Second Half of Summer 2013: What We've Been...

Another of my "What We've..." posts to cover the second half of summer, which will soon be over as reckoned by the fall equinox.  I've got at least four additional posts planned, which I soon hope to get posted.  They will cover our Trumpets celebration, plans for the remaining three and a half Roman calendar months, and then the starting back of weekly updates on what we've done in our homeschool, of which I'm already behind.  I'm typing this post on my iPad, as our messed up computer is finally officially finished, after three months of trouble following a lightning strike.  It served us well for four years before that happened.  Nathan is looking for a replacement, which is necessary.  I've had to download two different apps for this device in order to make blogging these posts with my pictures possible, but I'm so thankful I've got this option.  It appears as if there will be no font size changes or anything of that nature, but I'll make do.  Sooo...

What We've Read...

Jaden William's history (Mystery of History):

*Emperor Asoka of India

*The Septuagint and the Colossus of Rhodes

*The Qin Dynasty (Ch'in)

*Hannibal, Elephants, and the Punic Wars

*The Han Dynasty

*The Maccabean Revolt

Trusten's history and geography (Our Christian Heritage):

*Leadership/governing in our lives, especially God and parents

*Four oceans

*Seven continents

*Facts about each continent and some animals that live on each

We've gone back to pick up where we left off in Scholastic's Read and Learn Bible.  We are currently in 2 Kings, about to read about Elisha.  We are also still continually, over and over, going through the book of Proverbs.  Instead of a daily chapter, though, and also trying to fit in other bible reading with the kids (not counting my own reading), we are usually doing a chapter of Proverbs every other day, and the days in between we are reading a chapter in the children's bible.  Sometimes we combine and read both, but some days it doesn't work out, and I feel relieved that I have decided not to stress myself out about it.

Various children's books.  I'm not going to subscribe to the Weekly Reader/Scholastic News this year, at least not for Trust and Liv.  I apparently paid twice last year, because they sent me a notice of credit.  I am still trying to decide whether to order for Jaden William, but I'd likely let him read them on his own time, if I get them, if it's not too late.  When we got these, the reading from children's books was reduced, and I don't like that.  I love the wildlife magazines the kids get, and they are only monthly, so we will continue to enjoy these.  

What the Boys Have Written...

Jaden's book report on Lois Lowry's The Giver (book pictured above in previous section). Yeah, that boy managed to get his report all dirty, because he laid down on his belly on the front porch to write most of it!  He needs much more writing, writing, writing practice, but he is getting better.  He just gets in a hurry on everything!  This was his second draft, so I'm disappointed in how many spelling errors and missing punctuation there was.  

Jaden's book report on Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue.  This is his first draft, on which he came a LONG WAY from his first draft on The Giver.  And he's finally grasping how to write a full-length book report.  This is just his third, after The Giver, and you may remember his first one on The Children's Homer by Padraic Colum.  So I was pretty pleased with him on this.  I've got to go over it, type up corrections, and then he'll write his final draft, which had better be better than his final one on The Giver.  I don't know how that boy managed to spell things incorrectly and miss periods and such, when his second draft was COPY WORK.  I'd typed out corrections and added some detail in to better help him understand what he was lacking.  He definitely didn't lack in this report like he did that report. :-)  His grade (something very few things the kids do get) will be reported in a future post, as well as his book report on the final book in the trilogy.  

Trusten has mostly done copy work in his Language Lessons workbook.  He finished the one on which he was working and will now be working on the Explode the Code series and won't continue on with the next LL workbook until he's finished, which I expect will only take four or five months at the most.  He is good at flying nearly flawlessly through such things.  He's doing well on most of his work, despite his hair-trigger temperament.  Below is pictured some of the drawings he was asked to draw in his LL book.  He normally flies off the handle each time he's asked to draw anything (among many other things), which involves an exposive verbal outburst, a throwing of his pencil, etc.  Once I am able to calm him, it's as if nothing happened, and he gets his work done.  Same thing with anytime he's asked to write something free-hand (not copy work).  He knows very well I'll help him spell anything with which he needs help, but it seems all memory of that leaves him each time. 

