Well, summer is over and we are off to a great new school year.  I wonder each day why I homeschool and then I watch the news.  It saddens me to see how our world is becoming.  I pray each day for people who do not know Chirst. 

We had such a busy summer I did not get time to do any blogging.  God's been chisleing me quite a bite over summer.  Mostly in my marriage, learning to trust God to provide instead of my husband (no dig intended, just reality)  My business has been on a roller coaster, I love it at the top and am sad at the bottom.  He's showing me the importance of influcing other teens, I've been teaching a teen group on wed. nights. I'm just trying to listen for HIM daily.

The children enjoyed church wilderness camp, Zach went to CIY (Christ in Youth), Eli had her first group date (we are so not ready for that), and Matthew got to have a 6" spike hairdo for a day.  Plus, inbetween all the rain this summer we got to swim and relax. 

My goals for the year have changed everytime I sit down and try to figure them out.  We are going to start a co-op this year and we are all excited about that.  Zach is also on a bball league, so that will keep us busy.  Trying to make sure my 9th grader does all he's suppose to do when he's not motivated to do anything is going to be tough.  I'm defiantely not as organized as years past. 

Thanks be to the Lord my Savior for holding me up through the ups and downs of my life.  It really does bring peace in my heart knowing he's right there for me.  Shine Jesus Shine.

So much has been going on in our lives, it's unbelievable.  We do not even participate in the craziness of sports with the children.  It's just stuff!

We have finished our 2008-2009 school year.  I've posted a slide show to show you actually what we did for the year.  I'm most excited about Music this year.  I made a goal of teaching the children to read and play music and they all passed with flying colors.  We are an official Recorder Band.  We have not come up with a name yet, but I'm sure you'll hear us when you drive by the house.  We wake up the whole neighborhood with Marching songs, and Bedtime songs and favorites like: Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle Little star, and many more.

We did not do everything in the planning book, but we came really close.  We are going to school through summer for a couple hours each morning.  If we don't stay on a schedule I run into many disciplining problems.  I'm excited to have Matthew on grade level in Math, he worked really hard this year.  Elizabeth has excelled in Math and Zachary is moving right along (if he'd work his problems out, he'd be doing much better), he'll start High School next year.

I'm pleased to say that we have made it through 3 months of doing the Dave Ramsey financial peace class.  It's been very hard, and I've shed many tears when there's been no money to do things, or pay bills.  If it hadn't been blessings from God then I'm sure we'd not be making it during this recession.  Because of HIS blessings, my business is booming and Kenan is feeling lead to go back to Ministry.  This has been a huge prayer for me and being patient, allowing God to grow both of us, it might just happen in the near future.

We've also enjoyed several field trips this year as well as some of our clubs.  I've begun planning for next year, it's always exciting to me!  This is the best part for me, I always ask the children what they'd like to learn each year, and most of the time we can get it done.  With Zachary starting High School, I'm pretty nervous about what I should be teaching.  Thanks to the help of several moms, I think I got it.

Until next time!

Well, it's been awhile since I've been on here, but it's been a very long winter for our family.  Between my health, my husband loosing work, and the children being children, I did not get a chance to blog about our work.

In Jan. I had the opportunity to travel to Colorado for a Pampered Chef conference.  It was a beautiful city with lots of emphasis on a clean enviroment.  I was very impressed with how clean it was.  I enjoyed the conference and learned tons of stuff to help my business.

As far as school goes, we started doing chemistry until we got to a part that needed us to purchase items for projects so we stopped.  We finished up our nutrition study and have all been eating healthier.  We've also been doing the normal math, grammar, spelling, keybrding, reading, and goofing off.

At the end of March and early April, I had the pleasure to visit my sister who lives in Washington State.  Eli had so much fun flying for the first time, and I loved spending time with my baby sis and helping her with the kidoes (3 and 1). 

Now that we are home, I'm pleased to say we are back to school. Today actually went well.  I'm planning on schooling all summer in the mornings to help the kids get caught up to grade level in math, grammar, and spelling.  We might do a unit study hear and there.  We love our summers, swimming, reading, and playing.  We might even travel some more.

