MOPS- Check it out!!

Well it's about time I said something more about MOPS! MOPS stands for Mothers of Preschoolers and it's been a part of my life for about 9 years now. Many of you have probably heard of MOPS or have even been to a meeting, but for those of you who have not, I encourage you to check it out if you have children K age or younger.

MOPS International exists to encourage, equip and develop every mother of preschoolers to realize her potential as a woman, mother and leader in the name of Jesus Christ.

There are about 5,000 groups all around the world and I bet you can find one near you! Just use the group finder at the MOPS Web Site to begin some good fellowship with women who are in the same boat as you.

Some time I could share my whole MOPS story with you, but for now just know that when we moved so far from home MOPS was an integral part of my survival- just ask Dan! I had been involved in a group in VA before moving here and found a group before we even moved- for me it was part of the deal and even the location of our home has as much to do with where MOPS met as where my husband works! Yeah- it's THAT good.

Not only have I benefited as a mom, but MOPS has given me a wonderful ministry to work with and it's exciting to meet and encourage young moms. After so many years of serving the moms in my group as a leader, I'm now blessed beyond measure to work as a field leader with MOPS. That means I get to encourage MOPS leaders now and visit lots of different groups. It's been really exciting to move into this new area of the MOPS ministry.

This post is really about announcing a new pseudo button in my side bar. Under the MOPS icon, there is a link to the MOPS Web Site. Someday MOPS might have a ready-made button for me, but for now go with the link! I've learned a lot while keeping this blog, but code is not my thang. So, let's not get too crazy!

I'm so much a MOPS mom in addition to a homeschooling mom, that I would be remiss in not sharing it on my blog!

Better Moms Make a Better World,

Heather

Cranberry Pictures & Thanksgiving Booklist

The Cranberry Wreaths we made Thanksgiving Day

A liitle after the fact on the book list I realize, but here goes...

An Outlaw Thanksgiving by Emily Arnold McCully
Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation by Diane Stanley
Giving Thanks: The 1621 Harvest Feast by Kate Waters
The First Thanksgiving by Jean Craighead George
Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey
The Thanksgiving Story by Alice Dalgliesh
Arthur's Thanksgiving by Marc Brown
...If you Sailed on the Mayflower by Ann McGovern
The Story of Squanto First Friend to the Pilgrims by Cathy Dubowski
A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles Schulz
Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks by Margaret Sutherland
The Pilgrims of Plimouth by Marcia Sewall
Thank you , Sarah by

This is the artwork on partial view made with oil pastels which are always a favorite!

Here are some notebook pages from Cranberry Thanksgiving

Cranberry Thanksgiving

For the past week or so surrounding Thanksgiving, we've been doing a unit study of Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin. The story is set in New England on a cranberry farm and the plot includes a famous cranberry bread recipe and someone who wants to steal it. It's a cute story about Thanksgiving Day and what unfolds when a grandmother and her granddaughter invites some guests to dinner. We rowed this when R7 was in kindergarten and I thought it would be fun for I-5 to do it this year.

Here a some activities we enjoyed together:

*We learned about cranberries and filled out a layer book about them using this template from Homeschool Share.

*We talked about how to write about the setting of a story concisely. The first page of the book says: "She and her grandmother lived at the edge of a lonely cranberrry bog in New England, and the winds were cold at the edge of the sea."

Each of the kids made their own.

I-5: I and his sister lived at the edge of small, grassy fields in Pennsylvania where the sky was gray.

R7: TBA (temporarily missing!)

E9: Brandon lived with his father on the edge of a field surrounded by trees on the side of a mountain in Virginia, where the sky was beautifully sunny.

*We reviewed a map of New England and talked about the difference between bogs and swamps and what animals and plants we might find in each.

*We reviewed similes and the kids each wrote some of their own and/or filled in some blanks to make some examples their own.

*We read some Thanksgiving stories together. Stay tuned for the booklist which is a little bit long(I'm just feeling like I need to blog this stuff now or it'll be a while!)

*We sipped cran-raspberry juice while reading the story together this week.

*We made cranberry wreathes while away for Thanksgiving (pictures soon). I got the idea from the Ocean Spray site. Just click on ocean spray kids for more crafts including the cranberry wreath. That site also has a live cranberry bog cam! Too bad we'd missed this year's harvest already.

*We discussed the layout of the manuscript and how the author can make choices about how a book is laid out. This will be important over the next few weeks as the kids write their own books from start to finish.

