reading books, asking questions, or explaining things and I still am unable to talk much.  Hopefully, next week will be better.

Disney on Ice

We love Disney! These shows are always great. We've been to one every year since Colin was 3.

Waiting for the show to start:

 

Here come Mickey and Minnie:

 

Cars- Colin's favorite part

 

The Little Mermaid

 

The Lion King

 

Tinkerbell- Caleigh and Molly's favorite part

Wacky Olympics

 Today we went to Wacky Olympics with one of our homeschool groups. They divided the kids into groups, had them decorate their flag, and come up with a name. All my kids were on the Purple Power team. 

 

Then they competed in group events. Here is one of the events where they are going through an obstacle course.

At the end, they all received medals. It was such a fun event!

 

Camping

We took the kids camping over the weekend. It was their and my first time tent camping.

Colin and Caleigh spent most of their time climbing trees.

Molly was trying, but just couldn't get herself up there. So she made Chad help her.

 

You can't go camping without roasting marshmallows. They also enjoyed making hotdogs.

Here they are posing in front of the mountains during a walk on the trails.

 

Madeline

This week the girls (and Colin some too) studied Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans. We're supposed to read the book five days in a row, but Caleigh keeps asking me not to read it everyday so we read other Madeline books instead of doing the same one each day. Here are the ones we read: Madeline's Rescue, Madeline in London, Madeline Says Merci, Madeline and the Gypsies, and Madeline and the Bad Hat. We found France on our globe and marked it with our story disk. We read some books about  France and read that section in  Children Just Like Me. Here are the girls with the Madelines they made.



Here's a close up of them.



We read a book about the Eiffel Tower, played games and looked at pictures on a website, and attempted to make it out of Legos.





We made French pastries. Okay they were really crescent rolls and chocolate chips, but the kids didn't care and thought they were good.





Here we used blocks to represent Madeline and the other 11 girls. I had Caleigh divide the girls (blocks) into different groups.





Here are this week's notebook pages.





Here you can see the flag Caleigh made, the symmetry cards where she completed the missing side, and girls she put in order from smallest to largest.





On this side is her map work with Paris and the Seine River marked, the Eiffel Tower, a heart she painted and then folded to show symmetry, and a tiger she drew (she kept talking about how Madeline wasn't afraid of the tiger in the story).





Then we talked a little about Claude Monet. We watched Linnea in Monet's Garden and also looked at his paintings in the book. They made their own paintings with watercolors.





We finished our week by watching Madeline, the movie. The girls liked finding all the things in the movie that they remembered from the books.

I think they had fun. I keep overhearing them talk about Madeline, Miss Clavel, 12 girls in two straight lines, and the Eiffel Tower when they're playing.