Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving!! We hope that you have all had a wonderful day with your family and friends!

We had a very good day. It was just the 6 of us here for Thanksgiving, and it was a nice, relaxing day. While most of you were having turkey and dressing around midday, we were enjoying some pasta :)

We had our somewhat typical Thanksgiving meal for supper. The kids and Dany had turkey breast fillets, corn on the cob, broccoli casserole, and rolls. I did my best to fix a small amount of my T'giving faves which my family doesn't go for, including canned cranberry sauce, corn bread Stove Top stuffing, a baked sweet potato, and a green bean casserole, and I enjoyed every bite! Chiara really enjoyed the cranberry sauce. She ate it by the handful :) :) :) I'm kind of embarrassed to admit to the canned cranberry sauce and Stove Top stuffing, but at least I didn't miss out too much!

Here are some pictures and videos of some Thanksgiving-themed things that we've been working over the past few weeks:

Here are the poems that the girls have been memorizing this month for Thanksgiving:

During the past week, we have been reading the book "Cranberry Thanksgiving" and working on a lapbook based on it. We talked about the New England states, Thanksgiving, cranberries, and some literary terms, such as onomatopoeia and consonance. Here are some pictures of the girls with their completed lapbooks and a video of Maria explaining it - with interjections from Chiara :).

The girls wanted to sing a Thanksgiving hymn that they learned :) ....

Matteo has been working on a fall-themed lapbook these past fews weeks. Here are some pictures. And, he wanted me to take a video of him explaining it, like his sisters do for their lapbooks :)

Just cute pictures!

Matteo wanted to show everyone the new toy snake that he got at the dentist yesterday :)


And, I just had to take a picture of Chiara in her overalls. I think toddlers are SO cute in overalls. And, I'm snowing off her bang trim. She NEVER lets me put any type of clip in her hair, so I was forced to cut her hair in the front to keep it out of her eyes.

Homeschool Week(s)-in-Review 11/10 - 11/21

Well, I'm behind on blogging AGAIN! I imagine that things won't improve much over the next few weeks. We have 3 weeks to get Christmas presents ready and school things finished before going to GA.

This week should be a relatively relaxing week! We only have one activity this week, Monday morning swimming lessons, and 6-month dental check-ups for the kids. All of our other activies are cancelled for Thanksgiving! Dany only has 2 days of school, and then he'll be home the rest of the week. I've tried to put together an acceptable Thanksgiving meal for my family. They don't like most of the traditional Thanksgiving foods. The only requests I've had from the kids so far are corn-on-the-cob, cupcakes, and chocolate pie!

I'll start reviewing the past couple of weeks with Chiara's new sentence this week, "My tolt!" (translated: I'm cold!). That'll let you know what kind of weather we've had! She says it whenever we're outside going to or from the van. Today and tomorrow it will get above freezing during the day, so that's good :) Then, the cold and snow will return.

School-wise, it's been much of the same. The girls have studied the Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt during the past 2 weeks. They really enjoyed it. Maria really enjoyed some of the library books about King Tut.

Maria's still doing well in math. She's been doing a lot more geometry lately.

She was very proud of the 6-page narration on the King David book that she read. I told her that she only needed to write a brief summary taking about 30-minutes, but if she wants to write, who am I to stop her! We do work on brief, to-the-point narrations with her writing curriculum.

In spelling, Maria learned the last 2 jobs of silent "e" and the consonant-le syllable. She thought it was fun :)

In science, science she compared the bounces of a room-temperature rubber ball and one that had been in the freezer for 4 hours. I had been worried that with the simplicity of these experiments that she hasn't been learning much. But, I asked her some questions last night, and it really is sticking! There's a lot of be said for simplicity, I suppose!

Maria finished her flower picture finally:

A week from this past Friday was the kids' last St. Vincent classes for this semester. Maria's art class had an art showing for the parents. Here's a picture of Maria and 2 of her paintings. The top one is the Mona Lisa. The bottom one is abstract :)

Cati

First of all, Cati lost her 2nd tooth this past Wednesday! Sorry, no picture yet. Our camera has been very uncooperative lately :(

Cati is really into the 'meat' of her math program now. Started adding 2-digit numbers with regrouping on Friday by trading pennies for dimes.

Cati found our Magic Tree House books a week ago and quickly went though the 5 that we have. So, I reserved some for her from the library. Together we've been reading some Thanksgiving books and Devotional Stories for Little Folks.

In Science, she finished her lapbook on Manatees, which ends our study of mammals (except for humans, which we don't have time for now and must wait until after Christmas). We started learning about fish this past week and more specifically about sharks. We've been reading library books and started a new lapbook. We hope to do a unit about salmon after this and, if there's time, a unit of coral reefs.

Matteo has been working on a Fall themed lapbook. We haven't quite finished, but hopefully I'll have pictures of it by Thanksgiving, along with the poems that the girls have been memorizing. He's really enjoyed having his own lapbook to work on!

