Easter Lapbook

We had a very fun week of homeschooling. Our entire week was based on the book, "The Legend of the Easter Egg" We read the book and learned many thing from it. Here are some topics we studied:
-Good Friday and Easter-Why we celebrate those days?
-Communion
-Russia and Faberge Eggs
-Parts of an Egg, How a chick hatches
-Brown Eggs vs. White Eggs
-Practiced/Reviewed Telling Time
-Similies, studied them and wrote out own
-Learned New Vocabulary
-Sequencing/Story Order
-Egg-speriments
-cooking
-symbolism

We have had a great time and love making lapbooks. Sarah is working on one from the Three Snow Bears. She has learned so much about Canada and Polar Bears. Emily is getting ready to do a Lapbook on Amelia Earhart.

Reading Festival

I was downloading the camera and found this shot and wanted to blog about it. Partly because I just love blogging. :)

Saturday, Mark, Mom, Mammaw and me took my kids, Tay's kids and Kiara and Kayli to the reading festival in downtown Fort Myers. We had a fun time and all the kids got a free book. Katie is sleeping in her carseat, but Mark is holding up her book. It was fun to let the kids pick their books.

Emily -Pippi Longstocking (I think she secretly wishes she could be Pippi.)
Sarah- Cam Jansen book-I don't remember which one, but she enjoys those books.
Kiara-a Care Bear book
Kayli-I can't remember, but she was quick.
Ty-A train book. He has noises that he makes for every train car. It is a short book, but can take a good 10 minutes to read if you do every noise on every page.

I'm not sure about the others as we picked for them.

There was also face painting, crafts and other booths set up. There were authors there too. I didn't know many of them, but they had Stuart Wood for the adults. I used to read some of his books, but now they scare me.

I love free community events. Lots of fun!

The little things in life

I have a 'list' of things I want to do with the kids when they are young. There are of course the big things...accept Jesus as their Savior, get an education, ....the major things in life, but there are also the little things.

We did 2 of those little things in the past week.

-Get ice cream from the ice cream truck. Every kid should remember doing this. I remember running 2-3 streets over with a handful of change trying to catch the truck. The girls have done this many times when we lived in Cape Coral, but this is only the 2nd time since we have moved to our current home. As soon as Mark saw the truck drive by he hollered for us to come outside. Ty was thrilled to get a Spongebob Ice Cream. We talked to the lady and she said she would be by every Saturday night. It looks like we will be doing this again.

-Sleep in a tent...ok, so we didn't actually sleep in it this time. Mark set up our tent in the front yard, complete with electricy to watch a video on the little tv.

We plan to have part of our school day in there tomorrow. Should be fun.

Maybe I will sit down one day this week and right down all the little things. I think all the little things are what add up to make a great childhood. I hope our children look back one day and realize how much effort we put into making life fun and exciting for them. We sure enjoy doing it!

Due for an update

Robin sent me an email letting me know I needed to update my blog.....here you go Robin. :)

Tonight, Emily, Ty, Katie and I met Mom and Mammaw at the linear park to go for a walk. We are having gorgeous weather right now, so it was very nice.

Mammaw has been doing a lot of walking while she has been here. The kids and I met her at Lakes Park last night and she walked around the lake while we played on the playground.

Where's Katie?

Just click the area above to see Katie playing her
version of Peek a Boo.

How do you compute?

Sarah has a unique way to use the computer! The girls are 'in' to Webkinz again. Ok.... me too! I even have my own pet, Simon Seal. There are so many fun and addictive games on there. It is fun that Sarah can use the desktop and Emily can use the laptop and they can 'meet' in one of the Webkinz game rooms to play.

If you, or your kids, have a Webkinz let us know. We would love to add you to our Buddy List.

Last post today

Sarah-I'm happy to drive my family around!
Ty-Look Ma, a new handrest!
Katie-Are you sure you want me to ride in here?
Emily-Wait! Let me get in the picture too!

:)

Uniquely Sarah

Sarah is such a unique kid. I like the way she interacts with people.

Mark and I were talking about our recent training for work. The facilitator was a really neat person. She spends her day getting other people excited and 'buying in' to their program. By the end of the training she had us snapping and clapping for the good work of other people. Emily thinks it sounds crazy (she wondered if the lady thought we taught Kindergarten), but we had an awesome time. We both think Sarah could do this job when she grows up. #1 She likes to have fun and wants others around her to do the same. #2 She doesn't mind being a little goofy.

On Monday in their Journals I had them write down 2 goals for this week. I told them to think seriously about what they would like to accomplish. I was thinking they would put something like--say 2 sections in King's Kids, finish the book I am reading, keep my room clean. Um...no.
Sarah wrote:
1. Play webkinz with Grandma on the computer.
2. Finish a song on Guitar Hero 3.

PS--What an awesome shirt ! :)

Katie's real meal!

To celebrate her 6 month birthday, Katie enjoyed her first real meal. Yummy, delicious baby oatmeal!

Sarah is thrilled to feed her. NOtice we have to hold her hands down. She wants to grab the spoon and shove it in. She really enjoyed the meal and ate every bit of it.

Ty loves oatmeal and was quite bugged that he didn't get any. We let him try it thinking he would not like it because it was baby oatmeal, but he loved it. Silly guy.
Emily also helped out.

Licking the spoon! Yum!

Happy Birthday Emily! Part 4

Thank you everyone for coming. Travis was also there, but at the time this was taken he was trying to catch a fish. Unfortunately, an alligator got his bait. It was quite an exciting moment!