We did start a study on Greece today.  We have not done history for over a year.  So Zachary was very excited to review what we had done and start his "favorite" subject again.  We use "The story of the world" and had planned on finishing one book per year, well, this is our 3rd year and we are only in the middle fo the first book.  Oh well, I guess that's one of the perks to homeschooling.  I hope to maybe keep up a little better now that spring is hear and I hope to be feeling better.

Today the kids learned about the location of Greece, and made a salt/dough map.  I'm trying hard to get them to work together, and it was hard this time.  Zach always seems to know everything.  They did a 3D type of map and colored the dough to represent the land. (I can't get my pictures to download so I'll do that later) Check in later.

The new year, what does it hold?  Everyone always asks that question about this time of year and we all make silly resolutions.  I used to make those but never kept them so why make them.  If you are living the way God wants you to live and you are obeying his commands what is there to resolve? 

It's been awhile since my last blog and I have to say, WOW, have we been busy.  We had a great Christmas with both sides of the family.  Kenan got to go deer hunting with our new father in law.  I traveled to Colorado and back safely, and we started back to school this week.

We also finished our nutrition study.  What did we all learn?  How to count calories, how to know what is good and bad to eat, eating disorders, how to present a report and get a good grade (way to go Eli), and how to not present a report (Zach, has more work to do).  We enjoyed doing a project that taught us how to count our fat calories.  It was not a huge study, but we did read lots of books on the subject and my mr. know it all (age 14) actually learned something new.

We started this week with Chemistry.  I love the curriculum we are using by Answers in Genesis "God's design" series.  It's sort, to the point, and has experiments with each lesson.  We also started the year with writing cursive in all subjects.  That has not gone well, but they'll get used to it.  The children have had fun correcting my letters.  I'm thinking about doing mini lessons of school over summer.  This whole week they have all said to me "I forgot how to do that" it's kinda been frustrating.

I'll post our pictures later.  Hope everyone is doing well.  We are trying to stay warm with this bitter cold weather. Yikes.

Hi friends, I know it's been awhile.  Again I find myself busy with so much going on that I forget to stay connected with those that are keeping up with me.

We have finished our Election study, it ended up not being as exciting as I had thought.  Do you ever do that?  You have all these great ideas, and you get em' on paper and then you just don't do them?  Well, after two weeks of trudging through one week of our Unit, I decided to take over.  I did all the research and just presented it to the kids.  They still did vocabulary to do, and they had to copy everything I wrote on the white board.  Did they learn something?  Well, only time will tell.

Since my last post I've turned a year older.  It was such a great day!  I loved hearing "Happy Birthday" from everyone.  And when someone asked me what I got, I said, "nothing yet, just wish me happy birthday and I'll be satisfied".  I guess that's what old age is doing to me.  I'm appreciating more of the non-material in life.  Kenan planned a fantastic dinner and I did come home from church to a new outfit that was just my size.

We have also continued our clubs.  The children have enjoyed our last creation club for this year, and we are starting a chemistry club next week.  It's so refreshing to be a part of our home town home school group.

I hope to get some current pictures posted.  We started a new Unit on Nutrition, per Kenan's request.  Our daughter is getting older and had developed some of my unhealthy eating habits.  So this study will do us all some good.  Although, after today's study I'm not sure what direction to take.  It's such a broad topic.

Well, off to work.  I'm doing a Pajama pampered chef party tonight.  It will be lots of fun.

We've had a really dry summer and fall.  So when the rain came we were very happy to see it.  I don't recall which day it rained but I had these pictures ready to blog.

Matthew and Eli decided that they wanted to go play in it, so they went and played football.  When the rain started it was actually large pieces of hail.  But as you can see they had a blast!

Yet another crazy and fun filled day at our house.  I was so surprised at all that we got accomplished.  We started with our 20 min. each of computer math games focused on what they are learning in their textbooks (since I only have one computer we take turns) We also reviewed all our spelling words for the year, and started doing handwriting.  I was given two handwriting books from Zaner Bloser.  I love them because they show proper position for writing, I guess I never found that, and it's been helpful for Matthew who is left handed.  Even though Zach did not like it, he did it without to much complaining. 

