Posted in Creation Study

This afternoon I have started talking with the girls about how on Day 6 of creation God also created MAN...in His own image...and He created each person so very special and unique. We looked at a book that had pictures of a baby in the womb...VERY cool! And we looked at pictures of mommy with babies in her tummy...and we looked at their baby pictures together.

Here are a few questions I got, thankfully it didn't get any deeper than this!

*What is THAT? (the cord)

*Where did it go when I came out of your tummy? (still about the cord)

*Did you eat at the hospital?

*How long was I in your tummy?

*Look! Aunt Melissa has short hair!

*Look! There is Nana's hand! (a picture of Nana touching Emily in her newborn little bed...I thought it was very observant for them to notice it was Nana's hand!)

*Who is that? (Aunt Lissa's brother, Uncle Matt! This made me sad, because Matt no longer lives here and my kids don't know him! I told them that is another uncle that Jacob has!)

*Look! There's Caleb in my book! (Hannah looking at a picture of herself, it sure does look a LOT like Caleb!)

*Look! It's Caleb again! (nope, still Hannah!)

Then we worked on a little booklet for each of them called "All About Me." Here are some things we learned about the girls today:

Hannah - 45 inches, 37 pounds

Emily - 43 inches, 37 pounds

Hannah's favorites - Green Eggs and Ham, McDonald's, cake

Emily's favorites - Goodnight Moon, the beach, ice cream

Thank You, God, for each of these little creatures You have given to me. What a miracle they are!

Hannah Elizabeth

 Emily Grace

Caleb David

Posted in Creation Study

Creation study - Day 6! This coming week is going to be our last week of our creation unit. I am going to do a few days on animals and then a few days on "man" and the human body. Here are some things we are planning to do!

Good Books

*Box Turtle at Long Pond

*ABC Book of God's Creatures by Mary Landis (a Rod and Staff book)

*A Water Snake's Year

*Spoonbill Swamp

*How Was I Born?

*My Five Senses

*Your Skin and Mine

*The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body

*The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses

Fun Activities & Crafts

*If you sign up for www.liveandlearnpress.com they have some free printable booklets/lapbooks for you to use. There is one called "All About Me" that I plan to do with the girls this week. They will each work on the pages and then will have a finished book all about themselves! There is a place for a timeline of their life, tell about their family members, their birthday, address, phone number, special things they can do, hair color, etc. I think they will enjoy this a lot!

*We are going to review our animal classification chart and ALLLLL the animals/creatures we have been learning about thus far.

*We will make a chart in our creation journal of different types of animals. I want the girls to try and draw one of each. (birds, fish, insects, mammals, spiders, etc.)

*We are going to read Psalm 139 together and talk about how God knew us even before we were born...how He "worked" on us while we were in our mommy's tummies. I'm going to pull out old picture albums of each child as they were born, as well as the pictures we have of me all big and pregnant. I love looking at pictures with the kids and I think this will be a neat thing to do with them!

*We will draw self-portraits in our creation journal. We will probably also draw a picture of our family.

*www.learningpage.com has a Senses section. If you sign in (it's free membership) click on "basic sheets" and then senses is one of the topics across the top. We will be doing several of these to learn about the 5 senses we have.

*enchanted learning also has several printables, including a book, that the girls will make about their senses.

*Look at all these wonderful ideas for a 5 senses unit!

http://www.pre-kpages.com/5senses.html

*I will take turns blindfolding the girls to show them what it is like to be blind. We will also review some of the sign language we have learned and show how deaf people communicate with others in this way.

*Here is a cute craft that we may do on the day we look at the 5 senses.  Here is a description:

As a culmination to your five senses unit, have the children make self portraits; then glue on wiggle eyes, cotton ball dipped in perfume (nose), jingle bells (ears), sand paper (hands) and licorice (mouth). Use this caption:
"_____________ has Five Senses".

And if you scroll way down on this page you can see a picture of it:

http://www.littlegiraffes.com/fivesenses.html

DAY 7

My girls have already asked what we are going to draw on our mural for Day 7. The only thing I can think of is to draw someone sleeping?? Any other ideas out there? We will write the word "rest" as we have been writing 1 word descriptions of the other things God created on the other days.

