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Happy Punxsutawney Phil Day!

February 2, 2012 By 4 Comments

One grand thing about homeschooling is the ability to celebrate silly holidays.

We got our schoolwork done a little early, so that we could do a few cutesy Groundhog Day printable activities this afternoon. We also looked up the news story about Punxsutawney Phil to find that he “predicted” six more weeks of winter. (And the kids cheered! How funny! I always wanted early spring, but they cheered for more winter!)

And then, when Luke got home, we celebrated some more!

We had ourselves a little contest to see who could make the best-looking Groundhog-shaped pizza.

Luke is the master of any pizza-dough-shaping contest! And Gracie didn’t do half bad, either. (The rest of us kind of gave up. My Groundhog face looked like Mickey Mouse, Ava made a heart, and the boys made dinosaurs.) :-)

Luke's Punxsutawney Phil, before he was baked and eaten


Grace and her groundhog

Ava was happy with her heart.

And to top off the evening’s festivities, we had a scrumptious dessert…with P. Phil poking out the top (inspired by the cupcakes here).

For her efforts in the pizza contest, Grace won the chance to eat P. Phil from the dessert. Here he is before she devoured him…Isn’t he kinda cute? (Definitely not perfect, but kinda cute.) :-)

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone!

Next up for celebrations…Valentine’s Day!

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MOH: Ezekiel

February 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This week in our Mystery of History studies, we talked about the prophet Ezekiel.

He was an interesting guy.

One small detail of his life was that God commanded him to eat a scroll. Grace drew a picture of this:

"Ezekiel ate a scroll because God told him to."

So, we made ourselves a little (edible) scroll out of a tortilla and honey. We wrote “Oh, Israel” on it, because Ezekiel prophesied during the time period just before the third and final invasion of King Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent captivity in Babylon.

Then we rolled it up all scroll-like, and the kiddos ate it.

We decided a real, paper scroll probably wouldn’t have tasted quite so good. :-)

We also talked about his experience of prophesying to a valley full of bones…and watching those bones come to life! Then we sang the old spiritual “Dry Bones.”

Good times.

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Halfway There!

January 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment


Yesterday we completed our first semester of school. Woo-hoo! It’s always encouraging to make progress.

And, more interestingly, Caleb actually completed his math book yesterday. We started him in math last spring (before he “officially” started kindergarten – ah, the benefits of homeschooling)…so now he’s done with Saxon Math 1! Next week we’ll start on Saxon Math 2 (what we use for first grade math, actually a remedial second grade math). Good job, Caleb!

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MOH: Joseph and the cake of many colors

September 28, 2011 By 1 Comment


In today’s Mystery of History lesson, we studied – you guessed it – Joseph! And to celebrate this VERY familiar Bible story, we baked a CAKE of many colors. :-)

Each kiddo mixed some food coloring into 1/4 of the cake batter, and we baked separate layers.

Isn’t that cool?!

Picture courtesy of Gracie-Pie-Poo

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Caleb’s Cursive

September 22, 2011 By 6 Comments

Even though I’ve seen it done before, I’m still amazed by the ability of a kindergartner to write beautifully in cursive.

It’s Caleb’s turn to learn to read. So far he has most of his single-letter phonograms under control. (I.e. He knows all the sounds the letters make, and he can recognize them in book type and cursive.) And this week, he started learning to write in cursive! It’s so exciting! (He even got the red plate for it on Monday night.) :-)

I was nervous about teaching a lefty to write, but unnecessarily so.

Here’s a peek at the first of his written a’s and c’s…

And today he learned d’s and g’s. Here he is practicing in his saltbox (a tactile learning tool)…

It’s days like these that I am so thankful to be a part of this homeschooling adventure!

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