*Today we'll be doing an art lesson on Partial View. There's a page in the story where the girl is peeking into a room and she's partially hidden by the door. We'll be creating our own picture like this using the track ball mouse hidden behind a piece of cardboard. I'll be sure to post pictures when they are done.

*Finally, today we'll be talking about Elements of a Good Story (setting, conflict, rising action, climax, and denouement). I wanted to end with this as we begin the unit on making books with children. More on the new unit in a bit!!

I'll post some pictures to go along with these activities later today. So, stay tuned!

Time to Declutter again!

Well folks, I'm back at it just in time for Christmas! Sorry for the blog neglect- traveling for Thanksgiving and recovering have taken up some time, but game on! I'm ready to hoe out and get ready for new "stuff" that will come our way. Plus, I'm ready to blog!! First this, then an update on Cranberry Thanksgiving.

Check out the kitchen table decluttering which happened yesterday mid-morning...

But while I was making my dining room beautiful, you'll never guess what J2 was doing to his brothers' room...

This called for some "planned neglect" so I could move on to the playroom because it's been a while and I hosted a homeschool support meeting down there last night...

The big wooden rocking chair has a new spot- I keep it because my parents got it for me at an auction for my dorm room in college. I did part with one that I loved more but had no room for. There has to be someplace for big people down here.

I did a little rearranging too so that the magnet board is featured for the time being. The castle has a new spot- keeps things fresh! J2 played marble run all afternoon yesterday. He and I had some good runs going. So cool!

This area still needs some work so if I say I'm working on the school half- well this is it! My desk back there by the window became scary again! Ahhh!

Creative Play...

The kids have been crazy over building forts to play with their Lego guys lately. It's been one big playroom floor of blocks. There is always much grizzling over J2's little habit of knocking forts down. Dan decided to distract the little man with a train track running all around the fort. Wow! This has created a new frenzy and both battery op engines have been running full time.

Well, as stated before, I-5 has a particular knack for building anything like a ship or car or truck out of legos. It appears that his talents cross over into train building. Check out this next layout made by our five year old!!
Does I-5 rock at track building, or what?? Who needs all those special track risers when you have milk carton blocks. Just like our cardboard castle, I can't believe the milk cartons have been around so long. When E9 was 2yo I asked some MOPS mom friends to save half gallon cardboard cartons for me. I had zillions it seemed and I cut them and put them together to make preschool blocks for his birthday. Seven years later they are still here and as popular as ever!

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

This is for all the readers who are NOT in a snow belt location! This is what we woke up to Friday morning. The temps have been in the low forties or below for the past several weeks. We've had some flurries and snow showers (which around here means a few inches sometimes), but this was the first snow to blanket the ground.

I just LOVE snow!! I hope this is the first of many, many snows for us. Dan cleaned out the gutters today and put in the storm windows. The other week the air conditioner came out of the dining room window. I think we are officialy battened down for the winter which has arrived suddenly. Well suddenly when you consider that we had a long Indian summer and then it turned to winter all at once!

This hill in the front yard make a nice, short, but swift sled run once the snow banks build up at the edge of the yard in front making it impossible to sail into the street. Or maybe...just maybe...we'll get the kids to take a chance on the village sledding hill. It is a narrow swath of land that is about a half mile long and was given and preserved as a sledding hill. It's just too cool!

I can't wait for more!! Let it snow!

"Let's Play Chess Mommy!"

This was the call from J2 this morning. He had asked his oldest brother if he could get his chess set and E9 told him to ask me. So, J2 bops down the stairs to ask, "Mommy, play chess?" My answer was yes and we set off to set up a match.

J2 loves to set up chess and move pieces around and dump the board and do it all again. Today he kept asking, "What's this Mommy?" And of course I replied with names like rook, bishop, knight, king, queen, pawns. Before we knew it he was pointing to and moving pieces all over naming them- correctly! He knows that knights have horses and pawns are up front.

We played at this for quite some time just naming them, asking about them, moving them, dumping them, repeating their names. Very cute stuff! After the rest of us played a few games and I-5 was charged that he beat his sister R7 in their match- all by himself, we put the game away.

However, this evening we encouraged J2 to ask Daddy for a game. He wasted no time identifying his pieces and moving them around. Maybe one day we'll be able to teach him some moves. Until then, we'll just enjoy the time together "playing chess". Well like the big kids of course!

Math Time!

