Monday, November 28, 2011

Molly's Monster Birthday Party

When we started discussing party ideas in October, Molly wanted a spooky party. I wasn't sure she'd actually still want that once Halloween was over so I started looking for ideas. Caleigh and I were at Target and saw some adorable monster plates and napkins. I snapped a picture with my phone and brought it home to show Molly. She liked it and I found lots of cute ideas to go with it. I was also able to find some stuff to go along with the theme on clearance after Halloween.
All the kids seemed to have fun and Molly was happy to have so many of her friends over to play.



The cake was pretty easy once I got started. I used a grass tip for the orange to make it look like fur. I made fondant to shape the mouth and then just piped the teeth on. It was my first time making cake balls and I was a little worried they wouldn't turn out, but they worked well.


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Monster Cake



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Monster cupcakes



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Birthday Girl



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Fruit monster



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Pin the eye on the monster



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Molly



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Caleigh



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Cute monster shirts I found at Target went perfectly with the party stuff



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Hitting eyeball pinata

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Pilgrim (Thanksgiving) Study

Last month we studied pilgrims because that's where we were in history. I thought it was great doing it early because we didn't have any trouble getting all the books we wanted at the library. As you can see in the pictures below, we got a lot of books.



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Corn Cookies


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Pilgrim Hat Cookies


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Using Draw Write Now, the kids drew the Mayflower, pilgrims, and Squanto.


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Molly's


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Colin's

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Caleigh's



Pilgrims from History Pockets: Life in Plymouth Colony


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Notebook pages from the Live and Learn Press Thanksgiving study and Homeschool Share.


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Monday, November 14, 2011

Molly's 7th Birthday

Today is my baby's 7th birthday. We always take birthdays off from school and Chad takes the day off work so we can all spend it together.


The day started with chocolate chip pancakes.


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Then we went to the mall because Molly was anxious to spend some money she got from the tooth fairy a couple days ago. She fell riding her scooter and knocked out her front tooth, along with busting her lip and hurting her knee. At least it was a tooth that was already a little loose and the swelling was gone today.
She found these purple boots that she just had to have.


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After that we went to Olive Garden for lunch. The servers sang to her. This is her when she saw them coming. I couldn't get any other pictures because she was embarrassed and hid her face against my arm.


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Then we went to Chuck E. Cheese's so the kids could play games.


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Then it was home for presents and cake.


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I put the cake batter in ice cream cones and baked them. The white is buttercream icing. Caleigh helped by putting on the sprinkles and the red gumballs.


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Happy Birthday, Baby Girl!


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Friday, November 11, 2011

Our Week: Massachusetts, Ducks, and Fall

I finally felt like we were back to normal this week. It was nice to be able to read aloud without coughing the whole time.
The time change actually worked to my advantage because the kids are getting up earlier and we're getting our school work started earlier. I can already see that they're trying to adjust though so I'm not sure it will last long.
A lot of days have been tough for one of my kids' for the last several weeks. She gets so upset if she doesn't understand things immediately even though she does great once she calms down and starts working on it. I'm so happy that she had an awesome week this week even though she started new material in math.


Three Rs

Nothing too exciting going on with this. Everyone is just continuing to do the next thing. I usually forget to take pictures of this normal work, but I actually took a couple this week.

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Molly doing math (yes, in her nightgown). She's using base 10 cards to make two 4-digit numbers and then putting the cards together to add the two numbers. She thinks it takes too long to put out all the cards so I guess she'll be happy to learn it on the abacus soon.

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Caleigh using setting the table to work on prepositions.



History

The kids didn't really complain about history this week, but I'm not sure the girls really got much out of it. Colin did seem to understand when he took the quiz. The chapter started by talking about which countries control other parts of the world, especially North and South America, during the time in history we're studying. Then it went into more detail about Persia, going through all the groups that had controlled it. It also talked about the Ottoman Turks and their ruler, Murad.



Science

We've finished the insect portion of Zoology 1. I had planned to go ahead and start chemistry this week, but then I thought it might be easier to wait until after our Thanksgiving break to start something new.

We released our butterflies this week.

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This little guy didn't seem to want to fly away.


We read books about fall and talked about how the leaves change color. We planned to gather leaves to make leaf creations, but it rained yesterday. We'll get some over the weekend and do it.

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We also talked about ducks to go along with our Five in a Row unit study. See below for that.



State Study

Our state this week was Massachusetts. I thought that went well with Thanksgiving coming and since we just studied the Pilgrims. We read books (which I'll list in a separate post), did a coloring sheet, and filled in sheets for the binders. One of the things we read is that Massachusetts is where the first chocolate chip cookies were made. The kids did remember that from our chocolate unit study earlier in the year. The girls made chocolate chip cookies.


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FIAR Unit Study

Make Way for Ducklings is one of the Five in a Row books I've always wanted to do, but we just never got to it. It seemed like the perfect time since we were already studying Massachusetts. Besides learning about MA and specifically Boston, we also learned a lot about ducks. I'll be making another post with our book list, activities, and notebooks. We had a special lunch to go along with this study one day.

Tortillas with cheese cut into duck shapes. One of the kids didn't want that and had PB&J instead. The kids asked what the raspberries were for and I didn't know so they decided they were eggs. The applesauce has spring sprinkles, including blue duck shapes. I added a small slice of carrot and peppercorns to boiled eggs for the chicks. The cookie is just because we had it left over.

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Monday, November 7, 2011

Lazy 5 Ranch Field Trip

We went on a field trip to the Lazy 5 Ranch. It's always so much fun riding the wagon and feeding all the animals. The weather was also great that day.

I had a hard time getting pictures of Colin on the wagon. He sat at the front with a friend. He also wouldn't feed some of the animals. Last time we were there, a llama spit on him so he was very cautious this time.


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 Molly

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Caleigh

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Colin

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Molly insisted on wearing her animal outfit

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