Last week in our History book, we discussed the Japanese culture during the Middle Ages. As an extension of this lesson, we wrote some Haikus today. We focused on the structure and content. Of course, we attempted to stay close to the 5-7-5 sylaable pattern, but apparently in English one would be allowed to deviate slightly from that. The haiku is usually written in simple language (which makes it perfect for children!) and include a seasonal reference. A good Haiku can "say ten things, while presenting only two".  So here goes:

Ant carries a crumb

Up the anthill at my feet

It pleases the queen.

Eli

New buds grow big and wide

A wolf brushes a nearby bush

One bud falls to the earth.

Benn

A bird chirps and it

Sound beautiful to my ear

How do you like it?

Abbey

We recently had a chance to go to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. It was a great treat. A few days later, I had the kids write about our day. First we listed descriptive words and then they wrote away. Here are a few samples.

The Biltmore House was very big. It was the best house ever! I liked all the pretty ceilings. I liked Mrs.Vanderbilt's room and my other favorite was Cornelia's room. (Which, by the way, did NOT exist, except in her imagination). I liked walking up the stairs. It was super super gigantic. And I love the Biltmore House. There's lions that are beautiful. And I loved every single guest room. I loved every single servant's room. There were letterboxes there. It was the best house in the world! And I loved riding in a stroller there. (She only rode up the driveway and back down the driveway in it. The rest of the time she walked.)

Can you tell how much Jenna liked our trip? Being the one with the artistic eye, I can see why she was in so much awe over the house: )

Here is Benn's account:

Last Monday we went to the Biltmore Estate, otherwise known as "America's Castle". It is of mammoth size and it has well manicured land. The interior was very majestic and regal. I liked the Billiard Room and the very grand Tapestry room the most. We toured the whole Biltmore House in only two hours. If we had done it any slower, it would have been miserable. We found a few letterboxes there, too.

Benn really put to use those adjectives! I love his perspective on rushing through the house: ) And to think I was worried that they might have wanted to spend more time in there!

Check out my side bar for a link to the album of our photos. Let me know how this works for you.

We had a great time at the ballet. We sat in the balcony with about 400 hundred other home schoolers. The costumes and the scenery was magical. Jenna kept asking me when it was going to be over. I thought she was bored, but it turned out she told me she never wanted it to be over. She was afraid at the end of every scene that it was finally ending. She keeps asking me when we can go to another ballet! The girls have been dancing ever since.

Here are a few of the stories the kids wrote to go with their turkeys. Enjoy!

Benn's story to go with the Roman Turkey

One day on Happy Jalapeño animal farm there was a turkey. Not just any turkey, he was a very smart turkey. He was always trying to get away from his owners who were going to eat him on Thankgiving.Of course, if you were to be a turkey you would not be looking forward to Thanksgiving Day (unless you a very unhappy turkey who could not care less about his life). Albert was not that kind of turkey.(Albert is of course this very smart turkeys name.) He wanted freedom. He wanted no more of all this fattening up so that there would be enough meat for the whole extended family. He wanted freedom. The word kept ringing in his ears: “Freedom Freedom Freedom.” He thought for a minute and then he remembered that a

Roman fesival was on the next day. He would dress up as the great Caesar Augustus. No one should ever even dare to think of doing such a thing as eating a person like Caesar Augustus. .As he thought,there was only one plan that fit. It did not quite make sence to him but he thought he could make it work.

The plan was so elaborate that even I can not explain it let alone the farmers on Happy Jalapeño animal farm.He was about to tell the chickens but they were a few clucks short of what they should be. So he decided to keep it to himself. When he went to bed that night he kept on thinking trying so hard to perfect his plan. It seemed like he just closed his tired eyes when he woke up. He had finally realized how his plan would work. If you have guessed right you would be able to tell every grim person in the world that it even took Albert a long time figure out exatly how his plan worked and so he put it to action. He did not look like a normal sized person but nobody noticed him, except me- who of course who had to be there to record all of this vital information.As he started working his plan, a hippie in tie-dye clothes noticed him. Albert thought it was over. The hippie pulled him up off the ground. He started runing. The hippie ran aroud a corner, hopped into a car and drove off. The hippie took him to a farm. Again Alebrt thought it was over when he remembered that hippies are vegitarian and would not eat him.

And to this day Albert is at that same hippie farm eat vagtables and living meat free.He had what he wanted freedom.

Jenna's story, as dictated to me: )

Once upon a time my turkey was walking on the road. He found something on the ground. I will tell you what it was later. Then he went to somebody's house. He gave a present to kids. There was tons and tons of presents around him. Then he saw a monkey in the tree. He disguised as Santa Clause. He had black buttons. He had a red suit. He had black shoes. He had a red hat with a white dot at the top. He sat in the anthilland he saw a abat flying in the sky.

