A painting Emmy made for Camden. He loves doggies.
A beautiful sunset on our drive home from Birmingham this past Friday.
Last week was Tacky Week in Houston and Emmys pioneer club class.
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
Recent Pics
Here are few recent pics.
A painting Emmy made for Camden. He loves doggies.
A beautiful sunset on our drive home from Birmingham this past Friday.
Last week was Tacky Week in Houston and Emmys pioneer club class.
A painting Emmy made for Camden. He loves doggies.
A beautiful sunset on our drive home from Birmingham this past Friday.
Last week was Tacky Week in Houston and Emmys pioneer club class.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Bryans Birthday
I have always said that I would rather be buying something for the kids than myself and when I get extra money, that’s usually what I do. It’s just more fun. ;-) Bryan obviously feels the same way. Check out what he chose this year as his birthday gift.
It’s remote controlled. As you can imagine, the boys in our family were thrilled!! Girls too, actually. Bry has had a lot of fun with our new toy too. ;-)
They have had fun setting up mazes on our driveway with blocks and cones.
Camden enjoyed one other thing about our new truck.
It’s remote controlled. As you can imagine, the boys in our family were thrilled!! Girls too, actually. Bry has had a lot of fun with our new toy too. ;-)
They have had fun setting up mazes on our driveway with blocks and cones.
Camden enjoyed one other thing about our new truck.
Monday, October 27, 2008
History Happenings
In History the kids learned that at the same time that Israel was adjusting to it’s new king, the Phoenician people were climbing to the height of their civilization. The kids learned that the Phoenicians were originally the Canaanites and lived on the coast of the Mediterranean near Israel. Now the countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel occupy the land.
We know that the Phoenicians fished a lot and one of their most famous goods was a beautiful purple-red dye which was made from the gland of a sea snail called a murex snail. Of course, the kids thought this was gross. Expensive cloth was made from the dye and was cherished by the Romans and Greeks. Making the dye however was very smelly because the snails had to be left out to rot. Workers would then skim the liquid off the top to make the dye. The city of Tyre became known as the capital for this rich trade but it was a very stinky city!
We also learned a little about glass blowing which was another Phoenician trade. For a project we looked at the Phoenician alphabet and the kids copied it into their notebooks.
We then learned how the kingdom of Israel Divided. We learned about Solomons son Rehoboam and how he took charge after the death of his father. The 10 tribes of Israel rebelled against him.
We spent some time reading about the judges and kings at this point.
Next we learned about Elijah, The Fiery Prophet. The kids really enjoyed learning more about Elijah! Houston thinks it is very cool that he went to heaven in a chariot of fire and the girls think it is really cool that God sent Elijah an angel to bake him a cake, twice. I don’t think I had ever read that in the bible. We learned about many of the miracles that God performed through Elijah and how God provided for him, even in the wilderness where he hid Elijah from Ahab and then sent ravens to feed Elijah bread and meat every day for years! We also read about the widow that God sent Elijah to care for him.
We then learned about Elisha. It was interesting to compare the lives of Elijah and Elisha and then to compare their lives to Johns life. Many parallels their.
We read about the healing of Naaman and the miracles of the Shunammite woman. We learned about the many miracles that Elisha performed. One of those miracles was to supernaturally provide oil for a widow who was in need of paying off a debt. For our project with Elisha we dropped some red food coloring into some water to see what it would do.
It spread all around.
We then dropped some oil into water to see what it would do.
We then added food coloring to the water/oil mix and this is what happened.
The food coloring stayed in perfect drops when oil was mixed into the water.
Our next lesson was on two minor prophets, Joel and Obadiah. The kids learned that Joel was a prophet to Judah, not to Israel as Elijah and Elisha were. However, Joel was probably alive about the same time as Elisha. We learned that at the same time that Joel was a prophet to Judah, Joash was king. He became king when he was only 7 years old. We learned that Joel wrote the message God gave him during a Locust plaque. The plaque was so terrible that crops were being eaten up, cattle were dying, and people were starving from famine. The Lord told the Judeans that just as their land was wasted by the locusts, so their homeland would be wasted in the future by other countries unless they repented and worshiped the Lord. Joel describes the locusts like armies that climb walls and march in formation.
