Updates--History, Tintin, Walks

So much to say, so little time...

Quick updates on the kids:

Jade:  He's almost finished with Gr. 3 grammar and would be already if I hadn't cut out nearly two months because of late pregnancy and early postpartum.  He's doing well on his spelling, is about to transition to cursive in handwriting about three or four weeks from now, is about to start on his regular Horizons math lessons again (since I finally went through with him all his math word problems he'd done on his own for awhile, some of which he got right, some almost right, and some undone which we did together), is enjoying daily devotionals, science lessons, and history lessons.  He bought more Hardy Boys books and a Tintin video game.  Did I mention before that Nathan took the boys to see the Tintin movie back in December?  Well, he did.  Jade's already read some of the Tintin books a second time.  I wonder sometimes whether he's too obsessed with Tintin.  I had worked up some reward dollars with Timberdoodle, so yesterday I ordered Gr. 4 grammar for Jade, and I had enough left to buy one graphic novel.  The latter is a surprise for him.

He got his bird house back, finished:

He made a pretty surprise rock craft for me:

In history we read about Stonehenge, the early Egyptians, and the Minoans.  Jade found some rocks that looked good to make his own Stonehenge look-alike, but he said it was harder to actually put together than it looked.  He couldn't get any glue to hold the stuff together well enough, so he did something slightly different.  I also wrapped him like a mummy, and he labeled a map in the Greece area where the Minoans lived.  We steeped some tea and dipped the map in it and used a lighter on it after it dried to try to make it look aged.  It didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped it would, but I think he had fun doing it anyway.

 He's been helping with many things as usual.  We went on a trip to the post office last week, and I couldn't roll my window or the window behind me down, and Jade said it must be a fuse.  Well, when I went into the post office he got out and went around and opened my fuse box and had the problem fixed by the time I got back out.  I started the Sub and pressed the window buttons, and they worked!  I love that boy!  Then one whole day and night and part of the next day Nathan was gone, because he had to go do some work for his dad, and Jade is the one who built a fire and kept it going for us so that we'd stay warm.  He's also helping Nathan build a new chicken house and work on some other projects.

Trusten:  He's doing a great job learning phonics and sight words.  He excitedly points to words he knows and tells me what they are.  He also is doing well as far as his tracing is concerned.  He's done mazes, circles, and squares recently.  I plan to soon teach him how to play some Funschool games online.  Jade was playing computer games much earlier than this.

Olivia:  She is so smart, perhaps too smart for her britches in some ways.  She seems to possess good problem-solving abilities.  Now as far as some other things are concerned, it's currently funny.  For example, a few nights ago Nathan and I were talking about chickens, and she roared like some sort of carnivore, and I laughed so hard.  I told her chickens did not make that noise and asked Nathan to make proper chicken sounds for her.  I'm excited, because I think we are truly going to get chickens again this spring.  It has been three years!  Nathan says we're going to get turkeys, too.  Anyway, I'm wondering how well Liv knows the alphabet, because I've not actively been teaching her, but she apparently recognizes at least some letters.  She likes the magnet letters on the refrigerator, and an example is last night, she picked up a lowercase 'y' off the living room floor, and said it was a 'y.'  I talk about colors a lot.  Like I normally do, the main way I use to teach colors is just talk about colors throughout the day, like, "Your shirt today is pink.  Look, I'm wearing some pink, too, right here.  That letter is green.  This pillow is brown."

Elizabeth:  Well, who knows what all is going on in her brain right now, but she sure likes to eat a lot of brain-healthy breast milk!  :-)

A picture before my first walk with all four of my precious babies...should have been a little more in the shade of the tree:

I'd regretted not taking my camera (and knew I would) on our first walk.  Everything is so beautiful around here, even in the winter.  For our second walk, I decided to take the camera.  You can see how busy the older three children stay during our walk.  It's not just walking.  It's exploring, climbing, running, digging, etc.  And what a beautiful walk!

The kids have spent a lot of time lately in the creek in our front yard, Jade busting away at the dirt with a rock hammer and finding all sorts of things:

I couldn't resist not taking some pictures of Jaden and Olivia early one morning (before Liv was dressed) of them together in the computer chair.  Jade was reading a book, and Liv wanted to snuggle up next to him and get him to spin the chair around.  So there they sat, Jade spinning the chair with his feet for Liv while he read his book.

Oh, I have so many wonderful pictures, but I can't post them all on this blog.  One more, a picture of Olivia and Elizabeth:

Oh, wait, one more thing to share!  Our friend Casey gave us a strange stone probably a year and a half ago.  He found it in his yard.  We've wondered off and on what it could be.  It looks like a petrified something.  It almost looks like a peach pit to me.  Casey said it looks like a rose, and it does.  Anyway, a few weeks ago Jade and I were looking at it again, and he said he wondered what it was, and I said I didn't know, but it did look like a rose.  Well, after I said that, he ran to get his rock guide and said he knew what it was.  It's a form of barite called desert rose!  Wow, finally the mystery is solved!