Hip Check-ups

Most of you know that Cati and Chiara were born with dislocated hips (a.k.a. hip dysplasia). They each wore hip braces as infants for 4-6 months. Today they had check-ups with their orthopedist. Cati's x-ray looked great, and she won't have to been seen for 2 years. Chiara's x-ray was ok. The hip is in the socket, but the angle of the hip is not right yet. The doctor expects it to fix itself in time, so she doesn't need treatment for it, but she will have to be seen again in 6 months.

Homeschool Week-in-Review: 11/3 - 11/7

We had a good week, except for Chiara being REALLY fussy as she continued to get over her illness. She finally started acting like herself on Friday. The weather was absolutely beautiful (sunny and temps in the 70s), and I made sure that the kids spent time outside to enjoy it. We skipped art this week. I figure that we'll have plenty of time for that as the weather turns toward winter. Yesterday it was back to weather-reality: cloudy and cold :(

Here are some of the things we did this week:

Together:

History - We read some more about ancient China completed the chapter on ancient Africa. There are some fun folktales from both of these cultures that we read.

Art - As I said, we skipped this this week to enjoy the weather. I did finally remember to play classical music during lunchtime as part of their music appreciation. They loved it! They kept getting up to dance when they were supposed to be eating, so I'm not sure if it was a great idea :)

Poetry - The girls started memorizing Thanksgiving poems this week. I'll post them on the blog on Thanksgiving day.

Maria:

Math - Maria had an 'easy' week in math with only 3 lessons and no tests! The lessons were the 'fun' ones - time and measurement. I haven't mentioned how well Maria is doing with her Challenging Word Problems book that we do together on Thursdays. She loves it! I think her real enjoyment started the day she was able to do one that I couldn't :) She does the problems on paper while I do them on the dry-erase board, and then we compare answers. That day, she got to explain the problem to me! Dany did some with her yesterday, and he was impressed, too, by how well she did. This week, there was one problem when she did the 1st part right and I did the 2nd part right. We really work together on these!!

Reading - She still reading Black Beauty for her assigned reading, and she wrote a very nice narration on the 1st half of the novel. Her writing is improving so much this year. It's no longer so stressful for her. I really think the narrative writing that we began this year is what is helping her.

Spelling - She completed 2 lessons this week - one on 4 different spellings of long A and one that introduced her "Silent E book" which helps her organize 5 different uses of silent E in English.

Latin - Maria can now count to 10 in Latin! I should take a video for the blog.

Chemistry - Every week Maria does at least one experiment and lab write-up. This week she started complaining, asking why she has to do this lab report when "no one will ever read it!" So, here is the one she wrote this week, so that someone will read it :)

Cati:


Math - Cati learned the "doubles + 1" facts this week (i.e. 4+5, 6+7, 8+9, etc.).

Reading - We mostly read about whales this week to go along with her biology topic of the week. We also read "The Story of Ping" to go along with history.

Grammar - She continued studying nouns.

Spelling - Her lesson this week was about words with the "/er/ of her."

Biology - She completed a lapbook on whales this week.


Here is a video of Cati talking about the lapbook. You can actually hear her in this video thanks to her baby sister napping at the time :)



I haven't posted about things the kids have done in their classes at St. Vincent before. One of Cati's classes this semester has been about plants, and I think they've done some great activities. Here's a picture of a "man" with grass hair that grew on my kitchen counter this week. It's like a homemade Chia-pet!

Here is a shirt they made. They made the dye by boiling flowers and leaves.

Here is a mask that she made in her 3D art class. She loves making masks and often does it at home.

If you saw the video of Cati playing the piano last week, you could see our TERRIBLY messy playroom. Well, I've spent the past few days cleaning and reorganizing. I'm thinking of setting up some subject centers in the schoolroom and part of the playroom, but it'll take a while to get it all together.

Matteo and Chiara:

I feel bad that I never have anything to post about Matteo. What can I say? He's just a good kid who occupies himself quite well during the day. I'll try to post something soon, though!

Chiara, on the other hand, is definitely on her way to the 2s! Her sentence of the week was "I don't want to!" She spends the day getting Cati's math manipulatives, running and scattering them just because she knows that it drives us crazy!

Cati looses her 1st tooth!

Cati came downstairs about a half an hour after we put them to bed last night with her 1st baby tooth in her hand! I'll let her tell the story in pictures and words :)

Homeschool Week-in-Review: 10/27 - 10/31

I didn't post last weekend about the previous homeschool week. It was a 4-day week since the grandparents were still here on that Monday. We all had colds that week and felt pretty yucky. Thankfully, this past week has been better. Some of the things on this post include work done during that 'missing' week!

Please see the posts below to see pictures of our 1st snow of the season and of Halloween. This post was already too long without those pictures!

