Leaf Week

I guess first I should apologize for not updating much here. My life is always seriously hectic, but then on top of all that we lost our main computer. The hard drive just died on us. I now have a laptop, with windows vista on it. Both I had never used before. Vista wasnt much different but the laptop sure is. Im not overly fond of it LOL! After getting a real mouse for it, it was easier to use, but still very different. I miss my number keys on the side. I use those a lot for the business.

Also because of the computer loss I lost a lot of pictures. School pics that is, I backup regularly so I only lost about a months worth. So no pics of what we have done lately, sorry!

Leaf week was really fun for the kids, Laurel especially liked it because her name begins with L. Oh and by the way she will write her L letters with much enthusiasm! I figured out she likes to write letters with straight lines, like L, and E, and A. If they have curves, like S especially, she wants nothing to do with those. But thats OK for now, she is learning all the sounds and recognizing the letters just fine.

I have this book here called How to Homeschool. I found it at a yard sale and got it cause it was cheap with the intention to pass it on to another curious Mom who was thinking of HS'ing. Well this book had turned out to be a HUGE blessing to me! One of the suggestions inside was to take one day a week to skip all the paperwork and class time and do projects outside weather permitting, or go on field trips etc. So this week instead of doing the activities recommended by MFW on each day of the week, I combined them all into one big day of fun. This went over really well, and now each day we get through the class time much faster so they have more time to play anyhow. I have found that being as pregnant as I am (25 weeks) I have at least one day a week I feel kinda BLAH anyhow, so instead of sitting cooped up for a whole morning we go do stuff.

Some of the things we did was going outside to collect different leaves. When I pointed out the difference in the leaves they immediately starting looking for the differences themselves. After we got all the tree leaves in the yard we went to the garden and got some big squash leaves, and tiny leaves from bushes. We also found a treasure! On our property is a tiny peach tree which has never produced anything edible. Well this year it did! Only a few near the top of the tree, so we shook them down and although they were small they tasted so good. The next day they were all gone, we would have missed them had we not been out that day. What a sweet little blessing God sent to us!

The kids enjoyed doing leaf rubbings with their leaves the next day, and we pressed some between book pages. We have one houseplant, a Christmas cactus, I do not have a green thumb and kill everything else unintentionally. Our teacher book has me to pull a leaf rfrom the plant and explain how the plant was like God, and we are like the leaves. As long as we are attached to the plant we have everything we need to live and grow. But once we are detached we begin to die. Each day we looked at the detached leaf and talked about it. It got wrinkly, and turned dark, and began to wither away. This was a wonderful example of how we need God in our lives everyday, because without him we begin to change into someone different, and for a while we may think we are OK, but in reality we are dying inside. They got the message, and not in a scary way. I love this curriculum so much, I am so thankful we were led to it by dear friends! You know who you are!!