For a field trip, I'm hoping to get in a day FULL of naps...especially for mommy!

And for fun activities and books to read, we will continue napping.

Yes, a mother can dream, can't she?

I do hope you all have enjoyed looking through the pictures and ideas of our creation unit study. What an awesome God we serve!

Posted in Creation Study

Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!

This coming week our creation study takes us into the world of insects!

Fun Unit!

Homeschool share has a FUN unit using Eric Carle's book on insects. We will be using a lot of these ideas this week!

Check it out HERE

Good Books

*The Very Clumsy Click Beetle by Eric Carle

*The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle

*The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle

*The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle

*The Big Bug Book by Margery Facklam (this is a longer book about really BIG bugs, we have it on tape, so my hope is to listen about a different bug each day.)

*The Itsy Bitsy Spider by Lorianne Siomades (I'm sure we'll be singing this song throughout the week too!)

*My Day in the Garden by Miela Ford -- really cute story about all the things a little girl finds in the garden.

*Look Closer - an introduction to bug watching by Gay W. Holland

*Simon & Schuster Children's Guide to Insects and Spiders

*Bugs! by David Greenberg - a cute rhyming book

*a different "science" type book each day on a different insect each day (a book about spiders, a book about ladybugs, a book about butterflies, etc.)

*2 "First Discovery" books by scholastic - one on butterflies, one on ladybugs. These books are really neat! They have clear pages as overlays that show in pictures neat things. I got these at a book fair and would love to have even more of them! They are great science books for little ones.

Fun Activities & Crafts

*We got this STICKER BOOK for the girls to use!

*I printed off the insects at www.learningpage.com that are made for the mural, but I think we will make a little insect book with them instead.

*I printed off sheets on individual insects from www.enchantedlearning.com for the girls to color. They also have facts about each insect on them.

*We will do the mini book on Little Miss Muffet from the homeschool share unit listed above.

*I have some new plastic bugs for us to look at and examine. Fun and yucky!

*We will draw lots of BUGS in our creation journals and label them. I hope to get outside and observe some live bugs to draw as well as letting the girls draw insects they see in books.

(Side note here: As each week goes by I am finding that the Creation Journal is my absolute FAVORITE thing we have done yet as homeschoolers...kind of the same thing as a nature journal (which we also keep) but these have been only for our creation unit study. The girls have truly enjoyed drawing all the different things God has created, they love spelling and labeling the items, showing off their drawings to daddy each evening, learning how to draw new things, and they are becoming more and more confident in drawing. I love that I will have these beautiful keepsakes all in one notebook. We can go back and review all the things God made on each day as well, so it will be nice to have for that reason, too. I just wanted to share how awesome this has been for anyone who might be considering starting one -- be it a nature journal or if you plan to do the creation unit study. I actually think we will have filled up their ENTIRE notebook by the end of our creation study! How awesome is that? I just love that they are excited about it, too! That is the best part!)

Videos & Other

*Magic School Bus Butterflies

*Magic School Bus Gets Ants in its Pants

*Magic School Bus Spins a Web

*Magic School Bus Creepy Crawly Fun

(we are saving the "Bee" things for when we row The Bee Tree in a few weeks!)

Posted in Creation Study

We are finishing up our week learning about FISH tomorrow by taking a trip to the aquarium here in East TN. It really is an awesome aquarium and I'm sure we'll have a fun time! Daddy and Nana have never been so it will be fun for them to get to go with us as well!

Here are a few pictures from our week so far...I'm sure there will be a few cute shots at the aquarium too.

The girls painted their first paint-by-number this week and LOVED it! They both did an excellent job. Anytime I say the word "paint" they just get all excited. We also had some ocean foam stickers that we used to make our own ocean scene. And finally, we had Will over one day to paint watercolor fish. Colin painted one, too!

Posted in Creation Study

UPDATED: more pictures of our bird week! Thanks, Melissa!