Regarding the sentence pictured below, he was required to write his own sentence using one of the words in a list.  After his meltdown, I spoke a few sample sentences for examples, like "I want to fly a kite" and "I hope my momma loves me" ("kite" and "hope" being words in the list).  He shouted, "I know you love me!"  (Think with me: "CHILL OUT, child!")  Well, he calmed down, and I left to be about my business in the kitchen.  When he was finished with his work, he properly put up his workbook.  When I went to check it, I was humored that he had written that example sentence, even after his outburst!

LOL.  (If you haven't read the two preceding paragraphs, please do so now.)  NO spelling errors in that simple sentence, and I didn't help him (true, I spell it "momma" and "Momma" when it's proper, rather than common, but I'm a rare exception).  He just loses it too easily.

Jaden's latest reading and research obsession has been technology, and specifically Apple technology.  He drives me crazy!  He asked me whether I'd rather him talk about languages again, and I said, "Yes!  Please!"  LOL 

I've started reading about plant science to Trusten.  I'll talk more about that and more in a future post.

What We've Been Eating...

Homemade suki-yaki steak with homemade white sauce (maybe not as satisfying to the lust of the tastebuds as what you eat in the Japanese restaurants, but mine is whole-grain rice and pasta and all organic ingredients); homemade chicken pot pie (ok, except for the crusts), homemade peach cobbler (a long-time favorite around here), squash casserole, fruit salad, potatoes, creamy chickenn and potato soup (pictured is a failed attempt at an experimental casserole, but afterward I started making it as soup and cut the potatoes differently); tortilla pizzas; spicy Thai noodles.

The soup and the spicy Thai noodles were well-liked around the table as new meals.  I've fixed the former a few times, but I've yet to make the latter.  I will change it up next time, as it contained way too much oil the first time (but was indeed tasty).  

My sweet boy Jaden William (10 years) has fixed breakfast many times lately (usually muffins). His favorite is pancakes, and he happened to surprise me one morning with making pancakes.  I was walking into the kitchen, and he was already flipping pancakes out of the pan.  Yes, he runs the grain mill, combines all the ingredients himself, and does the cooking, and he does a great job.  He's already had plenty of practice over the past few years.  I asked for chocolate chips in mine, and he surprised me with a chocolate chip smiley face!

That's a cantaloupe out of our garden (yum!), and Na cut the cucumbers one night for our dinner, and he made us all cute things.  He made me the little car/cart above.  Almost all of our cucumbers have been delicious.  Everything has been so good.  Nathan dumped all of our wood ash on our garden spot throughout last winter, and Jaden put the straw and chicken poop from cleaning out the chicken house on there, so our food has been nutritious and tasy.  

What We've Done on Sabbath Afternoons...

Pictured above: After one of the floods (odd for mid-summer), the kids swam and played in the water in the creek that borders our property to the south/southwest.  I took so many absolutely gorgeous pictures.  The kids played after each flood.

You can tell they're dressed and ready to go play in the creek again, but first some fun with mud!  Check out William's mudman!

The two sweetest girls...  Liv wanted to show me a moth and other nature finds.

These pictures are so funny.  Poor Liv.  Trusten torments that poor girl, but you've got to admit that the pictures of him chasing her with his mud ball is pretty hilarious.  

What Nature Things We've Enjoyed...

