The Zoo

It is too hot to be going to the zoo! I do not plan to return to the zoo until winter.
Me, Dakota, Elijah, my niece Jennifer, and great niece Hannah took a little trip to our zoo.
It was really too hot to even enjoy the zoo. I'll share a few pictures of the kids.

I like how this picture turned out with the reflection in the water.

Elijah, Hannah and Dakota. You pretty much have to hold Hannah anywhere you want her to stand or she will take off. She's not much for standing still for pictures.

Elijah with his new haircut. Don't you know that has to be cooler for him.

Elijah and Hannah on the bear.

Memory Cross

Have ya'll took a peek at the Memory Cross link I added to the side bar of my blog?

This tool is amazing!

One of my goals for this upcoming school year is for our family to learn bible verses. While I was searching for something we could use I came across Memory Cross.
I was mesmerized by these cards.

I ordered a sample pack and turned right back around and ordered us the Bible verse family pack #1 and family pack # 2.

I LOVE these cards. I'm sitting here with a stack of them on my desk and I can't put em down.
Elijah also has one in his hands.

This company gives a 100% money back guarantee! They can do that because there is no way anyone can not be totally happy with these cards.

They also have story cards for coloring Bible stories and printed Valentine, Easter and Halloween cards. Great stuff for VBS too.

This is just too cool not to take a peek at.

http://www.memorycross.com/cmd.php?af=797888

Let me know what you think about them.

Dakota's Art

Dakota always has an art project going on.
I picked some of my favorites to share.

Elijah's Art

I thought I'd share some art samples.
Both my boys enjoy art.


Elijah did this painting at art class this week.




He also did this watercolor of an Egrat in art class this week.



This cross is 3d and textured.

This giraffe is a tracing of Elijah's hand.

Hannah Banana

My great niece, Hannah, turned 1 in April. Here are some pictures of her.
Some of the pictures look very pixel because of sizing and adjusting the pictures so much.

Elijah's first notebooking page.

Don't worry I don't plan on posting every page Elijah does for his notebooks. wink-wink

He has been so ready to get started and today we were finally able to do that. We read the two page spread and talked about what we read and the pictures we saw.

Then we found an I Can Draw page and he drew this picture and did some copy work.

I think his first page turned out nice.

He really took his time drawing the triceratops. I was laying on the couch and he was at the dinning table and he kept bringing his page to me to show me each change he made on it.

He was trying to get in all the details.

Elijah is a struggling reader and a very reluctant writer so I'm very pleased that he wants to do this.

Notebooking!

We have done a lot of lapbooking over the years and some notebooking.
During Dakota's 7th and 8th grade years he made bible, science and history notebooks.
Elijah and I have been working on a creation notebook for a couple of years now. He also has a stamp book, art book and a feather book.

In the fall, at co-op, Elijah will start a nature journal notebook. He is looking forward to that, so I got to thinking notebooking may be the way to go with him for school.
I looked through some encyclopedia type books we have and picked out the ones written on an easy level. Elijah and I talked about it and he is ready to get started.

The idea is for every two page spread we read Elijah will create pages for his notebook.
We will start four notebooks; animals, science, history and earth and space.
These notebooks are not meant to be completed in one year, nor to be worked in everyday.


Things Elijah can include in his notebooks:
* Writing - copy work, narrations and dictations
* Pictures - drawings, sketches, photos and clip art
* Bible verses
* Paper projects - booklets, folds
* Maps
* Diagrams and graphs
* Pressed flowers, leaves
* Worksheets
* Pages printed from the internet
* Scrapbook pages
* Lab reports
* Outlines
* Poems
* Newspaper or magazine articles


Supplies Elijah might use:
* Colored pencils, markers, crayons
* Glue sticks
* Scissors and shape scissors
* Tape
* Stickers
* Rubber stamps
* Paints
* Glitter
* Pictures
* Magazines
* Lined paper, copy paper and card stock
* Scrapbook sheets
* Stencils
* Zip lock bags to hold things
* I also created some sheets with various size squares for drawing and writing. I'll make sure he has a lot of copies of these sheets.