Here are a few pictures from the day we went to visit the exotic bird store last week! I hope to post a few more pictures of Hannah's work from this week when I can borrow mom's camera again! I have to post pictures of her cute little books! She has written 5 now I guess! She loves it and I'm so excited that she is excited about it!  She wrote one about a baby flamingo...too cute!

Jacob, Emily, Hannah and Caleb (the birds were VERY loud, why both boys have their ears covered!)

Caleb talking with one of the birds.

The kids at the park afterwards! They enjoyed playing in the little creek there!

Making bird feeders! Notice that Mattie and Caleb enjoyed eating the PB more than working on the feeders! Too cute!

Posted in Creation Study

This week takes us under the ocean to learn about all the creatures God made that live in the water! FUN! I've been sitting here doing my weekly printing and jotting down of ideas...here is what I have so far. There are a few places I haven't looked yet...so I may be adding a few more little things, but overall this is our upcoming week!

Good Books

*Crinkleroot's 25 fish every child should know by Jim Arnosky

*Manatee Winter by Kathleen Zoehfeld

*The Seashore a Scholastic First Discovery book

*Where Am I? by Moira Butterfield (a cute book with clues for the girls to guess)

*Gentle Giant Octopus by Karen Wallace -- GREAT book!

*Fabulous Fish a "What a Pet" book

*Mister Seahorse by Eric Carle

*How Many Fish? An "I Can Read Book" that Hannah can read on her own this week.

*About Fish - A Guide for Children by Cathryn Sill

*What's It Like to Be a Fish? by Wendy Pfeffer - a Let's Read and FInd-Out Science book

*One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss - we will probably do "goldfish math"  with this book!

*Dolphin Adventure by Wayne Grover - this will be our read aloud this week, Aunt Lissa said this one was a good one!

Fun Activities & Crafts

*I bought the girls their first "paint by number" of fish and ocean life. I think they will LOVE it as they love anything to do with paint!

*We will label the parts of a fish and color it for our creation journal.

*we are going to work on animal classification a little this week. I have had to do my own research on this...as I don't seem to remember ANY of it! Invertebrates (octopus!) Mammals (whales, dolphins, walrus, sea lion, seal, manatee) Fish (sharks, sea horses, other fish) Crustacean (crabs) reptiles (turtles) the ocean has LOTS of different types of animals!

*We will make a paper plate fish one day. Take a large paper plate and cut the mouth out, then staple that part you cut out onto the back of the fish to be the tail! I probably will let the girls water color this.

*Lots of fun fact sheets from www.learningpage.com

Field Trip

*Friday we are going to the AQUARIUM with Daddy, Aunt Melissa & kiddos, Aunt Valerie & boys, Grandmama and Nana! What a FUN day that will be!

Posted in Creation Study

We finished up our week in the solar system yesterday. Here are a few pictures so you can see the fun things we did!

This is our Creation mural that is on a wall in our play/school room. We add to it each week when we learn the new things God created on that day.

Hannah's drawing of what God created on Day 5 in her creation journal.

Hannah's drawing of the planets in order from the sun.

Our planets mural that we printed off from www.learningpage.com -- it's up o a long piece of wall above windows in our play/school room.

Here is Hannah with her sticker book of the solar system. The girls each had one, Emily didn't want her picture taken, though! These stickers glowed in the dark and we had lots of fun looking at those one night after bedtime!

Posted in Creation Study

This coming week in our Creation study we will be learning all about birds! Last night I began printing off our activities and getting all my books together, so here are a few things I have found that we will be doing!

Good Books:

The Little Book of Birding by George H. Harrison -- this is a really NEAT book that I found recently. It's a small, square book with real photographs of alllll different kinds of birds, with just 1-2 lines of text on each page. It talks about the thrills of observing and learning about birds.

Birds a Scholastic First Discovery Book - this is a neat little book too, with clear overlays showing parts of the birds and their habitats.

Bald Eagles by James E. Gerholdt

Simon & Schuster's Children's Guide to Birds -- This book has some really neat pictures throughout the book, this will be more of a book to look at than read all the words. We may go through and find our "favorite" bird and read more about it.