We then dove right into Music.  Since we've not done this in awhile we had to spend time reviewing all our notes and songs that we knew.  We finally finished up with the Cowbow and Indian March and they all did very good.  I still can't figure out how to add a video, but I'll keep trying.  Their homework is to learn Jingle Bells by Thurs.  The lesson learned from all this review is that none of them are practicing outside of class time.  I feel they are all old enough to do that without mommy reminding them.  They realized how hard it was to get back into music when they had not practiced.

We then jumped right into Art.  I had 2 lessons planned, Autumn Textures and symmetrical balence.  We found all kinds of leaves, grass, and tree bark and used colored pencils and copy paper to color over top of the object.  We then learned about collages (not the school as Zach thought).  For the Symmetrical balence we folded our colored paper in half and drew an object and once opened it was a whole object.  The boys did not get into this project like Eli did, but that's OK. 

This was Eli's version of symmertical art, she spent a lot of time on it, it was worth it!

We then headed out for our Tues. Club - 4-H, where we made Thank you leaves for our hospital workers.  We'll deliver them next month with a batch of cookies.

This recipe was so easy and inexpensive.  Around this household we tend to have breakfast for dinner, so that was the case today.  The kid's helped me with this one.  It's called Sausage biscuit frittata.  Ingredients needed: 8 oz. bulk sausage, red bell pepper (optional, we did not use it), fresh basil (we used Italian seasoning), 4 oz. cream cheese, 6 eggs, 1 pkg, refrigerated grand-size biscuits, 1 cup shredded provolone cheese (we used mozzarella cheese) I really try to follow the directions but my family is so picky I have to change it up sometimes.

Cook sausage on HIGH in Microwave for 3 min.- take out and break up - add bell pepper and basil finish cooking another 3 min. Drain sausage.  If you don't like to microwave your food just cook it on the stove top.

Separate biscuts horizontally in half to form 16 biscuits, arrange biscuits on the bottom of your pan (or oven safe dish) roll out to form your crust.  You might need a little flour to help with the sticking, or just just your fingers to flatten out biscuits.

In a microwave bowl, add cream cheese and microwave until soft, about 20-60 sec., add eggs and whisk until well blended.

Sprinkle half of your cheese over the biscuits, add your sausage and spread evenly, add your egg mixture, then more cheese (I told you we are a huge cheese family, no wonder I can't loose weight).  Then bake for about 20 min. or until biscuits are brown and eggs are done.  serve immediately

Until next week, what's for dinner in your family?

We've been busy doing mini field trips.  Today the children enjoyed making African Masks.  I was unable to attend, (I scheduled my first day at the gym) but my fellow home school moms let them participate, thanks moms!!  They children loved this trip cause they got to use oil pastels.  So it was an Art class wrapped up with a little bite of history. 

Since our field trip to the capital and meeting with another mom for some ideas on how to make this unit more fun, I've decided to stop all the writing part of the study.  Instead I'll spend time over the weekend and pull out 5 or 6 questions that I want the kids to learn relating to the Elections and Government and we'll discuss them.  We've also got tons of books from the library that we are reading.  So far it's been going much better, Zach still thinks it's boring, but so do I to be quite honest.  So this week we discussed the following things:  

• What is government? 
• What form of Government do we have in the US? 
• What forms of Government do other countries have? 
• What is an Election?
• How did people vote along time ago?
• Describe the three levels of Government; Executive, Legislative, Judaical
• Talk about the seven steps a person takes to become president
• How are candidate's chosen?
• What is a primary and a caucus?

We actually got through all those questions without to much pain.  I'm still using Amanda Bennent's Unit study on Elections, so I have the web links that she uses which really helped me find the answers to some of these questions.  We even pretended that Matthew and Zachary were running for President under the same party and how we finally got to one person being nominated.

Along with all the discussion, I found a fun recipe to make to keep with our RED, WHITE, and BLUE food theme.  It was super easy! 

Melt some butter in a saucepan and add some marshmallows (see where I'm going)

Add your favorite food coloring! We also did Blue

You then add some Rice Krispies

Take some of the rice krispies and make them into balls

We then added a little pull apart licorice to make a loop and they were Election ornaments

Hopefully everyone has a recipe to make rice krispie treats, we just colored ours and made them into balls, they did not last the whole week and I don't think Kenan got one.