WELCOME to Small Wonders!  Here you can join us in our daily life and in adventures at our homeschool, Stronghold Christian Academy. 

Our 2006-2007 school year is now up and running.  We are running on a 4 weeks on, 1 week off schedule, which gives us 3 weeks off for a Christmas holiday, and about 6 weeks for summer vacation. 

We will continue to use WinterPromise Animals & Their Worlds for our core studies.  We have up until this point skipped around a bit, studying the animals of the African Savannah and moving on (Gavin's choice) to some amazing desert creatures!  We will take the next two weeks to complete our deserts study and then will go back to finish our African Savannah study (maybe a week and a half to go) and then we will be doing woodlands!  I'm VERY excited about this because we will really be able to spend a great deal of time out in the woods exploring, drawing and appreciating the beauty of nature, all while learning about the creatures who live within our "small square." 

I will start by posting a few of our past adventures & projects from the time we started (March 2006) until recently. 

These are the books that came with our AW package.  My boys LOVE them and especially love the DK Animal Encyclopedia.  They can consistently be seen pulling it off the shelf to peruse, and will often be seen with their heads together leaning over gorgeous colored illustrations of their favorite animals that we've studied so far, or those that they wish to learn about next! 

This is C.'s first Draw-Write-Now assignment!  I am very proud of his effort on this, and on all of his drawings since!  He enjoys his weekly drawing and copy-work, and tries hard to get his pictures to look "just right."  We are actually quite ahead of schedule in this book.  When we took our summer break from most of our studies, he kept right on doing this book!  I am planning on purchasing the entire set of these in a few weeks, so he will have a huge choice of animals to choose from, and may even get a little history out of it as well.

This is my feisty youngest son, G.  He is loving the projects we have done in Animal Worlds, and will often play with his creations for hours after completion, until the creation falls apart!  Here he can be seen playing with a snake that he made all by himself, looking at the directions in a book, and then he went ahead and started using the kleenex box as a mouse hole.  I pity the mouse when he makes his exit!

While studying the African Savannah C. & G. kept busy making animals and playing with them for hours!  I regret to say that eventually the zebra was in fact caught by the lions and is not with us any more. 

Here my boys can be seen planting their peppers.  This we did instead of the grass growing project that was scheduled.  Mostly they just loved playing in the MUD! 

Gavin LOVES doing projects along with learning his letters.  The Alphabet Art book has been GREAT for this, as the projects are fun for him yet very easy to prep for and usually require mainly everyday household items.  He's made Fluffy F, Shiny S (with tinfoil), & an eggshell E!  This week is the letter T, which he will practice using a variety of resources.  Besides the Alphabet Art book Gavin enjoys Starfall.com abc's & corresponding worksheets, his Dover Animal Alphabet coloring book, Handwriting Without Tears Get Set for School along with wood pieces for building the letters, and the parts of the Explode the Code Primer series that he's ready for. 

One of our most memorable projects that we will for sure duplicate in the future was animal footprint casting, from the book Make Your Own Wildlife Habitats.   We went out on a lovely, yet cool early spring day looking for animal tracks.  We found lots of deer tracks, but found many were too muddy to stay in a perfect deer print shape.  We finally found one, however, and the boys loved mixing the plaster of paris and pouring it into the print.  We then went exploring while we waited the 30 minutes for it to dry.  The boys insisted on going into the creek, and against my better judgement I said go ahead, warning them that they very well may fall down and it WOULD BE COLD!  This didn't dampen their spirits, however, and they happily waded around the creek, until suddenly C. was stuck in deep mud and couldn't get his boot out!  After being extremely silly for a while, he then really tried to get out, but fell down in the water instead!  It was far too cold to have him walk all the way back to grandma's in soaking wet pants, so we took them off.  Of course C. & G. thought this was rather hilarious. 

Here they are with supplies at the ready!

Here they are heading out to search for tracks. 

And here is C. after the "incident." 

This week we will be back to school full swing.  Gym at the park starts this week (my dh and I will be leading ages 12+ which should be fun!) and Cornerstone (the church program we will attend Wednesday nights) will start next week.  With the dreary, rainy weather we've been having it surely does feel like Autumn is upon us!  And with it, the perfect chance to cuddle up with great books and enjoy our school year.