What Makes a Bird a Bird? by May Garelick -- Do you know what makes a bird a bird? It isn't that they fly, it isn't the beak, it isn't laying eggs....you'll have to read this great children's science book to find out the 1 thing that makes a bird a bird.

Listen to the Birds - a neat little book put out by Christian Light Press. It has black and white realistic drawings and tells the different calls of several birds.

This is the Sunflower by Lola M. Schaefer - this is another one like The House that Jack Built. This is about the sunflower that grows in the sun, that has lots of seeds, the birds come and get them, they scatter them...a neat picture book on how the seeds get scattered - by birds!

When Agnes Caws  by Candace Fleming - this is a story about a little girl, Agnes, who has the amazing talent of making sounds exactly like birds. This talent ends up helping her out of a very tricky situation later in the story!

The Bird House - by Cynthia Rylant (I had no idea C. Rylant had written so many books!!) This is a really sweet story about a little orphan girl who watches a lady that has lots of birds at her house (outdoors.) She loves watching all the birds...and eventually they are able to connect because of their love for the birds and then 2 lonely people aren't lonely anymore!

The Birdwatchers by SImon James -- this is a SWEET story, maybe one of my favorites for the week! It's about a little boy whose grandpa goes birdwatching and takes him on his first birdwatching day in this story. They see lots of neat things!

The Burgess Bird Book for Children by Thornton W. Burgess - - I have read about this book on the FIAR message boards, several moms have raved about it! It is a book of short stories, each on different birds. This will be our read-aloud for this week!

Fun Crafts & Activities

* http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mbaldeagle.htm  This is a toilet paper roll bald eagle! Since we did learn that the eagle is a symbol of our freedom here in America, I thought it would be neat to learn just a little bit more about the eagle this week. We will read a book from the library specifically about eagles on this day as well.

* Enchanted Learning has some good printables we are doing - I am not posting a link, because my member link comes up and then you can't open it! But you can go to enchanted learning, click on "animal printouts" and then find "birds" and you should be good to go! There are activity sheets as well as coloring pages for lots of different birds.

*The girls have LOVED drawing birds in their nature journals! So this week, I think we will find some new favorite birds out of these great books and try and draw them as well. Check out THIS post to find out more about the birdwatching corner in our playroom.

*We will hopefully be visiting an exotic bird store this week too! Thanks to grandma and Aunt Lissa for telling us about this! I think this will be a GREAT field trip!! Especially after my girls and I have been learning more and becoming more fascinated with birds in the past few months!

* http://www.birds.cornell.edu/schoolyard/T_Resouces/ColoringBook.pdf  Check out this GREAT link for realistic drawings of birds as coloring pages with questions about each bird underneath. I think this would make a great bird-watching coloring book. I haven't totally decided yet, but I may print off a few at a time for us to work on together.

* http://www.naturesongs.com/birds.html -- This site has bird call recordings on it! YEAH!! I have been looking around for a book that was recommended for listening to various birds, but couldln't really buy anything else...so God provided a freebie for me!!

* If you want to read the Burgess Bird book for children that I mentioned, here is a site where they have a link for each type of bird that goes with each chapter. http://www.geocities.com/homeschooling3boybarians/burgessbirdbook.html

*I also read on another site that you can paint a more realistic bird by getting a wooden bird at a craft store. So, this weekend when we are in Knoxville I may have to look for a few of those!

Posted in Creation Study

Update on movies, look below!

We are headed OUT OF THIS WORLD this week, wanna come? . We are going to be learning about the SOLAR SYSTEM that God created, including sun, moon, stars, space, planets...Creation Day 4. I am VERY excited about this unit! Here are a few cool things I have found a long the way for anyone who is going to come along for the adventure. Can you believe God made such a GREAT, BIG world for us to live in! I think about how HUGE all of it is as I look at the sizes and descriptions of the planets, yet He knows how many hairs are on my head and loves me as a child. What a great God we serve!

Good Books:

 The Moon by Melanie Chrismer, a Scholastic Non-Fiction reader. This has some great "beginner" vocabulary for those children who are just beginning their studies on space.

What Makes Day and Night by Franklyn Branley - This is a GREAT introductory book in a SHORT and easily understood format, meaning my 4 and 5 year old can sit through it and understand it. 