I thought I'd add a post about what the kids are up to in subjects besides FIAR. Yes! We really do other things like math. We use Horizons Math for all the kids which seems to agree with them very well. This year we are using Math K, Math 2, and Math 4/5 for our kindergartner, second grader, and fourth grader.

I should add that J2 has a "math" book and loves to pull it out and color and glue and all sorts of things in there. In fact, tonight as I was working on some lessons, he kept coming up to me and asking where his math book was- only I kept missing the math book word. Finally when I got it and I said, "Oh math book!" He began to search and say with a lilt, "Math book where arrreee you?" In no time he was seated at the school table chattering away about his math and gluing paper in it and penciling and markering different pages. He definitely cannot be left out of anything!

E9 is doing a lot with fractions and geometry lately. He can name line segments, lines, rays, angles, find perimeter and recently area. He is enjoying interchanging from mixed numbers to improper fractions and vice versa.

E-9's working on the second half of Horizons math 4. He will likely begin math 5 sometime this spring. On this page he was delighted by two things. As always the ultimate Hokie fan, he has been working on congruent shapes and did some here. On the right side, he ran up to me so excited that he would be adding fractions with different denominators. Just the other night he and Dan had a long conversation about equivalent fractions and adding fractions and what would happen if you had to add fractions with different denominators. E9 predicted correctly showing off his fraction skills and almost the very next day it showed up in his lesson.

R-7 is moving on to the thousands in place value which is very exciting to her- especially since only four problems take up a whole page! She's been adding three digit numbers and has really mastered carrying with addition. She really enjoys doing Rainforest math on the computer when she's done with her book pages.

I-5 adores his math! He's been telling time by the hour and measuring with rulers. Most recently he's added some place value exercises and is adding two digit numbers with one digit numbers using a number line. Such cool Kindergarten stuff and he's just about done with the first half of his Kindergarten math program- in November!

The Pumpkin Runner

For the past few weeks the kids have been studying The Pumpkin Runner by Marsha Arnold. Inspired by a real man named Cliff Young, this story is a tall tale that tells about a race from Melbourne to Sydney, Australia.

The kids had fun discovering some things about Australia while hearing about tall tales and fables and vocabulary words like lanky. E9 and R7 did some extensive work on map skills- cardinal directions using a compass rose, measuring distances on a map using a ruler and the scale, and even determining locations based on longitude and latitude.

There's a lot to this book and next time we hit it, we can add newscasting and human body to the lesson list. For now we'll be moving on to some Thanksgiving activities.

R7 labels her map and identifies where AU is on a world map.

I-5's map of Australia

E9 rowed this book with us because it's a volume 4 book for older kids too. Here he practices some cursive writing skills and pumpkin drawing using Draw Write Now. We also had a fun lesson on how Australians use some different words than we do. I think I'll be telling my kids not to grizzle so much from now on! Grizzle- what a great word for complain!I-5's Australia notebook page marking the flag, its animals , and opposite seasons! That's yellow dog from the book there too.

I-5's handwriting page- this was a tracer and a pumpkin vine drawing. You can't contain the creativity so enjoy the funky vine.

R7's page on AU. In the flap book on the globe she tells very succinctly why AU is called the "land down under". Well because it is below the equator of course Mommy!

This picture shows her AU word page.

E9's flag page. He's also good at answering the bonus questions. All of these maps and exercises come from Evan Moor's Teacher Filebox.

Working on the long list of 18 vocabulary words- they got to match the definitions to the words

Measuring distances and reading pictographs on population- R7 begged to try and did a fantastic job!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Introducing the Canon MX700- a copier/scanner/printer

Yes, that's right...today is my birthday! Only 9 minutes left to get this post in on time. I wasn't sure what Dan was going to come up with this year. I always provide a healthy list of things I'd love to get. I just love my birthday! Dan looks it over and thinks on it, but never reveals any hint of what he might end up getting. Each year it is a ritual. I bug- he shrugs! For the record, I did have a scanner on my list. Let me share the back-story with you. Over a year ago our hand-me-down scanner stopped working and since then Dan has tried to make it do several times. Then a couple weeks ago our other Canon printer (which has been loyal and economical) began to chug.

