Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from the Millers!

How does your family celebrate Thanksgiving?
At the Miller home we celebrate Thanksgiving by having a pumpkin shoot every year. For us this takes the focus off of food.

Elijah has Eosinophillic Gastroenteritis and has a feeding tube.  Holidays seem to revolve around food and that's not fun for him. Dakota has food issues also so food events have never been enjoyed by our family.

We look forward to our pumpkin shoot each year. During October we collect pumpkins and set them around our doorsteps and wait for Thanksgiving day.
On Thanksgiving day the boys set the pumpkins out for shooting time.

Then everyone takes turns shooting pistols, rifles and shotguns. I’m sure we look like a bunch of rednecks, but that’s okay, the guys enjoy this part of the day.
Elijah shooting his 20 gage and he blew the top of that green gourd off. Dakota giving it a shot. All three shooting at once. Big Daddy taking a turn. My great niece Hannah stayed with us today. Jody made her wear ear protection while the shooting was going on and she wasn’t happy about that.


I hope your family had a great Thanksgiving day. We enjoyed a laid back Thanksgiving. It was a relaxing day.

Bawcomville Christmas

This would be funny if it wasn't true! I can't believe Bawcomville is on the internet. We have no shame!

Happy, happy holidays from Bawcomville!

R.I.P. Cheyenne

Elijah’s dog, Cheyenne, was a really good dog. She appeared wild and crazy to anyone who drove up, but she was really a sweet dog.

A week ago we were leaving to take Elijah to choir practice and we ran over Cheyenne in our driveway. It was really sad. Elijah loved his do so much.

We will miss Cheyenne.

Cool Photos

Our homeschool group has two big co-op groups at different locations because all of us can’t fit in one church at the same time. We are very blessed to have our co-ops.
Last week Dakota took group pictures of each co-op location. I love how the pictures turned out.


He would love to do this circle picture with a wedding group. The bride and groom with the groomsmen and bridesmaids on each side of them, having the parents and grandparents next to the wedding party, then family and filling in the rest of the circle with all of the wedding guest. Wouldn’t that be a cool picture?
This would also be a cool picture for family reunions, school classes or groups or even sports teams.
Dakota can’t wait to find a group so he can take another picture like this.

Bayou Art

Elijah is enjoying art class through Bayou Art Classes. I’m loving the art pieces he has completed.
This piece is an 8x10 chalk pastel of fall leaves. Dakota taught the students how to use chalk pastel and blend colors. Elijah’s turned out really nice. Dakota framed this project for the students.
This turkey was done with colored pencils. Dakota was teaching how to blend colors with colored pencils and using the pencils with different pressure to get different effects.

This acrylic pointillism project was fun for the kids. Each student could draw any picture they wanted for this project. Elijah drew a big fish.

This fall leaf project was created with water colors.


At the end of each class or while waiting for paint to dry on a project Dakota gives the students drawing lessons. He has been getting them to draw things out of certain shapes or using certain lines. I snapped a few pictures from Elijah’s sketch book. I can certainly tell Elijah’s drawing is improving and he is learning to control his pencil more.  
Elijah’s October art from Bayou Art Classes.

Bayou Art Classes can be found on the website and on facebook.

Spelling

I’ve never been a fan of spelling curriculums. I’ve seen a lot of kids memorize spelling words for a test but then can’t spell the words when writing.
Dakota was a horrible speller, but an excellent reader and read all the time. When he started using email and posting on some message boards his spelling seemed to have changed over night. Now he is an excellent speller and I’m often asking him how to spell words.
The same thing happened with Elijah when he got his cell phone and started texting and using facebook his spelling improved so much, but he still needs to improve.
Elijah does ask me how to spell a lot of words when he is writing so I thought he might need something to expose him to more spellings, but I still didn’t want a curriculum, I thought something on the computer would be more fun.
I found Mrs. Flinkster’s Spelling Accelerator and it turned out to be a fun spelling program.

There are 6 games to play with each list of words and there are over 1,000 spelling words. You can put in your own spelling if you want to.
Elijah wasn’t thrilled to see what I had bought, but once he tried it out he decided he did like it.
Just thought I’d throw this out there in case anyone was looking for something to help with spelling.

Ben Franklin

There is so much to learn about Ben Franklin, he was truly a remarkable man. He surely deserves to be on our one hundred dollar bill.

• Day 1: Who Was Ben Franklin?
• Day 2: People and Places in Ben Franklin’s Life
• Day 3: The Accomplishments of Ben Franklin
• Day 4: Lessons to Learn From Ben Franklin
• Day 5: Remembering Ben Franklin

Elijah just finished the Download N Go Ben Franklin unit created by Amanda Bennett. We found this unti to be FULL of information. So much information we could have spent 2 weeks or more on this unit.




We learned a ton of interesting facts about B. Franklin. So much that we ended up with a lapbook full of booklets and folds. We used two large file folders to make this lapbook.

 
You can see I added the yellow and orange card stock pages to make extensions just so we could get everything in the lapbook.
If you are not into lapbooks the booklets could be used in notebooks.
The Download N Go units do include a nice list of library books, but if you are not able to get to a library don’t let that stop you from trying a unit. I have not gotten any library books for any of the DNG units we have done and that has NOT stopped us from learning and enjoying the units. The units are full of SAFE links with tons of info you can read about Franklin on the internet.

I really appreciate the vocabulary words found in each Download N Go unit. Each unit also includes spelling words.

To finish up our unit Elijah built different electronic experiments with his Snap Circuits set.


Are you ready to start a new adventure with your children and learn about Ben Franklin? You can order the Ben Franklin unit for only $6.25 for a limited time.
Visit the Blog Tour to read more reviews about the B. Franklin unit.

Dakota’s Art

Dakota has done some new 16 x 20 paintings in the last couple of weeks that he has up for sale on Etsy. The pictures do not do the paintings justice. The actual piece of art looks awesome.

This one is mine and I hung it up in our living room. I love it!

I love this Louisiana painting. It looks so awesome!
This wedding picture is amazing with silver, gold, black and white. I love how this turned out.
This black and red fleur de lis picture turned out nice too.

Here’s another Louisiana painting that also looks very cool.

This one looks so amazing in real life, the picture just doesn’t show how beautiful these colors are together.
       I like the mint green fleur de lis on gold with chocolate too. I love the black, white, red, silver and gold together. It looks so freaking awesome!

This one is zebra print of off white and black and the pink fleur is much prettier and brighter than it looks here in this picture.

This crazy picture looks really cool. It’s purple, gold and green, our Mardi gras colors.

This turquoise on gold with chocolate looks amazing too.

I love all the paintings and can’t decide which is my favorite.