School Room

The game cabinet and some other stuff. It's not completely organized yet nor filled.

Here's where Jakeb does his school work. The desk is in the bottom of the picture.

Here's the view when you first come in the basement door from outside. The kids do their school work on the tables....obviously, right? Ha!

Here's the view from when you come down the stairs

And here's just another view

Yes, it's in the yucky basement with cement floors. One of these days we'll get around to doing something with the floor, but until then, it works and the kids don't complain about it...not the room that is...maybe the school work.

Fairy Sensory BIn

Okay, If I haven't told you all before, sensory bins are great! They're cheap because you use the stuff you have on hand, and the kids love them. I made a fairy one this time to go with our "F" fairy theme. I had
squinkies balls
some links from the $$ store
Tinker Bell Fairies that I bought a long time ago
Flowers in my scrapbooking supplies
bells
pom-poms
rice

Pretty simple right? They played with it forever transferring everything. Yes it gets little messy, but that's what a broom is for.

Even with the girly theme, Kaleb got in on the filling up of the Squinkies balls.
Making bracelets with the links

homeschooling

Makenna practicing her cutting
Klaire transferring q-tips got the tray at Goodwill along with about 6 other ones. It took me a while to figure out what to use it for, but I'm assuming I saw this idea somewhere and apparently it stuck.

Who would have thought Klaire would have loved this. She spent quite awhile shoving the pom poms down then holes at the top of the bucket.
Our new small dry erase board. I love it!
Makenna practicing writing her letters Klaire enjoying the pompoms again - transferring them with tweezers. I know...it's the little things. She loved it. Who knew?
Playing with Wedgitsgetting bored with the Wedgits and making bracelets instead Big brother Jakeb getting in on some Wedgit time
Got this idea from Here
and even though ours didn't turn out as well, they were still fun to make. I think I just had some junky oil pastels. First day, you make a spiral web out of the glue, and then the second day after it completely dries you color it with the oil pastels. You're supposed to put spiders on it too, but that didn't work for us. I"m thinking of having the kids add some 3D spiders to it instead. That would be fun.
Here's Blake showing how much fun he's having doing the craft. (He sure does love them. Can't you tell?)

Build your own house - art project

Makenna was focusing on the letter F this week, and so the theme was Fairies, and i thought it would be fun to make a fairy house. Of course, the boys wanted to make a Squinkies house too, so we all got to work with some leftover boxes that we had been hanging on to. We split up into teams and began building and decorating with what we had - sticks, pom-poms, paint, popsicle sticks, ribbon, and a ton of glue. The boys did not share the same joy of deocrating that Makenna and I did. They were ready to paint and that was it. I made them..ahem, I mean I encouraged them to decorate the outside of theirs with more than just paint if they planned on keeping it and playing with them.

makenna did all the painting and helped a lot with the glue

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!

Homemade Wooden Blocks

We're going green! Not! I saw this cute idea for the wooden blocks on a blog a good while ago, and I had just been waiting for an oppurtunity to ask Eric to make some. Recently, in the past month or so, we had a storm that knocked down a huge branch, and so while he was taking care of that branch, I finally got my chance. He didn't mind one bit using his chainsaw toy for some of the big pieces. For the smaller ones, he just used his miter saw. Klaire had fun with them today. and shoot, it's a fun toy, and what could be better....it was free!!!

Felt Fish

Here's some felt fish I made. I got the idea from here. Each fish has some deocrative items on them all the way up to 10. I drew them freehanded on the felt and then cut them out. Then I glued the washer to one side, decorated the other side with objects, and the quickly stitched them together. Don't look too close or you'll see some really horrible stitching. Each fish has a different amount of objects on it, so they'll be great for counting.

We didn't get to use them as much last week as I had planned because of some unplanned doctor's visits and sick kids, and well..if you homeschool, you know how it goes, but I will definitely be using them a lot in the future. They'll be great for counting.

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.

Glue paint

We made our very own Glue paint which we did a projects with...the first art project of the year. We just mixed the 1/2 filled glue bottles with some acrylic paint, and voila...makes for some fun crafts.

Basically on these pictures, you simply draw your picture with pencil, trace it with the colored glue, and then wait for it to dry. The next day, you use water colors to color it all in. Fun!!!