The kids got to enjoy witnessing the metamorphosis cycle of butterflies (painted lady species).  Pictured above are the caterpillars hanging from the top of their containers (nasty by that point) and each creating a chrysalis for their pupae stage, and then in the bottom picture they are all in the pupa stage.  I pinned them to the side of the butterfly pavilion.  Notice one on some tissue at the bottom.  It had fallen to the bottom of the container, and I didn't have much hope for it.  Jaden and I theorized.  I told him I wondered whether it would not develop properly if it laid on the bottom, or whether the sole purpose of caterpillars suspending themselves up high was to keep away from predators.  I wondered whether there was a dual purpose (like so many things, or often more than dual).  It turned out in the end that the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis alive, but one of the wings was deformed.  It was unable to fly, so Jaden put it in one of my pots of flowers.  We felt bad for it.

ALL ten caterpillars emerged alive as butterflies.  Nine were perfectly formed and able to fly away on release day.

I also read our copy of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar for fun, and I played a video on Amazon on Demand of butterflies and their lives.

We only kept the butterflies as adults in the pavilion two--maybe three--days, and then the kids took turns getting one on their fingers and then releasing them.  The picture at the bottom right of the collage directly above is so funny.  JW had a butterfly perched on his finger, but by the time I shot the picture, the butterfly was gone.

We LOVED this!  It was especially a treat to us, because we love butterflies so much!  Life is truly a miracle!  It's just so amazing!

Poor Elizabeth didn't know any better.  She'd found the under-developed butterfly that Jade had put in the flower pot of flowers.  She came walking excitedly toward me with a big smile on her face, holding the butterfly.  I was horrified on the inside, but I managed to gently tell her that no, that wasn't good.  I don't think she damaged it too much (it wasn't going to make it, anyway), but William started to shout, so I had to calm him quickly and remind him that Baby Sister didn't understand how to hold butterflies, and she was just excited to get to hold one like all her siblings.

Jaden William a beetle or something in its pupa stage. This was exciting!  I liked this particular ones.  You can the one in the upper right picture is broken open a bit, so you can see the larvae inside.  The rest were undisturbed.  This was fascinating!  I just love all the awesome things you can find in nature.  The coverings were like tree bark!

Liv is picured with an adult pill bug crawling on her hand.  She loves these things!  (My younger sister did, too.  I won't touch them.)  Liv is often scared of such things at first, but once she realizes they won't hurt her, she takes quite a liking to them, whatever the "them" may be.  

Well, I've got LOTS more to share, but this is it for now.  There will be more soon.

Until next time...

Outdoor Discoveries, Trusten's Reading and Writing Prep

I'd saved where I'd worked on my last post, and the way I'd left it gave me trouble with adding more, so I just published it, and now I'm starting a new post.

Some other highlights of the last few months:

A Slight Flood...

Jade and Liv at top, then all three below after the water greatly increased

Nature Discoveries...

Butterflies loving my lilac bush

Jade with a tiger swallowtail butterfly, a salamander, inspecting caterpillar nest, climbing deer stand

More butterflies in our yard; Nathan holding a grass snake rescued from the cats

Some of Jaden's Latest Projects...

Jaden took apart the iron that stopped working.  He always enjoys taking apart things, trying to diagnose the problem(s), and keeping things he thinks he might can use for other applications.  He also sets aside recyclable things and adds them to our stuff to take to be recycled.

We read about ancient Egypt and clay-and-straw bricks.  He loves working with clay and so enjoyed making another clay and grass brick, but he left it in an unwise location, so on two separate occasions Trust and Liv (different one each time) messed with his brick.  I took a picture of it the way it was before it was completely ruined.  As for the hole in the center, that was intentional by Jaden, because he said he wanted a brick that he could fill with mortar. 

I was very pleased that he finished making a compost box for me.  He's so sweet!  He used materials Nathan let him have, left over from his own projects.  Some of that is just paneling that was left over from when Nathan put new paneling up in parts of the house.  Considering, I think Jade did a great job!  He started to paint it, but he said that Nathan told him he was afraid he wouldn't have enough paint left to finish painting the storage building if he painted the compost box.  Jade also hauled it himself beyond the yard to where I normally throw out scraps.

Trusten's Prep to Read and Write...