Katie-6mo, Sarah- 7 , Kayli- 5 , Emily- 9, Ty- 2 , Kiara- 5 and Logan 1

Happy Birthday Emily! Part 3

Dual Kite flying
Sarah and Kayli
Cake time! Emily was so happy.

My girl! Daddy's girl.

Happy Birthday Emily! Part 2

This was a perfect kite flying day. All we had to do is gradually let out the string and they swooped right up in the air. We were flying the $1 kites from Walmart and they worked wonderful!

Ty and Mammaw. Notice Ty has his Kite handle in his hand. He liked flying his Cars kite, but sometimes forgot and let go. I chased it down twice. Emily went after it the third time, but it got swooped away. If you look closely at this picture you can see Katie smiling in the background.
Grandma and Katie-both are smilers!
We had a total of 6 kites, but at this point we were down to 2 or 3.

Happy Birthday Emily!

Today Emily turned 9. We had such a fun day.

She started off with school because you can't skip that!


Then Emily and I went to the Library to get books for school, out to lunch and shopping at Target. It was fun for it to be just the 2 of us. She spent a little of her birthday money and really enjoyed that. She is a wise spender. She purchased a Fairies Poster and special crayons. The girls had fun working on the poster.
We had Subway at the park before our family get together.
Ready to fly kites!

Emily's Party

We had Emily's party tonight and it was a great success. There were 8 girls in all and we tie dyed t-shirts, played charades, made shakes, had pizza, chips and shrimp for dinner, ate birthday and had moments of laughters and giggles!

It seemed like such a mature, grown-up party. Our Emily is turning into a beautiful young lady!

She picked to have a cookie cake this year. It was delicious.

We were very pleased with how the shirts turned out. Thank you to Kathi for helping me with the process. (Want to do them this summer at Hemans?)

I love this picture!

Ty and Daddy

Ty is somewhat of a challenge to photograph. He loves to pose and smile, but they are somewhat unrealistic in nature. We were excited to take a picture of the two of them in their blue shirts and ties. Mark and I had an idea of how it was going to go down, but when Ty saw Daddy kneel then he had to do the same.

Miss Katie

Katie is such a sweet girl. She is playing with Sarah's boa in these pictures. It seems like every time I got her in position she had moved off the backdrop. She isn't crawling, but can wriggle and squirm to get to where she wants to go.

We are going to give solid foods a try next week. Sarah is looking very forward to that day! She can't wait to feed her baby sister.

Ty

Ty is at such a fun stage. I love these pictures of him. It tells alot about him.

The hat and black cape are from the dress up box-leftovers from our Halloween Pirates.

He is still in his jammies and loves to wear them.

I don't know if you can tell but he has pen writing on his face-his art work from last night.

He is playing with Sarah's pink horse. Sarah got the horse from Grandpa and Grandma W when she was 4. The horse is well worn from lots of play. I think we need to get a new brown one soon. (Won't show wear and tear as much)

You can also see the jump rope around the horse's neck. That is because he is ready for a ride by his sister Emily.

The pretend phase is so much fun!

Disney Fun 3

Ok, being a blogging newbie I just realized that you will now read Disney Fun 3 then Disney Fun 2 and finally Disney Fun. So you will experience our trip in reverse. Urrghh. Oh well, one day I will either master blogging or include less pictures thus eliminating the need for multiple posts.

Anyway....
Mark met us outside of the park on Friday. He brought us dinner and then we headed back in to finish off the night. While we were waiting I snapped this cute picture of Katie. She is growing up so quickly. Hard to believe she is almost 6 months old!
While Mark and Emily were on Rockin' Rollercoaster, Sarah and I explored the ESPN zone. It was ESPN weekend and they had lots of fun activities set up for the kids.
All in all we had a great time and no Disney trip is complete without the obligatory Castle shot.

Disney Fun 2

Here we are on Day 2. We decided to spend our 2nd day at Hollywood Studios (used to be called MGM). It wasn't quite as chilly, so the parks were a bit busier. Here are my 3 girls waiting for the shuttle bus at the hotel.

One of the reasons we chose this park is for the New Playhouse Disney show. They revamped it to include Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Handy Manny and Super Sleuths. Those are Ty's 3 favorite shows. He danced, clapped and jumped along with the show. As you can see, Katie thoroughly enjoyed the show. Well...she figured it was a great time for a nap. She seems to sleep better with loud noise. Silly girl!

Here we are outside of the Great Movie Ride. Sarah really likes this ride. It is a tour through various movie scenes. During the ride our 'driver' is taken hostage and a bank robber overtakes our car. There is a gunfight all around us. Of course, Sarah buries her head and misses the whole thing, but she still says this is her favorite ride.

Disney Fun

While Mark finished up his conference the kids and I went to Disney! We had a great time. We started off on a very cold day at Epcot. It was freezing cold! I think we started off the morning in the low 40's. That is very cold for us Floridians.

Here Emily is with a pictures morpher. I think Epcot is our favorite Disney Park now. At least for the girls. The Innoventions area is great! There are all kinds of interactive computer areas.

This is us with our personal garbage can. We had to do a survey to estimate how much trash we accumulate in a day. Then we had different computer tasks (games) to complete to empty our trash container. It was fun, but also educational. The kids loved it.

Emily and Sarah on Main Street. After a fun morning at Epcot we headed over to the Magic Kingdom. It was still quite cold which made for a less busy park day.