2nd Annual Halloween Party

I'm finally getting to the party pics! (kicking self) And I forgot to take a picture of the whole spread!  And (worst of all) I forgot to take a picture of all the kids together!  We had 18 kids, and some adults, in costume!

 My Little Pumpkin with Aunt Jana

 My flamingo & skeleton with Grana & MawMaw

 My Abe Lincoln with a Rangers Fan as Batman passes by.

 Babe Magnet and Country Bumpkin

 Lots of kids running around!

We did a treasure hunt for pumpkins and played Donuts on a String, which was hilarious!  The kids had to eat a donut, but couldn't touch it.

 As it started to get dark, Grandpa drove us on a hay(less) ride.  I gave them their goodie bags with glow sticks.  I was afraid it would be a boring ride, but we ended up with about 16 howling coyotes riding along with us!  And they appeared to be having a ball!

Some of them hung out for a while afterward with the kids playing hide & seek in the dark.  You know it's a good party when every one's not rushing to leave!  : )  I'm already looking forward to next year!

The Flamingo

 We found this goofy flamingo hat at Dollar Tree last summer.  Right then & there, Elizabeth wanted to be a flamingo for Halloween.   I figured she could dress in pink with the hat & call it done.

Then I saw the bird wings tutorial on Prudent Baby... and I got ambitious. 

 Standing on one foot.

Yes, that was a time consuming project, but I have to admit... I love them... perhaps as much as she does.  And there had better be years of play left on those wings after Halloween!  : )

More Halloween

 Last week we made more Halloween decorations!  Some of the supplies came from Aunt Sissy's Box of Fun.

The kids enjoyed reading I'm the Scariest Thing in the Castle by Kevin Sherry,  so we made bats like the one in the book.  This is a great book to read with little ones.  It's not really scary at all... it's cute!

I did this a few weeks ago with my homeschool art classes- we made the giant squid from Kevin Sherry's book, I'm the Best Artist in the Ocean!  All the kids have enjoyed this project.  Idea from Deep Space Sparkle.

Next we used pipe cleaners & eyeballs to make spiders!

I looked at the cute press on nails that are out for Halloween & didn't want to spend the money, or they were in kids sizes.  So I decided just to do crazy nails with a monster eye.  Unfortunately, I lost half of my polish while trying to remove green Sharpie scribbles from my painted white kitchen cabinets.  I'll redo them this week, though.

Skeletons are not scary at our house.  After all, everyone has one!  We have a couple of skeletons that I picked up at Halloween time for homeschool purposes.  : )  Gotta learn how the body works, you know!  The kids really enjoyed making these Q-tip skeletons!  Idea from Boredom Busting Mommy.

Rebekah's skeleton is in purple.  Hers looks a little like it was in an accident!

Random

 A few showers have finally fallen and the lantana has loved it!  These blooms are like little joyful bursts of sunshine!

We got a dog on August 5:

Daisy is a Great Pyrenees.  Yes, we were aware that she would be a big dog.  Here she is at 4.5 months old!

Isn't she pretty!?  She is by far the best puppy we've ever had.  As a cat person, I am really surprised how much I've enjoyed having her.  I'm having a hard time remembering she's just a baby, though! 

Tiny Talk Tuesday

Mom: You want oatmeal or eggs for breakfast?
Rebekah: Um... Candy!

Aunt Sissy's Box of Fun, Part 1

Last week we received a fun box that the sender called, "Aunt Sissy's Box of Fun!"  Aunt Sissy wanted to see what we might do with some of the stuff, so here's a peek at what we did this afternoon after our field trip to Legoland!

We made a pipe cleaner mustache and glasses.

Earlier in the week, we made white glue ghosts so today we stuck them on the glass.  Elizabeth's was made using a different type of glue and it all pulled into the middle instead of the shape that she drew.  So we went with that and just gave it lots of eyeballs to compensate for the strange shape. (Hey look, Sissy, you can see the dog through David's ghost's mouth!)

I made a little bunting out of the black pom-poms and the SPOOKY letters.

 

I also made a big black spider out of the pipe cleaners, but forgot to take a picture.  I guess that's ok, though, since Aunt Sissy and other aunts hate spiders.

Elizabeth has been drawing some jack-o-lanterns for decorations and I've got her flamingo wings in progress with one week remaining to finish her costume!

October ONE

Wow.

Really what else can I say?  The blog speaks for itself.  I've been blogging for 7 years and this is the first month I have only had one lousy post!  Not that I have a lot of followers, but to those who are following, I apologize.