 Trusten has started the books preparing him for Explode the Code.  I used Explode the Code with William and loved it, but he did not do the Get Ready, Get Set, and Go books (A, B, and C) that I bought for Trusten.  Trusten is on the first book, book A, right now.  It works on phonics and letter-writing.

Well, believe it or not, Trusten doesn't always make faces like the one above.  As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure why it looks as if he's angry in that picture, because he seemed content.  He'd just finished making the 'f' sound and saying the name of the picture he is pictured circling.  Sometimes, though, he really does get mad about his work.  He does a good job sounding things out, circling the right pictures, etc., but he is frustrated about writing most letters.  


No Child Left Behind...

Olivia naturally wants to do what the boys are doing.  She has scribbled countless times in Jaden's workbooks he's left lying open unattended. When it's time for Trusten to do his work, I  normally give her a piece of paper and a pencil so that she can free-scribble, but on this day she wanted to cut.

Well, I'll probably leave my catch-up updating at this.  I'll try better to keep up with it now.  

Until next time...

Flowers, Floodwater, Snakes, and Worms

Throughout spring the boys picked bouquets for me.  Well, mostly Jaden William picked flowers for me, but Trusten picks flowers, too, so he added to the arrangements.  I've been needing some more flower vases for awhile, and I finally got some at the thrift store.  Now I don't have to have my flowers in a Coca-Cola glass that a relative gave me from McDonald's.  Here are some pics of the beautiful bouquets my sweet boys picked for me:

Some pictures of some unidentified, never-seen-before types of mushrooms on our property (anyone know?), a picture of what my red honeysuckle looks like this year, and a couple pics of the latest snake he caught (Western Ribbon Snake, a type of garter snake):

Now for a picture of the boys hanging out together on the hill off our back deck before it was covered with the summer weeds,  a picture of Liv in the shower after one of her mudfests, and some pics of all three kids playing in their much-beloved spring yard flood:

Earthworms!

In the next post I'll talk about Trusten's 4th birthday and the last of God's spring feasts, Pentecost.  After that, I'll talk about JW's birthday and our butterfly garden.  Next week starts the boys' swimming lessons, and also JW turns eight.  We're planning to take him for a flight in a private plane.  He'll get some new books and other things.  He's read all of his Cul-de-Sac kid books and only has three of his historical graphic novels left, so he'll get some more of the latter.  It's cool how much he reads about and then tells me.

He asked me not too long ago who William Clark was.  I said, "Wasn't that Lewis' travel partner when they explored up and down the Mississippi River?"  He said he thought so.  I told him we could look it up in the encyclopedia.  We've done this with several things recently, but this is the example I remember.  It gives him practice on looking up things in reference books.  I do this with dictionary skills, too, when he asks about words.  Anyway, I guided him through looking up William Clark, and I told him to read the entry.  He read part of it, enough that we confirmed that is who it was.  I asked him how he knew about him, and he said he'd read about him on Poptropica.  That's an online game he play sometimes.  He sometimes interacts (to an extent, as you can choose things to say from options, not just type whatever you want) with other kids, asking them to play certain activity competition games on there, etc.  He also reads and learns things on there. 

Well, this is it for now.  I included mostly pictures, little typing, as I'm so behind. 

Until next time....

Sloths, Birds, World Architecture, Solar System Scale, and Righteousness

First, I'd like to say that I left out something in the previous post on Wednesday, March 17.  For his writing that day, he had to write about what he learned that day.  Then on Thursday, March 18, while we were driving, I made up a tale about a white-tailed deer named Will who went to go find other kinds of deer.  He went across the North American continent meeting other deer and had short conversations with each type after learning their names.  He made comments on the differing antlers and such.  Then he had to sneak aboard a ship and stay alive by eating grain, as he travels to Europe.  That was the end of that segment of "Will the White-tailed Deer's Adventures ," until I can better research the deers of Europe, then he will move on to Asia and so forth.  I'll be showing the boys pictures on Google images of different types as we go along.

