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...

Jaden's Clay Artwork

I'll be giving birth in about a week or so, and I've been tired lately and have had other things I've had to do, so I've not assigned a lot of book work lately.  It's been about two weeks since Jade has done his daily math word problems and Language Lessons pages, and it's been a week or more since I've done a spelling lesson with him.  I've read to the kids but with a reduction and nothing from Mystery of History or the science book we're currently on, but they get history and science here and there, regardless.  I've been reading them a daily devotional and then sometimes a chapter in Proverbs on top of that.  Jade has continued to do grammar and math almost daily, and I mark those lessons so he can do his corrections.  He usually has very few, if any, corrections to make for grammar, so he'll correct and do a new lesson each day, but for math he does a lesson one day and then corrections the next day and no new lesson.  That's just the way it is for math now, because he must go more slowly on that.

Jaden William finished his clay art class.  The main thing was a bird house.  The teacher still must fire them again, and so it should be ready to pick up within two weeks.  All the kids in the class did a good job on their bird houses, though I really think Jade did the best job.  His bird on top definitely looked the best.  They all made little bowls on the potter's wheel, too, though, and Jade's collapsed on him.  He was really upset about that.  But he was the only one who made some other things.  He made a truck, a pumpkin, and then a rectangular thing with two neat imprints in it.

It was so exciting to see his creations!  He decided he would use his collapsed bowl for a candle holder.  I told him if he didn't want it that he could give it to me after he made his planned candle, and I would be happy to have it.  So, today he put a wick in it and poured some dyed and scented wax in it.  Then he said he was afraid he poured it in while it was still too hot and something about it sometimes cracking when he does that.  So a bit later, after I'd taken it back to my bedroom, he said he wanted to look at it again, and it had little crack-looking places in the wax, so he was upset about that, but I don't care.  I'm so proud of it!

We drank some punch and talked to his art teacher last night, and she told us that he was a very neat kid.  She said that he took more initiative than most kids she's ever known and that he has quite a few ideas in his head.  She told me that he'd told her that day that he kept the Sabbath.  She asked some about what I believed; she doesn't even know much about the bible to begin with, but I told her almost everything Christianity taught I don't believe and do not believe is biblical but was pagan-adopted by the Roman Catholic Church.  Nathan explained that the best way to describe him is agnostic (he believes in a God/Creator but doesn't ascribe to any in-stone beliefs beyond that).  She was delighted to know how well we got along and respected each other's beliefs and said that her experience in most "Christians" was that they are very closed-minded and disrespectful of other beliefs, etc.  Maybe that in itself will pique her curiosity enough about what I told her to investigate more for herself.

Anyway, she said that it was apparent that whatever I was doing was good, because she was really pleased with Jaden.  That was nice for me; I needed to hear it.  I've been so down on myself over the past several months.  This year has taken a toll on me, and my out-of-whack hormones and all the stresses I've experienced this year has resulted in my struggling greatly with patience with the kids and decreased energy to do more with them, so I've felt like an awful mother.

William had taken his teacher a candle to sell to her his last lesson or the one before that.  When Nathan said to her, "If he's told you anything that sounds outlandish that he does, it's probably true."  That's when she admitted that when he'd told her he made candles, she thought to herself, "Yeah, right," but then the next week he took her the candle.  Jaden William then told her about the stool with a storage compartment he'd made earlier in the week.  :-)  He only had scrap wood parts from Nathan's projects to work with.  He's always so busy doing things, though.  He actually used up all his money (rare for him) on some new books and a new drill--a nano drill.  He actually had only enough to cover a little more than half for the drill, so I told him I'd front him the rest of the money, but he'd have to do extra work.  I need that right now, anyway, so he's been doing a lot more house work than normal to give me a break, and he has also done things to help Nathan, like loading up split firewood into the truck and stacking it in the back yard.  He won't get his drill until he has satisfactorily completed extra work without complaint for the remainder of my pregnancy.

Some other things Jade has done lately...