Here are the books we will be using to create these notebooks.


Notebook # 1
Questions and Answers: Wild Wild World is all about animals. Elijah loves anything to do with animals so I know he will enjoy this notebook.

We will also use this workbook to tear pages out of and add them to the animal notebook.

Notebook # 2
Earth and Space
Elijah is full of questions about the solar system and always drawing pictures of planets and such. We also have two different hands on solar system boxed sets he has been begging to get into.







We can also use this book to tear pages out of for the Earth and Space notebook.







Notebook # 3
Encyclopedia of World History
This book starts with ancient history and covers middle ages, age of discovery, revolution and industry and ends with the modern world.
I know Elijah and he'll want to make a lot of pages about Ancient Egypt.







Notebook # 4
My First Encyclopedia is full of science information and even has science experiments throughout the book. Science is Elijah's favorite subject.

The best part is we already own all these books and have tons of supplies.

I will take him to buy four 3 ring binders. I would like the ones with the clear plastic on the front so he can design his own covers.

I think 3rd grade will be a good year for Elijah!

Just for fun!

Since I shared Elijah's soccer pictures I decided to find a picture of Dakota when he was little and played soccer. Gosh it is so hard to remember him this little. He is now 16 and going into the 11th grade.

He wasn't very athletic either and mostly just played airplane when on the soccer field, but we still loved to watch him. And now we have something to pick on him about.

I love you, Dakota!

Soccer!

Elijah played soccer with our homeschool team this year. It was a lot of fun!

He is not very athletic and not a great soccer player, but he had fun and I had fun watching him and all the other kids run around chasing a ball. They were all so cute!

Here are some snap shots of Elijah at games or practice.

Q and U Wedding

I'll back up to our Q and U wedding our Sight Word class had on the last day of co-op.

Here is the little girl who carried Mrs. U. She is such a sweetie!



Here is our wedding party.
The boys were not too happy about doing this.




Mr. Q told me "This is so embarrassing!" Afterwards I told him it wasn't that bad was it?
He assured me it really was.




One of our teen guys was delighted to perform the wedding for us.




The chapel was full with guest. I think most of the class let out to come attend the wedding.

We even had a guest book to sign.

We had rice cakes, smarties and grape Koolaid burst.

Elijah was not to happy to be doing this.



The parents of the little girl who carried Mrs. U made a smile box video.

http://secure.smilebox.com/ecom/openTheBox?sendevent=4d7a45784d6a67784e4877324d7a497a4e6a51790d0a&sb=1

I'm BACK!

It has been a busy wild end of the year. From April on we have been super busy.

I kept telling myself we would slow down when June hit.

I have not had time to blog. I've wanted to so bad, and when I have had a few minutes it wasn't enough time to resize pictures to upload. We have dial up so pictures have to be resized or it would take forever to upload anything.

Dakota and I even stopped at the library one day (they have wireless) to upload all the pictures on our SD cards to our Photobucket accounts and we found out their internet is no faster then ours. So we left.

Now that June has hit we have slowed down. I wanted to slow down, but I wanted it to be my choice, but now I've came to a stand still or should I say a sit still. I can barely even move around my house.

With gas prices being so high we decided we wouldn't try to go anywhere this summer, we decided to buy the kids a pool and stay home.

This picture is not our pool, but one like we bought. Ours is 18' x 4'.

So we put the pool up and on the first day we got in I jumped in and twisted my knee.

When I hit the bottom I did the splits and felt my knee instantly. I have been in so much pain!

Yes, you can see right there on the pool it does say No Jumping or Diving!

I tell everyone I'm a teacher and I teach by example so I was just showing my kids what not to do.

I'm hobbling around the house with a cane. Thank goodness for drugs!

It's drving me crazy not to be able to do whatever I want.

I want to back up to April with my blogging and blog about all the wonderful things that have kept us so busy.

I'm back and with pictures!