I thought it might be fun for the kids to see a real locust up close with this lesson but getting my hands on one wasn't easy. My friend Linda who lives out of state had cicada shells in her backyard (which look very much like locusts) a few months back and she was kind enough to collect some for me and mail them to us. I kept them hidden until this lesson. It was a fun surprise for the kids when I pulled the box out to show them. Thank you Linda!
The kids thought they looked pretty gross, of course. It really grossed them out to think about creatures like this crawling everywhere as Joel wrote about.
Our next lesson was on Homer. About the same time that Joel was prophesying to Judah during the terrible locust plaque, a man named Homer was living in the area we now know as Greece. We had already previously studied one of Homers stories, The Trojan Horse. Historians think Homer lived around 800 B.C. and it is believed that he was probably blind. It is believed that Homers stories were written down years after he lived, once the Greeks had a written language. We learned that Homer was what we call a bard. That is a person that wrote long epics or poems and retold them over and over. He is credited with composing what is called the Iliad, and the Odyssey. The Iliad tells the story of the seige of Troy using the giant wooden horse. The Odyssey tells of a hero named Odysseus who traveled back to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
Our project for this lesson was to read The Children’s Homer together.
It took us a couple of weeks to read through this book.
Our next lesson was India and Hinduism. This was the first time that we had studied India in our ancient history lessons. Something that turned out kind of cool with this lesson was that we had just finished rowing How to Bake An Apple Pie and See The World and one of our lessons in our rowing was on Sri Lanka. We had just read through some books on the pear shaped island off the coast of India and had identified it on our map. It was the first thing the kids thought of when I said we were going to study India.
We learned about a great civilization that thrived in what is present day Pakistan. They were really advanced, much like the Sumerians but they disappeared and no one knows for sure why they vanished. We then learned about a group of people later in history who lived in India and were called the Dravidians. They were dark skinned and possibly descendants of Ham. They lived in northern India until a band of warriors called the mighty Aryans invaded them around 1500 B.C. The Aryans came from central Asia and poured into India by crossing the great Himalaya Mountains. Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is in the Himalayas which means they probably had to cross it to get into India. The Aryans were light skinned people. Their were racial tensions between the Aryans and the Dravidians. As a result, the Dravidians were pushed deep into the south part of India.
To help us remember the Aryans who had to pass through the Himalayas to enter India we played a game.
Conquer Everest is the name of the game.
The game board is pretty cool!
Each player has a man that attempts to climb Mount Everest. You learn a lot about the Mountain in the process.
We touched briefly on Hinduism during this lesson, talking about what it is and the basics of what the religion is built upon.
We also studied one of the great land marks of India during this lesson. The Taj Mahal, one of the 7 wonders of the world.
This is an incredibly beautiful book and I would recommend it if you are studying The Taj Mahal. It tells the complete story of how and why The Taj Mahal came into existence. We really enjoyed reading about it’s history.
We know that the Phoenicians fished a lot and one of their most famous goods was a beautiful purple-red dye which was made from the gland of a sea snail called a murex snail. Of course, the kids thought this was gross. Expensive cloth was made from the dye and was cherished by the Romans and Greeks. Making the dye however was very smelly because the snails had to be left out to rot. Workers would then skim the liquid off the top to make the dye. The city of Tyre became known as the capital for this rich trade but it was a very stinky city!
We also learned a little about glass blowing which was another Phoenician trade. For a project we looked at the Phoenician alphabet and the kids copied it into their notebooks.
We then learned how the kingdom of Israel Divided. We learned about Solomons son Rehoboam and how he took charge after the death of his father. The 10 tribes of Israel rebelled against him.