Then he said, "I can fly higher than you, bat! I can fly in a wagon! I have reindeer. I can even go down chimneys. AND I give presents to kids."

The end

PS- The thing he found on the ground was a turkey feather.

OK, I keep seeing awesome photo presentations with Flickr, so I thought I would check it out for myself. I still can't quite figure it out, but give me a little time and I'll be a pro.

In the meantime, there is a band of pictures on the right hand side of my blog. These are a snapshot of our week, so to speak. Benn is receiving several Cub Scout awards at his pack meeting. Abbey is enjoying a Brownie Scout tea party with her good friend. She earned her Manners badge at this. Also, all of the kids disguised a turkey to rescue it from our dinner tables next week. See if you can guess their disguises by the photos? They wrote stories to go with them. At our monthly co-op group we enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal and all of the kids shared their turkeys and read their stories out loud. All of the kids impressed me with their wonderful stories. This activity was so fun, I even had to participate!

BTW, for those friends and family who are receiving this as a mailing: In case you have lost the web address and desperately want to see these turkeys  here is the link:

www.homeschoolblogger.com/dtfamblynotes

If you add us to your favorites, then you can come visit our picture gallery whenever I send a mailing out!

Maybe that was a little too big?

I'll try to get that fixed.

Here it is! We finshed and delivered our gingerbread house entry today. It is now out of our hands and into the Grove Park Inn's hands! It was fun to get a behind the scenes look into the process behind the houses we look at each year. The Asheville television station even tried to get Danny bringing in the entry in a little news intro spot, but he wasn't game. I could've told them that ahead of time if they had asked: ) Now we are looking forward to going up and seeing if it all held together.

 This is a picture of us on our latest letterbox hunt. The 'extra' child on the end in the light brown coat is our niece Sophia. Of course, she thinks she is just one of us! For those of you who are not familiar with letterboxing please check it out at www.letterboxing.org or www.atlasquest.com. We began this hobby this summer and we have thoroughly enjoyed it. In the photo we are on Trail 15 at Caesar's Head. It was a beautiful trail with a waterfall, a cave and lots of colorful leaves! The letterbox was actually hidden on top of the cave in a hollow at the base of a tree. The stamp inside was a Little Caesar's pizza guy, which we all thought was funny. We have now found 19 boxes!! We also planted a box at Caesar's Head just beyond the Devil's Kitchen. We entitled it, appropriately, "Devil's Delirium".

Wow! We are having a great fall. School is going very well. Abbey continues to be extremely self motivated. I often find her doing her next lessons without being told. Very weird since I am used to the boys, who hope I will somehow forget that they need to be educated and hide until I call them for school.  Jenna is learning to add and read her 'popcorn' words. These are high frequency sight words such as can, we, the. etc... She also has been reading some very simple three letter words on her own. Eli and Benn are doing some great writing. I will post some of that next. We are reading Where the Red Fern Grows together. An amazing story of perserverance and love! The boys would have read it all by now, but we are taking it slow so we can do projects and discussions along the way. We just finished our Botany book and are finally headed into Astronomy.  We have put off History until after the holidays. That's what we ended up doing last year and it worked well, so in Jan we will continue with the Middle Ages. We are also zooming through the new Math curriculum. The boys seem to be 'getting' it so much more often than they did with our old curriculum. I think we made a good change.

We have spent the last week working with one other family on a gingerbread house entry for the Grove Park Inn's (in Asheville, NC) yearly contest. We are doing a replica of the Candyland board game. I will post pics as soon as we are finished. The kids have come up with some great ideas! I thought I was going to be the idea person here, but they seem to be getting pretty clever. We are pretty sure our chances of winning are slim. The houses on display there are unbelievable!!! But we are very excited about seeing our name on a house at THE Grove Park Inn! The display dates/times are Nov. 20-Jan. 06 You can go see them for free on Mondays -Thursdays. If you want to see them on the weekend, you must be a guest of the Inn. Hope some of you can make it up to see! There are so many wonderful houses it is way worth the trip up the mountain.

We came in late last night from TN, where we went to camp and visit with my father's side of the family. Some of them live in Florida and others in Ohio, so TN is a good middle spot and fall is a great time to be there! The leaves are absolutely beautiful. I enjoyed seeing my family. Camping was perfect. It was cold enough to enjoy the campfire and snuggling down in the sleeping bags, but not too cold. We camped at Elkmont near Gatlinburg. At one time it was a logging community, but now there is an old abandoned town there. The kids call it the Ghost Town! We did manage to see three black bears. One was up in a tree over the roadway. A ranger managed to get him down to safety. The other ran across the road in front of us and the last bear was foraging in a trash can. It took one look at us, grabbed the bag and ran! On Sunday we headed over to Oak Ridge TN, the “atomic” city, to go to the Museum of Science and Energy. I am still amazed when I dwell on the fact that this city was able to keep secrecy for 6 years with the population of 75,000! We found a letterbox while we were there, too. It was a series of three boxes appropriately called “Loose Lips Sink Ships”. One box was missing, but the other two were still intact. They were hidden near the “Friendship Bell”. This bell was molded in Japan and is a sign of the hope for friendship between the town of Oak Ridge, who helped to create the atom bomb, and the Japanese.