Our rock is placed on the page beside the book's picture

Until next time...

New Baby, Owls, and Ancient Sumerians

I had started this post two days ago, exactly one month since my last post, but I lost it, though I thought it was saved.  After my last post I dropped Jaden's book work down to only his 5-day-a-week handwriting and two pages almost-daily out of his math Daily Word Problems book, then later the latter was also dropped.  His work around the house increased, though, in order to give me a rest.

We stopped our almost-daily walks together, but I started walking by myself; the kids stayed at home with Nathan.  My walking stopped, though, six days before the baby was born, because I fell and hurt my knee when I was nearly home that day.

I continued reading to the kids most days.  I read to them their daily devotionals from Bible Study Planet, except on the days I didn't approve the overall message (which is rare), a chapter from Proverbs, their nature magazines, and Weekly Readers.

One of the things we studied was owls.  We've read about a few different types of owls in their magazines over time, but last month we learned about snowy owls:

I read aloud about different kinds of owls in one of our encyclopedias and showed them pictures, and I made a playlist of owl Youtube videos for them to watch while I folded laundry, including some fun ones…I always throw in something animated, preferably a moral tale or a song.

The featured treat for the month in Big Backyard was of snowy owls. I changed up the ingredients only slightly.  I made them owl treats with apple cinnamon rice cakes, melted marshmallows (b/c marshmallow cream was unavailable), peanut butter, raisins, and blood orange-flavored hard candies (I substituted the latter with banana slices for Liv's, not pictured):

Jaden's, w/o peanut butter (Oops!  Sorry about the camera strap!)

Trusten's, w/ peanut butter

We concluded our owl study by dissecting owl pellets, which are balls of hair and bones that owls hack up after eating their prey.  We could tell the "pellets" we dissected were mice:

Loupes, owl pellets, and nitrile gloves

Jade carefully inspecting the outside of a pellet with a loupe

Mouse bones!

Skull is still whole, along with the teeth

Mouse teeth still attached to the skull

Stinky!  I commented to the kids that it was a real lesson in how brutal things were in the wild and reminded them that animals will not behave that way when God's Kingdom is established on this earth.  Owls will eat plants then.

 Six days after I injured my knee (thankful I had somewhat of a healing time), I gave birth to my fifth-born child, my second girl—Elizabeth Annmarie.  Jaden, Trusten, and Olivia all love her very much!  She's a sweet little blessing.  So far she has seemed more like Jaden William as a baby (or Asher, as he was also pleasant) than last two.  Here are a couple pictures of her:

Elizabeth, two days old

Elizabeth, nine days old

Before Elizabeth was born, we read about the Tower of Babel in a Mystery of History lesson.  We looked at ziggurats on Google Images, and he built one of his own with wooden blocks.  Since she was born we've picked back up on history and read about the ancient Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh.  When Jaden is a bit older I'll allow him to read or listen to that Babylonian story.  It has been just over a year since Nathan and I listened to the entire epic on Youtube.  What a strange tale!  There were some things that I found would be inappropriate for Jade at his age.  Of course, I guess some would say the same thing of some things in the holy scriptures, but the wording of the things (sexual content) in Gilgamesh I don't like for an eight-year-old. 

We read about the Sumerians' written language—cuneiform.  I encouraged Jaden to write real cuneiform symbols in clay, but Jade did his own made-up written language on a small clay piece he made (from clay he found outside and then dried afterward to keep; he didn't want to use modeling clay):

I also reminded him of the time he wrote his name William in Chinese.  We then went to Google Images and looked at cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Hebrew, Greek, Telugu, Arabic, and perhaps some other non-Roman-alphabet languages that I can't recall.  I reminded him of the bible study articles I've written that our brother Manasseh in India has had translated into Telugu to distribute throughout his region in India.  Manasseh sent some copies once, one of which I gave to Jaden to keep:

Manasseh has also sent us newspaper clippings in Telugu:

I finally explained to Jaden that all languages evolve as well, and our Modern English has changed from Middle English, Old English, etc.  I showed him what English looked like exactly four-hundred years ago by pulling our copy of the 1611 Edition of the King James Bible…

…and opened it to compare the chapter in Proverbs we had just read from the modern King James bible.  The u's were v's and the v's u's, the s's were f's, there are more e's on the ends of words and doubles of many other letters, etc. and I also pointed out that their chapter headings were done in Roman numerals, rather than Arabic numerals:

I'm now easing back into our [new] normal routine, and I'll soon have more to report about all the three oldest children, but this is it for now, except a couple fun shots of Olivia in her new dress-up dress that my momma got for her (and her play silk that I got for her a quite some time ago):

Until next time...