We spent some time reading about the judges and kings at this point.
Next we learned about Elijah, The Fiery Prophet. The kids really enjoyed learning more about Elijah! Houston thinks it is very cool that he went to heaven in a chariot of fire and the girls think it is really cool that God sent Elijah an angel to bake him a cake, twice. I don’t think I had ever read that in the bible. We learned about many of the miracles that God performed through Elijah and how God provided for him, even in the wilderness where he hid Elijah from Ahab and then sent ravens to feed Elijah bread and meat every day for years! We also read about the widow that God sent Elijah to care for him.
We then learned about Elisha. It was interesting to compare the lives of Elijah and Elisha and then to compare their lives to Johns life. Many parallels their.
We read about the healing of Naaman and the miracles of the Shunammite woman. We learned about the many miracles that Elisha performed. One of those miracles was to supernaturally provide oil for a widow who was in need of paying off a debt. For our project with Elisha we dropped some red food coloring into some water to see what it would do.
It spread all around.
We then dropped some oil into water to see what it would do.
We then added food coloring to the water/oil mix and this is what happened.
The food coloring stayed in perfect drops when oil was mixed into the water.
Our next lesson was on two minor prophets, Joel and Obadiah. The kids learned that Joel was a prophet to Judah, not to Israel as Elijah and Elisha were. However, Joel was probably alive about the same time as Elisha. We learned that at the same time that Joel was a prophet to Judah, Joash was king. He became king when he was only 7 years old. We learned that Joel wrote the message God gave him during a Locust plaque. The plaque was so terrible that crops were being eaten up, cattle were dying, and people were starving from famine. The Lord told the Judeans that just as their land was wasted by the locusts, so their homeland would be wasted in the future by other countries unless they repented and worshiped the Lord. Joel describes the locusts like armies that climb walls and march in formation.
I thought it might be fun for the kids to see a real locust up close with this lesson but getting my hands on one wasn't easy. My friend Linda who lives out of state had cicada shells in her backyard (which look very much like locusts) a few months back and she was kind enough to collect some for me and mail them to us. I kept them hidden until this lesson. It was a fun surprise for the kids when I pulled the box out to show them. Thank you Linda!
The kids thought they looked pretty gross, of course. It really grossed them out to think about creatures like this crawling everywhere as Joel wrote about.
Our next lesson was on Homer. About the same time that Joel was prophesying to Judah during the terrible locust plaque, a man named Homer was living in the area we now know as Greece. We had already previously studied one of Homers stories, The Trojan Horse. Historians think Homer lived around 800 B.C. and it is believed that he was probably blind. It is believed that Homers stories were written down years after he lived, once the Greeks had a written language. We learned that Homer was what we call a bard. That is a person that wrote long epics or poems and retold them over and over. He is credited with composing what is called the Iliad, and the Odyssey. The Iliad tells the story of the seige of Troy using the giant wooden horse. The Odyssey tells of a hero named Odysseus who traveled back to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
Our project for this lesson was to read The Children’s Homer together.
It took us a couple of weeks to read through this book.
Our next lesson was India and Hinduism. This was the first time that we had studied India in our ancient history lessons. Something that turned out kind of cool with this lesson was that we had just finished rowing How to Bake An Apple Pie and See The World and one of our lessons in our rowing was on Sri Lanka. We had just read through some books on the pear shaped island off the coast of India and had identified it on our map. It was the first thing the kids thought of when I said we were going to study India.
We learned about a great civilization that thrived in what is present day Pakistan. They were really advanced, much like the Sumerians but they disappeared and no one knows for sure why they vanished. We then learned about a group of people later in history who lived in India and were called the Dravidians. They were dark skinned and possibly descendants of Ham. They lived in northern India until a band of warriors called the mighty Aryans invaded them around 1500 B.C. The Aryans came from central Asia and poured into India by crossing the great Himalaya Mountains. Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is in the Himalayas which means they probably had to cross it to get into India. The Aryans were light skinned people. Their were racial tensions between the Aryans and the Dravidians. As a result, the Dravidians were pushed deep into the south part of India.