We went with our monthly group to the pumpkin patch this morning. That was fun. The kids went to an educational presentation, petted the animals, went on a hayride and got a bag of apples and a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. They had such a good time with some of their best friends in the world! I love the seasonal activities like apple picking in the fall, Chistmas caroling in the winter and strawberry picking in the spring.

Now it is time to unpack and clean up. It was just barely cold enough to start a fire in the fireplace this morning. Still feeling nostalgic from camping, we decided to start one anyways. It makes home so cozy and safe: )

Last night Abbey and her friend Cassie came home from ballet ready to put on a performance! Abbey was the fairy, Cassie (in the top picture- middle) was the princess/ dancing girl and Jenna was the bunny who turned into another dancing girl later in the play. It was fun to see what they created on their own. Cassie made up the cutest bunny dance for Jenna to do. They are dancing on the window seat Dan built for us this summer. The girls love to use that for a stage!

Jenna and Abbey made pancakes yesterday morning. They came up with this idea when they made one by accident. So they made one for each of us! Very cute. It was hard to take a bite out of those little faces, but the chocolate chips helped!

Benn and I had a great time at cub scout camp this weekend. (Dan couldn't go because of work: (  ) We forgot our flashlight, though. But I did remember my camera, so we spent a lot of time taking silly pictures in the tent. This was one of our sweet pictures. It got down to 38 degrees that night, but we had good sleeping bags. You just had to keep your head inside to stay warm! Benn's pack was on Windy Hill so you can imagine what kind of campsite it was. I woke up several times in the night and heard some interesting wildlife. First thing I heard was the resonating sound of 20 fathers snoring on top of a hill.. I thought we were in a bear den for a moment! The rest of the night I heard a barred owl. They have the distinctive "who cooks for you, who cooks for you all" call.  The next morning we went hiking, played games, shot bb guns and bow and arrows and practiced fire starting all between 9 and 12. Whew! Lots of fun, but we sure were worn out! At least I was.

Abbey made her own cake today.

I'm just testing to see if the mailing list works. Let me know if you got linked to this in your email. And take some time to look around our new family blog!

This is our attempt to keep you all updated on the daily craziness and educational happenings here in the Kyzer Jr Family!! I hope to be able to post updates on the children's schooling,  recent field trips and whatever else interesting is going on. This will be like our little newsletter.

To begin, I will give a quick synopsis of how our school  looks this year. All four of the children are schooling at home. Jenna began in the local K5, but we decided we'd prefer to have her back home with us. Her pops helps a lot with her schooling. She likes that! Abbey is a busy little bee this year. She is going to ballet, Girl Scouts and a once a month sewing club. Benn is still taking trumpet lessons. He wants to try violin next, so we are looking into that. He is also involved in Boy Scouts. He enjoys that very much. Eli is taking guitar lessons. He has just begun book two out of three books! All of the kids are attending a local art class and a local PE class.  They also attend a once a month 4H science class, which I happen to be teaching. Our Mondays and Tuesdays are pretty busy, but the rest of the week we are mostly home. We have also planned all of these activities close to home. So we are never more than 15 minutes away, which is pretty amazing when you consider where we live!

The boys have just switched from Horizon Math to Bob Jones Math curriculum. We are looking forward to this change. Horizon was just not working for us. We are finishing up their Apologia Botany study and will be moving on to Apologia Astronomy this month. For the girls I usually plan some simple corresponding activities.  I think Benn is about sick of plants, so this will be a good change. We are studying the Middle Ages in History. Still using The Story of Our World curriculum. This is a great curriculum that crosses grades well, so I can use it with all of the children. Last year we studied Ancient History. One of our goals is to work on writing skills this year and so far everyone has done some good work. We will be sure and share that later! Jenna is zooming through any work we plan for her. She is lots of fun to teach as long as you keep her busy! Abbey  is just becoming such a well rounded student. I am very proud of all of the kids this year!

Our system of five weeks on and one week off is working very well. The kids all work very hard because they know they have some play time coming up!

OK. maybe this wasn't so quick, but there is a glimpse of how this year's school is looking. We will look forward to sharing more! Feel free to leave us comments!!