I do have things to blog about.  We took an amazing family vacation at the end of August.  We started our home school year and started co-op classes.  We took trips to the fire station and the museum.  We went with our home school group to see a movie.  We had doctor appointments.  We celebrated grandparents day (though we forgot to tell them!) and the first day of fall.  Sarah turned 9 months old!  We started a small group in our home.  Maybe I'll go back & add some pictures.  If I have time.  I've got 4 kids and I'm tired. 

Well, anyway, it's a new month and here they are in all their cuteness, growing like a patch of weeds in a drought:

The one photo all day where not one child was crying... or caught in the act that made one cry.  Yes, they're a beautiful patch of weeds.  Some folks choose to call them wildflowers.  I'll try to remember that the next time I feel like pulling one of them up by the roots!!  : )  And my, how they grow!

September ONE

My, how time flies!
Last year: September 1, 2010

Puppy Week: A Kindergarten Unit Review

I have used HomeschoolShare for lapbooking resources several times with David and have really been pleased with the results.  Our favorite of all time had to be the My Father's Dragon lapbook!  He still talks about that one.  Amazingly, I never got pictures of our completed book.  The site is free to join and has a lot of free printables for lapbooks, notebooks, and unit studies.

HomeschoolShare has some new Kindergarten Kits coming out soon and I had the chance to try out the "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" set with Elizabeth.  She really enjoyed it and I took lots of pictures!  Elizabeth is 4 1/2 years old.  Not old enough to be a public school kindergartner, but we're starting kindergarten this year at home anyway.  She is more than ready!

Disclaimers: "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" was given to me to review & test out before the final version was released on HomeschoolShare.  I didn't have all the books recommended for the unit and didn't have a library trip scheduled either, so we made due with what we had.  Also, I love the light in our dining area, but it makes backlight in all the photos, so I apologize for the darkness of the activity in the photos!  And finally, my printer was just about out of color ink, so the printouts are a little dull.  I went over the edges of some things with a marker so they'd be easier to see.  If you have a good ink cartridge in your printer, your printouts will look much better than mine.

Here's all the puppy & dog books that we had.  We read these as we were going through the activities in the pack.  Also had an informational book about dogs that somehow missed the photo.

Going over the days of the week, she decided to count them.

This was the cutting page, but she wanted to trace the lines first.

Then I cut the page into strips for easier handling.

This was really good practice for her because we haven't done a lot of cutting.  Unless you count her bangs.  Doesn't that look lovely?  She and her brother did that.  At least they were working together, right?

Anyway, Elizabeth loves coloring, so the same size/matching activity was right up her alley!

The next activity that she really loved was the

A-E-I-O-U Game.

She could have kept playing this for hours!

I liked that these were lowercase letters.  She identified the vowels, put them in alphabetical order, and identified them by sound.  This opened the discussion of long and short vowel sounds also. 

Then she hid the bone and had me try to find it, except that she always left a little corner of the bone card peeking out... and she thought that was hilarious!

We used our hodgepodge of ABC magnets and a cookie sheet for her to copy some words.  This is  beginning spelling & reading skills.  Then we talked about the sounds that each letter makes and slowly let her sound out the words.

The smile was after sounding out a word, when she realized that she had just sounded out a word!

Doggy, Doggy, Where's Your Bone? had her place the missing numbers on the chart.  The instructions recommended printing the missing numbers on sticker paper, but I didn't have any.  That would have been really fun to use, though!

She was proud that she made it all the way to 30!

We love nonstandard measurement activities, and this one was no exception!

The bone ruler and 3 puppies came in this activity.  She measured each puppy, measured them stacked up, sorted them by size, and then found other things to measure.

Her plate is 6 dog bones across.

The eraser is almost 2 dog bones long.

The little trampoline is almost 7 dog bones tall.

Her foot is 5 dog bones long.

We compared her foot to my foot.

Baby Sarah's foot is 3 dog bones long.

The last thing I got pictures of was the One Stop Puppy Shop Game.  Once again, the games are her favorite!  We used real money, but paper money is included in the kit if you want to print it and use it.  I wrote on the coins with a Sharpie how many cents they were.  We talked about the value of each coin or bill.  We matched the coin to the puppy supply it would buy.  (For example, the quarter is 25c and it will buy the frisbie.)  Then we rolled dice to play the game per the instructions in the kit.  She loved this!

We had a lot of fun with the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit!  I'd highly recommend it!  Other Kindergarten Kits will be available soon, free of charge, on HomeschoolShare!

Oh, and look... We did the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit just in time...

That's our new puppy, Daisy!