Going deer hunting with his daddy:

Nathan and Jaden dressed up and ready to go into the woods

He's been making breakfast some mornings.  It's handy that his Gamma (Nathan's mother) just recently sent him an apron and some wooden utensils of his own.  He loves pancakes, and I've posted about him making pancakes before, but this time he did everything completely on his own--read the directions, mixed it, and cooked them all.  The sunglasses?  Probably stuck them on his head after retrieving them from his baby sister.  The A-shirt?  I guess he'd not gotten dressed for the day yet, or sometimes he puts on crazy things.  He drives me up the wall with his strange dress at times.

 Saving animals from Sylvester's (our beloved cat) jaws:

Creepy, I know.  A mouse!  I told him to deposit that thing across the road, and I hope it doesn't come back into our territory.  The cat has been doing his job killing mice lately, but Jade can't stand for the cat to kill anything.  I get sad about birds and such, but I like that we don't have a big mouse problem.

I'll talk more about Trusten later, but for now, I will post a few pictures of him putting bug stickers on a scene in a book I'd bought him for his birthday back in May.  I'd forgotten about that book!  He didn't act interested back at the time.  But it just so happens the book is about insects and spiders and such, and we have been studying those things, so it was handy that I came across it and read to him more about spiders, insects, etc., and he had fun with the stickers.

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Spiders and Tornadoes

Spiders...

When I decided to get The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I came across some other Eric Carle books that looked interesting, so I looked on Ebay to find a used lot of books that included the caterpillar book and a couple of the others in which I was interested.  One of them is called The Very Busy Spider.  Last week we talked about spiders, which included reading the aforementioned book and a couple other cute ones we have.

We had recently finished reading an issue of Ranger Rick that included a section on jumping spiders, which was thoroughly enjoyable for Jaden and me.  Trusten followed along, too, but usually Liv doesn't sit through our magazine readings.

We're being tight with our money right now, but I used what I had on hand to make spider treats for the kids.  They could have come out better had I used some things I had in mind, but the kids don't care.  I used some natural dot and long sprinkles I had on hand for the numerous spider eyes and fangs.  Too bad I didn't have size differences for the eyes.  I had vanilla wafer cookies left over from making banana pudding for our previous Sabbath dessert, and I melted some semi-sweet chocolate chips (with some water) to coat the cookies.  Then I cut up a fruit leather for the legs (like I did for the caterpillars).  Jade is happy I'm making more treats like this.  I made them often for him when he was between Liv's and Trusten's age, but I can probably count on my hands how often I've done it the last four years!

Among their Youtube videos last week were spider videos--some on jumping spiders, some on the two venomous spiders in the U.S. (black widow and brown recluse), and then some random fun ones like the largest spider in the world.

Tornadoes...

I think I may have already mentioned that Trusten became stuck on tornadoes, asking us numerous questions about them.  So, I got a couple good used books for cheap on Amazon (as usual) on tornadoes--Tornado Alert and then an Eyewitness Book, Hurricanes and Tornadoes.  The former gave facts and kid-friendly pictures about tornadoes, talked about Tornado Alley, and explained what to do in the event of a tornado, depending on where you are.  The latter book has info on all sorts of natural disasters, but there is a good section on tornadoes. 

In addition, the kids all watched several tornado videos during Youtube time, which mostly consisted of real video footage of tornadoes in action.  I printed out a tornado coloring sheet for Trusten, and his coloring itself is tornadic.  Actually, I was pleased.  I did not sit with him to assist him with coloring in the lines, and he's doing better on his own.  I admit, I do not spend a lot of time coloring with my kids, so they learn to do it well later than many.  I really want to watch the movie Night of the Twisters with the kids, but it will have to wait until I can reasonably afford to buy a copy of it.  It's apparently rare on dvd.  I looked into renting it, and I can't find anyone in the area who carries it, but I think it will be a better movie than Twister.  I've never seen the former, but I read the book as a child, and I read the movie reviews, and it sounds really good.

 

What the kids really enjoyed, though, was the tornado-in-a-bottle.  We had talked about the tornado's vortex and the vacuum that is created.  So then I demonstrated it with two one-liter bottles (the only size of something I could find with something decent for drinking in them),  with water halfway filling the bottom bottle and the second bottle taped to the top using duct tape:

Jade and I took turns flipping the water-filled bottle over and giving it a quick couple of twirls.  Voila--a water tornado in a bottle:

I was afraid they weren't going to tire of watching the water tornadoes.  It was a real hit!