*Tuesday, March 23:  Proverb and bible story.  Jade did a reading lesson (about a secret king who dressed up like he was poor to see how his people were), two math pages, and some Youtube videos (including the Omega 3 one which was listed with the last post with previous videos).

*Wednesday, March 24: Proverb and bible story. We went to buy groceries.  Jaden has been pushing Liv in the stroller, and I keep Trusten in the kid's seat in my cart.  I tell the clerk how much water I'm going to buy, and then we all go back to the truck.  I unload the groceries and strap Trust and Liv in their carseats and lock them up.  Jade and I take the water jugs back in to fill them.  I can watch the truck the whole time through the front windows right beside the water dispenser.  I love our grocery store!  We shop at Ozark Natural Foods.  We are co-op owners there.  They are fairly strict about what they carry:  no artificial ingredients or things like MSG, no pesticides, hormones, and definitely no GMOs.  On the way home, I explained to Jade what was meant by "as the crow flies," when he was asking how many miles we had left to get to our house.  I explained the difference in going along the road and "as the crow flies."

Jade had to write out the scripture verses:

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. -Matthew 15:8


For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. -Romans 2:13

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. -Ephesians 6:4

I had already talked to him about these, but I wanted him to write them, too, and to memorize them.  This is because of what I discussed in my previous post.  As for the last one, he's not a father, but he is like a father to Trusten, since he's the firstborn.  Trust imitates everything Jaden does.

I'm happy to say that Jaden is working on changing his ways.  He has a way to go, but he's doing well, and Nathan is also improving as a father.  We are both trying to be good parents.

Youtube videos:  Red Peacock (animated moral story), visuals of World Architecture, planets and stars size to scale--Our Solar System (Jade loved this one),  biography of Amelia Earhart

*Thursday, March 25: Proverb and bible story.  Jade did three writing pages (making lists), two math pages (intro to double-digit addition), and a reading lesson (Grimm Brothers).  The boys and I read and looked at Jaden's newest issue of Your Big Backyard.   In it, we read about different types of birds and the different types of nests that they make, and we read about three-toed sloths and some other things.  Then I read to the boys a couple of the stories in the previous issue of Heaven's Family, to remind the boys of what types of things go on in the world and how thankful they should be.  One of the stories was about some poor widows and their children, and another was about how thankful some very impoverished families were to have biosand filters in order to have clean water. 

Youtube videos:  plane and forest fires (computer-generated), California wildfires (2007), giant octopus (Trust wanted more octopus videos), octopus, and a moral cartoon story: "The Beggar's Laugh" (animated tale of wit and wisdom)

Oh!  And here are a couple videos that I taped this day, of our flooded yard: creek and yard

*Friday, March 26:  Proverb and bible story.  Jade also did an Explode the Code lesson.  He now has only one book left.  The boys played outside in the water that was left from the flood, which wasn't much.  It clears out pretty quickly.

Youtube videos: monarch butterfly metamorphosis, another monarch butterfly metamorphosis, a dragonfly metamorphosis, 1948 spiders and other arachnids, Discovery Channel spiders, "Treasure in the Fields" (animated moral story), "Dolls" (animated moral story)

*Saturday, March 27:  Proverb and thankfulness lesson, where the boys learned how the Levites praised God.  We also listened and sang along praise songs by Fernando Ortega, one of my favorite musicians/singers.  Nathan also loves him, and he's practicing "Come Ye Sinners" as sang by Fernando with Amy Grant.  He says he wants to get it perfectly.  It's really sad that he didn't learn to play an instrument at an early age, because I think he could have, and he sings so well. 

Tomorrow night is Passsover, and then after that the week of Unleavened Bread.  Jade will be off a week from doing written book work.  He may write some scriptures.  He will definitely be doing one writing project, and all that will be revealed in this week's blog post at the end of the week.  I'm hoping it will be a good week!  :-)