First Day of co-op

We love co-op . It's kinda like the first day of school for us. For those of you that don't know what a co-op is, it's when a whole bunch of homeschool families get their kids together and offer a whole bunch of classes that they might not get at home or simply just for fun classes. For instance,


Blake is taking: Botany, Science Fun, and Lego Mechanisms. (For those of you who know me, know that I hate science, and Blake loves science. All of these classes are great for him!


Luke is taking: Ohio History, Zoom Science, and Bee Alert. (He is not thrilled about Ohio History, but the kids have to take it. Bee Alert is awesome because every week kids have various topics that they have to answer 100 questions to. On co-op day they go and have a competition on what they've answered. One of the mom's at my co-op developed the whole curriculum. It's fabulous!)


Jakeb is taking: Ohio History, Science Experiments, and Math Games and More. (His favorite is the Math Games!!)


Kaleb is taking: 7 Days of Creation Activities, Gym, and Math Games


Makenna is in the preschool class, and...

Klaire is in the nursery.

The mom's are usually required to help out in two classes each, but some also teach. I have the huge responsiblity of teaching SCRAPBOOKING this year. Whoo! It might be a little hard for me! Ha!

Ocean themed sensory bin and I Spy Jar

Here's our sensory bin that I put together filled with blue rice, some ocean toys that we had around the house, and some seashells.

I Spy bottle

And I made a quick I spy bottle, and I printed out the bottom picture so the kids will know exactly what to look for.

Homeschooling week 3 - Ocean themed part 2

Here's a continuation of our homeschool week which, of course, didn't go like I was hoping. They never do, do they? I missed a day of teaching because of three doctor's appointments, I had three days of sick kids (one on each day), and emergency doctor visit including an xray, and I don't think we opened our history books or reading books all week. And of course, we're packing up getting ready for Florida. Oh, and did I mention that I had to have two stress tests on the baby too because of the gestational diabetes? But somehow, God got us through it all, and man, am I looking forward to vacation.

pattern cards for Makenna - another free printable

Jakeb and Klaire enjoying the felt fish that I made. Yes, it even involved some stitching. Gasp!!! I'll talk more about them later.


This was a fun project - Glue art - I got the idea from a blog, but I plan on posting more about that later.

Day 2 of the Glue art project - Painting with watercolors


Kaleb building
Klaire's little lapbook from here
Play dough mats from here


Shadow matching from one of the printable packs I downloaded.
Magnet Worksheets - Some people do these on cookie sheets, but frankly I didn't feel like going up stairs and getting them, so the girls did them on the board. It hink they might have like it more this way anyways.

Luke and Klaire making a home for a worm that Luke found. Too bad I refused to let them keep it.
a few outside races because it was so nice out

Homeschool Week 3 - Ocean Theme part one

In celebration of going to Florida next week, I'm doing an ocean theme. (We're planning on going to Sea World and to the beach, so I thought it would be very fun!) I got all of my printable stuff on-line at various sites. I'll try to link them up if I remember.
We made an ocean in a bottle which didn't turn out exactly like I wanted which is very sad considering it said VERY EASY, but apparently I'm just not that smart with stuff like that!! The kids liked it still.

Here's Kaleb acting all shy for the camera. He had just finished his first attempt at a number sequencing puzzle. (extremely easy for him, but well...it was something new!)

Makenna's number sequence puzzle found here
Playdoh sea urchins - She had to find the right number to the right toothpicks urchin. Lauri Pegs
Kaleb and Klaire's creation

Read, build, and Write mats. I just discovered these, and I think they are Fabulouso!! They read the word (which happens to be ocean words for the week), they build them out of letters. I had some letter tiles in my scrapbooking supplies that I had bought forever ago at Michael's that I grabbed for this. And then they write it out at the bottom. It's great!

School's Started

PS... Long post..and pictures ahead....a whole first week of school in one blog post

School started this last week. AHHHHH!!!! I have a 6th grader, 5th grader, 3rd grader, 1st grader, preschooler, and a toddler. (Of course, pretty soonyou can a newborn to the list too.) I'm working hard this year to be organized. I have most of our school plans done until Christmas which it totally unlike me. Hopefully I can stay on schedule. I'm trying to throw some preschool/toddler activities into it all. Not to mention we started a few new curriculums this week like SOS and Math U See. (However, we haven't been able to really do Math-U-See cause it's on back order. Whoops!) And we haven't started real history yet because we still haven't gotten all of our books. I know....I shouldn't have waited till the last minute to order them, but well...that's me. So far, it went smoothly this week, and I think we all enjoyed it. At least this is the first week I enjoyed the first week of school.

The girls working on dotting their I's with our new Do-A-Dot markers. I love those things.


I made my first sensory bin. It was school themed with letters, colors, school supplies, beans, and pom-poms, and some other stuff in it. As you can see Jakeb like it too. What's funny is that I saw even Luke playing with it the other day too, so it's good for all ages if you ask me.


Luke working hard on A Beka language


The boys got a new Science program, Switched-on-Schoolhouse, and I'm sure they like it a lot more than me teaching them science. It took us awhile to figure it out, but we got it going and now they're working hard at it.


Here's Blake typing out his spelling words in Microsoft Word. Afterwards, he was able to go to Spelling City and play some games. The boys are using a Keyboarding program to learn to type, so I thought by typing the words once a week, it would help in both areas. All three older boys made above a 92% on their Spelling Test this week, so see...it did help.

Klaire playing with her Guidecraft stack n sort puzzle


Kaleb working hard on his first grade A Beka Arithmetic. He did at least 1/3 of it last year, so that's why he's already so far in his book. I'm hoping to switch to Math-U-See for him later this year.


Here's our Pop-Beads that the girls were sorting by color. Klaire had A LOT of help with it, but Makenna aced it.

Here's Makenna simply working on her pop bead necklace.

The next day she did it by shape. I think she liked doing that better.

And well, I had to take a couple of pictures of Klaire playing dress up.....with the boys dress up stuff.

And here's how I found Klaire quite a few days...completely tuckered out form all the hard school work she had to do.

Here's she fell asleep while they were watching Leap Frog. How uncomfortable does she look? Crazy!

PS. Just so you know why there's more pics of the girls than boys.....they still let me take pictures of them. The boys fought me when I went to take pictures. That's why there is lovely pictures of the back of their heads. Here's proof of what they do when I take pics.

oh and one last thing. I've got a lot of catching up to do on the blog. I'll get to it eventually. I've got birthdays and lots of summer fun we had! Eventually I'll get around to that.