Trusten's conclusion, though?  He came up to me a few days ago and said, "I hate tornadoes now." 

His current obsession, what he interrogated Jaden about last night after they went to their bunk beds?  Dinosaurs.  "If you saw a dinosaur, what would you do?"  And on and on it went.  He has already approached me today asking me similar questions.  So stay tuned. 

Some Periodicals We've Read...

Ranger Rick, Big Backyard, Arbor Day, and Weekly Reader

Animal Binder...

Remember Jaden's animal binder?

A couple months ago I got copies of pictures of him with animals over the last several years of his life, plus some of the pictures I've taken of animals we've seen (but that he's not held).  In his own time, he's going to use the pictures to make his own collages and add the pages to his notebook.  There are 84 pictures for him to go through, and some of the animals include butterflies, caterpillars, worms, sharks, cows, goats, chickens, cats, dogs, salamanders, snakes, and penguins. 

Children and Pumpkins...

All the leaves have fallen off our trees now.  It was beautiful while the color changes were happening.  Winter will be here soon.  I took fall pumpkin pictures of the kids, and I've started baking our pumpkins and freezing pulp for pumpkin pies.  Yum!  Here a few of the pictures:

Pumpkins, gourds, and three sweet chillins!

My sweet babies!

Jaden is doing well on his book work.  He blows through grammar like it's nothing...like his momma.  ;-)  He may not speak it well, but he sure thinks his lessons are easy, and he gets them finished quickly.  He works on his handwriting practice and daily math word problems on his own, and I quickly go over his grammar and Language Lessons, and he does those on his own, and we do his spelling lesson together, which usually doesn't take long.  I've had to slow down on his math (not to be confused with his daily math word problems).  Rather than doing one lesson a day and then his doing his corrections and another lesson the next day, one lesson is now spanned out over two days--the lesson one day, then he makes his corrections on the next day.

He's still making candles and reading, and now that it's freezing on some nights, he dresses in his bibs on those mornings and goes out to bust ice.  :-)  One more picture:

Jaden William using his Light Wedge to read a Tintin book in bed at night

Until next time...

Butterflies & Caterpillars

Caterpillars and butterflies (and moths) have always been a big deal in our household.  I love butterflies, and all my kids have loved both caterpillars and the adult moths and butterflies.  I have so many pictures of Jaden William with caterpillars over the last several years of his life, and I've started collecting quite a few of Trusten and Liv with the crawling creatures.

For years I've wanted to get Eric Carle's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I just haven't.  I finally did, though, and the kids loved it.

I also showed the kids Youtube videos of the metamorphosis of caterpillars to butterflies and included a couple of videos with cute little songs about the magnificent creatures.

I used to make a lot of play dough creations for William when he was the ages of Trust and Liv.  We had so much fun.  I've recently started playing with play dough with Trusten and Olivia.  I make creations for them while they play with some by themselves.  Last week we had a session where I focused solely on making caterpillars and butterflies.  They used my butterfly cookie cutter to cut our butterflies, and they free played.

Trusten making balls as I had shown him how

Liv picking up her newly-cookie-cutter-cut butterfly

Trusten showing off his own caterpillar creation

My caterpillar

My butterfly (yes, with the lines from my hands, but they're like veins in butterfly wings!)

Liv using cookie cutter to make a green butterfly

Also during the week I made all of them a fruit snack that looked like the caterpillar in the Eric Carle book.

Not the prettiest caterpillar, but the kids love when I make fun snacks

Then I transformed my fruit, seed, and grain bar recipe into butterfly cookies by taking the dough and rolling it out thinner and using my butterfly cookie cutter.  That dough with all the stuff in it doesn't cut out cleanly, but we could still tell they were butterflies, and the kids loved them.

Super delicious with sweetened cream cheese (Trust likes jelly or plain)

For young, but slightly-older children than Trusten is, here is a good worksheet resource for The Very Hungry Caterpillar:  Activities and Lesson Plan for The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Until next time...