Together:

History - We took 2 weeks off from our usual ancient history studies while Maria worked on her Presidential Lapbook (see below). We started back this week studying ancient India and ancient China. Here is a narration by Maria about ancient China. She's really been doing well on her history narrations. Writing is typically a tough subject for Maria with plenty of whining and attempts to get by with the minimum ("Is this enough, Mom?"). However, history narrations have been easy for her lately, and I thought this one deserved to be posted.




The activity guide that we use includes coloring pages for each chapter, which Cati loves! Here is one she did this week. She always uses as many different colors as possible!!



Art: We've been working on this art project for several weeks now. Cati finally finished this week. Maria's still working :) The 1st picture is the original that she had to work from. It is intentionally black and white so that they would have to choose their own color scheme. This is our 1st project on shading.

Here is Cati's interpretation:

Maria:

Sometimes Maria decides to do her work in costume :) She's very happy about her new Mary costume!

Math - She finally got to some new topics this week. She learned how to find the factors of a number. She took her 4th test this week, but I still need to grade it :)

Grammar - She took a test on nouns this week and did very well.

Spelling - She started level 3 of our spelling program this week! It's always fun to start something new! The 1st few lessons work on the different spellings for long A.

Reading - She's reading Black Beauty. She loves horses and is really enjoying the story. In her free reading time, she's gotten into the Happy Hollister books. I've been getting new ones at the library each week.

Chemistry - She did 2 experiments with their reports this week. The 1st one was about moving oil and water drops on wax paper to see that polar and nonpolar molecules are not attracted to each other. The 2nd one showed that the work of stretching molecules (using a rubber band) produces heat.

Election Lapbook - Here is the election lapbook that Maria worked on for 2 weeks. In the video, Maria explains some parts of the lapbook. Warning - it's more than 5 minutes long! :)

Cati:

Math - She started working on counting by 5s this week in preparation for adding nickels to our daily coin cup. She also learned how to draw line segments with a ruler. It's kind of one of those things that you take for granted - that a child just knows how to hold a ruler to make a straight line. It's something she'll have to practice daily now on her worksheet. She has to draw her own line at the top of the page for writing her name.

Grammar - Cati started working with nouns.

Reading - Cati always reads to me for 30 minutes per day. She always reads to me from her religion book, and then we read something else. Sometimes we use one of our phonetic readers. Sometimes we read a library book about one of our history or science topics. This week was about whales! We also started Charlotte's Web as a read-aloud before bed.

Spelling - Her lesson this week was based on this rule: "I and O followed by 2 consonants may be long."

Biology - She finished her lapbook about marsupials (kangaroos, koalas, opossums, tasmanian devils, etc.) and started a new one about whales. Here is a picture of her marsupial lapbook. Chiara was trying to invade the pictures on the side :)

There were so many minibooks, that we had to use the back of the 2 bottom flaps to have enough space. I'm so glad I found these lapbooks. She LOVES working on them!

She explains some of the parts of her marsupial lapbook in this video. I hope she's speaking loudly enough for you to hear! This video is only 1 minute long :)

Even though Cati is doing all this work this year, she still has plenty of time for building Little People villages with Matteo :)

I haven't posted a video of Cati's piano practice before, so here it is! Please, please ignore the VERY messy playroom in the background.

Chiara:

Chiara has really taken off in her speech over the past couple of weeks. She can say just about anything, and she talks CONSTANTLY! She learned her 1st Italian work a couple of week ago - "mio!" (mine). She picked it up during a discussion we had about the last piece of cheesecake from my birthday :)

Happy All-Saints Day!

Happy All-Saints Day!

Unfortunately, Chiara is pretty sick with a good fever and serious congestion, so only Dany and Maria were able to go celebrate at Mass this morning.

Here are some pictures from All Hallows Eve (a.k.a. Halloween).

Maria was Mary (Thank you, Grandma, for finishing her costume while you were here!!!), Cati was Snow White (no time to get an angel costume together), and Matteo was a pumpkin (again).

Off they go with Dany to fill their pumkins and bags! I stayed at home with Chiara, who kept dozing off in my arms (she's really not feeling well!), giving out candy.

Matteo was a little concerned about the whole thing, but he was happy about all the treats he got and asked when they get to go Trick-or-Treating again!

Cold and Snow

We had our 1st snow of the season this past week.

Here are the kids bundled up after returning from morning Mass.



Cati wanted her hood off so that she could feel the snow flakes fall on her face.

Maria is very serious about dressing for the cold. It was in the 30s and quite windy, but it wasn't THAT cold!

You can see that later in the day we got a good burst of snow.

It was even enough for the kids to go out and play. It doesn't take much snow to make them happy!


While the kids love bundling up and playing in the cold snow, Dany and I don't :) That explains why all these pictures are taken from inside the house through the windows. You don't get great quality, but at least we stay warm!

Thankfully, fall weather has returned! The kids (and Dany) are playing outside now in sunny 60 degree weather!

And, we're looking forward to grilling hamburgers outside this evening for the GA/FL game. Go Dawgs!!!!

Any chance winter is over?? It was enough for me!