We just finished up on our first read-aloud chapter book of the schoolyear, The Secret Garden!  This book was right up our alley...all about receiving the healing power from getting out in the fresh air and enjoying nature.  I had never read the book before, we ALL enjoyed it immensely.  Now, we are looking forward to renting the movie to watch.

THANKS so much for all the comments and recommendations on which movie to choose!!  Unfortunately our library only has the most recent version, which is definitely NOT the one I want to have!  So I'm going to pursue neighboring county libraries to see if they have the others.  I love everything I've seen that Hallmark Hall of Fame has done, and I'd love to see the older version as well, so I'm going to try and find both.  If libraries don't have them, I'll turn to Blockbuster Online and just have to wait for them to come in!!  THANKS AGAIN!

My friend Cindy posted a great idea this last week about using picture prompts for creative writing.  This idea was so awesome!  In the process of clipping pictures from magazines to use, I ran across a yummy recipe for pumpkin bread, which sparked an idea.

I thought it would be neat to copy the recipe onto a sheet of paper, and have my daughter get some writing in by journaling something about it.  I put a question to help spark her writing up in the corner of the sheet, and then she journaled just a short answer.  You'll see from the picture below, that we then went to town on it!  She took her colored pencils out and decorated it, and today, we ended regular school a bit early and she actually made the pumpkin bread and scrapbooked pictures of the process on the sheet.  So I'm thinking we got three subjects out of one project:  writing, baking, and scrapbooking!  It will make an awesome addition to her portfolio.

Oh, and the pumpkin bread turned out so wonderful, she's beginning to become quite the baker.  I ended up letting them eat it for dinner!  It's a vegetable, right?!