Our Stars by Anne Rockwell - Just a simple child's book on stars

Galaxy Getaway by Jane Tassie and Julie Ferris - a MATH book! Fun! Some of these math story/problems are PERFECT for our age group (preschool, K, 1) and some are a little beyond us. But i think the girls will have fun with this one. One example is a martians favorite drink box is in the fridge, it shows how many he drinks in one day, will he have enough for x amount of days. Or, the spaceships on this page have 2 booster engines, count how many there are all together. (counting by 2's)

Exploring Space with an Astronaut by Patricia Murphy - an I Like Science! Book. Answers questions about going to space and shows pictures of lots of different astronauts on each page. This is another one that is great for not being over my kids heads.

The Sun, Our Nearest Star by Franklyn Branley - these books by Franklyn Branley (there is one more I'm waiting on at the library - The Planets in our Solar System) are WONDERFUL for small children, great and fun pictures, easy to understand wording. I really like these!

Find the Constellations by H.A. Rey - same guy who did Curious George! The illustrations in this one look very familiar!  This is not a read-aloud. This I will use to show the kids pictures of different, famous constellations. There are brief descriptions with each one, and it is written for children...so we may read a few of them.

Fun Links and Activities:

*  www.learningpage.com  -- If you haven't joined this site yet, you MUST! It's FREE and the sheets on this site are wonderful! There is a mural for the kids to make of the planets, which we will be doing this week! You print off the planets, which are according to size. The 4 smallest planets fit on 1 page, then Jupiter is so big it takes 4 pieces of paper, you print them all off and color, the we'll be putting ours all up on a wall...somewhere. Also, I printed a few math pages off for Hannah that have solar system pictures on it, but regular math problems according to ability level - I printed off some addition and subtraction for her. For both girls I printed off a few sheets on different planets, with a short list of facts for them to learn.

*  www.enchantedlearning.com --- has a lot of astronomy stuff - a whole coloring book on the planets, etc. I am going to print this one (not sure if anyone can open it, or only members --- http://members.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/activities/coloring/earthmoon.shtml  to show the size of the earth compared to the moon. I also printed off the moon phases from this site.

* http://www.kidsastronomy.com -- This site has some neat resources as well!

*I hope to star gaze several times this week! One of the times I'd like to take our nature journals out with us and try to draw the moon and stars.

*We will be drawing the planets, stars, moon and sun in our creation journals this wek!

Fun Videos:

There are several Magic School Bus videos at our library on space, stars, planets, etc. We got 2 of these to watch next week.

**We also found a kids video made by BIll Nye, the Science Guy, on space! Update: we watched this one today, well part of it...it was pretty much over our heads here at our house! And in case anyone is interested, he does mention "billions of years ago" as well as the big bang theory.

Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space -

Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System

Magic School Bus Out of This World Update: The girls just LOVE Ms. Frizzle and the gang! this one was another good one for us at our house! Yeah Magic School Bus!

Magic School Bus Takes a Moonwalk

Magic School Bus Sees Stars

Posted in Creation Study

As we are learning about day 3 of creation, we took a little detour and delved into the world of rocks. The girls have become very fascinated with collecting rocks now! I found this kit awhile back and we have been working on it for over a week now. I wasn't expecting it to take this long...but it was HARD WORK being a geologist! And in the end, daddy ended up doing most of the "digging." We left the dirt out on the table for days, a few times a day we would each stop by and dig and scrape a little bit. But, it wasn't until today that we hit our first rock crystal! And daddy was digging and digging...and we found 12 in all!

Here is the description on the kit: Crystal Mining Kit - Excavate your very own crystals. Add them to your rock collection. The kit contains various color natural crystals. It's a cool mineral rock digging kit.

We found clear quartz crystals, agate, amethyst, and dolomite. It was quite exciting each time we "hit" a new rock. The slide show pictures show all the steps we took. We dug and dug with the tools provided in the kit, after we found the crystals, we soaked them in warm water, then we dried them off, put them on the classifying board and now they are added to our rock collection! Fun!