That's right chug. I was 90% on the way to a new one of the above (and planning on where I'd put it) when Mr. Engineer had to step in. There was a problem you see that begged to be fixed. Ever known an engineer? That's how it is with them. Next thing I know he's taking apart my printer and examining all the parts wearing his headlamp! Everything was fine and one day it chugged and slammed back and forth while printing and then there was a black mark and a hole in the page. Really. It was out of the blue. Well about 15 minutes later Dan walks up from the basement holding an inked up bean. A bean. I just want to say formally that Canon i860 printers don't print on beans easily. They chug- try to tell you something is wrong. The engineer's mission was complete and successful and I just need to say that I had nothing to do with the bean though I do recall J2 with a little shaker can of beans made at Sunday School that had never been sealed properly.

The printer incident reminds me of my vacuum. I've been known to get a little carried away with it at times. Let the bag get a little full. Full enough to cause the dirt to flow out into the hose or never make it to the bag- depends on how you look at it. The same week as the bean in the printer brought a day when the vacuum seemed less than capable of doing its job. I went to change the bag (which I swore I had just changed) and found that it was overfull- a little. In the opening that attaches to the vacuum bag I noticed a few items that may or may not have been causing a problem. There was one shard of paneling and I fished that out along with a long piece of no longer sticky masking tape. Behind that I could a full size pencil (which turned out to be unsharpened) and behind that was a small rubber ball (red). Immediately I began to try and dislodge the pencil and I think I did free the ball, but I could not get the pencil. That is when I noticed that the hose was full. Once again I try for the pencil. Finally I had to face the reality that I needed to ask Dan to help. Of course I knew Dan would have a few words to say about this and I vaguely remember some mumbling about me not noticing the machine' poor performance and burned out motor and there may have been a few more comments about my ability to cause harm to our vacuum. I distinctly heard him say we should try for a bagless vacuum. My over enthusiasm to rid the house of unwanted dust and debris would be on display for all to see! In my defense, I recently vacuumed a very dark corner of the basement and it is likely that these large items tried to hitch a ride- to nowhere! I've already discussed in a very early post how my pencils are always trying to get away to more organized homes...

But I had nothing to do with the bean. Or the chugging. Honest.

Needless to say, once Dan had freed the bean from captivity in our printer, there was no need to panic and buy a new, faster, fancier product that would allow me to once again scan or copy the vast library of educational materials we own. I was so close! I knew it was useless. We are not frugal people by nature, but my husband has developed over the last few years a few frugal skills. He practices a few of them regularly. Take the phone for instance...our cordless phone no longer can dial a 5. And the 2 is getting finicky on occasion. His cell phone number has three 5s in it. His reply to my request for a new phone is and I quote, "You can still dial 911." Recently, I asked him to dial a number with many 5s to see a reaction. After his failed attempt, he sent me downstairs to dial out on the corded phone. For real. Still no new phone.

But I did say one thing regarding the loss of my new scanner/copier/printer. And I think it must have struck a cord and I knew it would. I simply reminded him that I was no longer referencing and using most of the materials on my shelf because it requires too much planning ahead. He replied, "That is a valid argument." Why thank you.

Now I just need to work on one for the phone and hope in the meantime that my Christmas present isn't a bagless vac!!

Adjectives for Fall

I-5 and R7 worked on describing fall on some leaves last week. We talked about how words that describe are called adjectives and we named a few. Red, cold, orange, and gray sky are some of the words they chose.

We decided to put them up outside the "castle". About four years ago or so now we made this castle out of a sturdy box some of the equipment in Dan's lab came in. We'd been reading Henry and Mudge and the Long Weekend by Cynthia Rylant. In it Henry and his dog are super bored until his mom suggest making a castle out of their refrigerator box. Since then it has become a great fort, reading corner, play house and R7 has taken to decorating it with her art work on the inside. It's very cute and I can hardly believe we've had a huge box in here that long!

Introducing BEFORE Five in a Row

The Red Carpet!

J2 is maybe, kinda, sorta probably giving up his nap sometime soon. I think he's definitely in a transition phase though it might be a while before it's totally gone. We've done B4 here and there and have enjoyed it with I-5. So, I thought it might be best to begin some of this fun stuff with J2 early in the day so he's set while I work on school with the older kids. I certainly can't wait long because the later, the fussier- for everyone!

So, in our story a red carpet is to be laid out for a visiting duke and it runs away and eventually meets the duke at the ferry where he receives a huge welcome. The adventure is very funny as people set out on a chase to catch the carpet.





So, we set out our own red carpet and J2 unrolled it all over town. He had a great time rolling his car right down the red carpet.





Next, I think we'll talk about important people and "the red carpet treatment" and maybe even roll out a carpet for when Daddy gets home from work.