To help us remember the Aryans who had to pass through the Himalayas to enter India we played a game.
Conquer Everest is the name of the game.
The game board is pretty cool!
Each player has a man that attempts to climb Mount Everest. You learn a lot about the Mountain in the process.
We touched briefly on Hinduism during this lesson, talking about what it is and the basics of what the religion is built upon.
We also studied one of the great land marks of India during this lesson. The Taj Mahal, one of the 7 wonders of the world.
This is an incredibly beautiful book and I would recommend it if you are studying The Taj Mahal. It tells the complete story of how and why The Taj Mahal came into existence. We really enjoyed reading about it’s history.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Book-It
Houston, Emmy-Anne, Annie, & Natalie are all participating in Pizza Huts Book-it program this year. I set reading goals for each of them each month and if they complete those goals then I have a coupon from Pizza Hut that I can give them which entitles them to one free personal pan pizza each. All of our kiddos love to read, so the pizza each month for reaching their goals is just an added bonus.
They all 4 completed their reading goals for the month of October and received their coupons for their free pizza!!!
Ally and Camden are too young to participate in Book-it but of course they got some pizza too on our trip to reward the older kiddos.
The Book-it program runs through May of next year which means that at the start of each month I will set each of the kids reading goals and if they complete them, they get free pizza each month through May. ;-) They also receive book tags from Pizza Hut each time we go and if they complete their goals for the entire year they will receive an All Stars Certificate and reward at the end of year.
They all 4 completed their reading goals for the month of October and received their coupons for their free pizza!!!
Ally and Camden are too young to participate in Book-it but of course they got some pizza too on our trip to reward the older kiddos.
The Book-it program runs through May of next year which means that at the start of each month I will set each of the kids reading goals and if they complete them, they get free pizza each month through May. ;-) They also receive book tags from Pizza Hut each time we go and if they complete their goals for the entire year they will receive an All Stars Certificate and reward at the end of year.
Friday, October 24, 2008
A New Year Approaches & We Have a New Host For Our Blog!
Sooooo.......for various reasons we felt the time had come to move on from blogging with .Mac. Our main reason being that now that Bryan no longer works for Apple it was going to cost us 100$ a year to continue blogging through them. With that in mind- we went on a search for a new home for our blog and this is where we landed.
If you are not familiar with blogger and want to leave us a comment (which we love by the way) all you have to do is click on where you leave comments at the end of the posts and you will see the empty box to write out your comment, then click where it says name/url and write in your name. You do not have to have a blogger account to comment nor do you have to leave a website address. Just your name and comment. You will need to type in the word verification box which we have to help prevent spam.
We have spent the last few weeks working on getting comfortable, settling in, and getting to know our new home well in hopes that we can bring you our new blog with no glitches. It is our hope that you find our new home a warm and inviting place, the same thing we would hope for, if you were walking through our front door.
Hopefully those of you that had issues pulling up our .Mac blog will find this new host to be easier to access. Their are things we will miss about our old home but their are already things we love about our new home too. The one thing I am excited about is that their will now be monthly archives on this new blog. Our old blog did not have that option and once we got so many posts on our blog we always had to delete old ones. I am excited that I will now be able to actually have a blog archive!
If you are not familiar with blogger and want to leave us a comment (which we love by the way) all you have to do is click on where you leave comments at the end of the posts and you will see the empty box to write out your comment, then click where it says name/url and write in your name. You do not have to have a blogger account to comment nor do you have to leave a website address. Just your name and comment. You will need to type in the word verification box which we have to help prevent spam.
I hope you will take a few moments and browse our new home to become familiar with it. Don't miss voting in our 2 polls- we think they are kind of fun!
And Ya'll come back soon now, ya hear!
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