Haircuts!

Wanted to share a fun quarterly event in our family- the dreaded little boy haircuts!

Well, not so fun  Here's the money shot of the whole bunch  This was immediately before Ash head-butted Leif in the nose.  Elliott, having seeming Twintuition, you can see is a bit worried about Asher's mental state, and is staying clear.

Thankfully, before that we got some good pictures  On the above left is Elliott after a couple swipes of the hair cut thingy  have done their job  Elliott LOVES haircuts  Leif too, he loves looking like an "army guy" Since Leif is all about the army.  Ash- not so much, however, he DOES do much better with short hair, like Alex when he was little, i think it calms him down.  Below is Leif and Ash (right) and Leif and Elliott (left)

Leif and 

Book Review- Advice for Seekers, by Charles H. Spurgeon

I was blessed with the opportunity to review the classic "Advice for seekers" recently released and published by Attic Books, a division of New Leaf Publishing.  nlpg.com   Charles Spurgeon was an influential Baptist Minister, who is known as the world's most influential preacher.  This book was published initially in 1896, and Attic Books recreated it, complete with original spelling and style.

I have to admit, i do not read as many "old dead guys" as I know I should.  We all have so much to learn from the old dead guys :)  And in theology this is particularly true.  I am glad i read this wonderful little gift book.

The first thing i noticed about the book when it arrived is its small, doable size.  Its a durable hardcover book with beveled pages, staggered and choppy around the edges, very artsy.  It made reading the book an experience in itself.

Spurgeon hits on the primary points of the Gospel in his brief 134 pages.  He discusses topics such as

- Why Can't we save ourselves?
- What is our natural standing as fallen man?
- What is Jesus' role in our lives?
- How to be saved?
- If you are saved, why do you not FEEL saved?
- What does Repentance look like, and why is it important?
- What gives ME the right to obtain eternal life?

These answers and more are answered in a lyrical, yet, understandable way by Sturgeon.  I'm grateful that Attic Books has reprinted this lovely little book.

Check out other bloggers opinions of this book here http://nlpgblogs.com/babel-and-seekers-reviewers/

Disclaimer-  I received this book as a free review copy in exchange for posting a truthful review.  The thoughts contained within this post are my honest opinion.

Book Review- Tower of Babel, by Bodie Hodge

This upcoming school year, we are back to year 1 history- Ancients in our 4 year cycle.  I'd been planning the upcoming year and when hearing Master Books was looking for reviewers to review Bodie Hodge's new book "Tower of Babel, the cultural history of our ancestors" I was SUPER excited.  Unlike Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, etc. times,  the earliest history is a bit hard to cover, due to lack of written resources.   This book is a big step in the direction of remedying that problem.  

Check out the trailer for the book here- 

My thoughts on the book-- Author Bodie Hodge- who you can learn more about here-  http://www.newleafpublishinggroup.com/authors.php?author_id=125 Did an amazing job bringing to life the history of the peoples of the tower of Babel.   This book is engaging and informative, seeking to answer, and succeeding, the questions:

How do you pronounce Babel?
Is the Tower of Babel real, and does it MATTER?
When and where did the scattering of peoples occur? Where?
What did the Tower look like?
How can all the languages currently in existence be accounted for?
What was the origin of writing?
What was the original language?

"Tower of Babel answers these questions and many more in ways I didn't even realize possible.  I just didn't realize all that information was "out there" it just isn't available in mainstream media.  I love the use of visual aides like diagrams, charts, pictures, etc.  For a visual person like me, this is very helpful for understanding complex information dense material.  Nonetheless, i found the book to be tenable, and particularly informative.  I plan to use it as a read aloud next year with all my school-agers, who will then be ranging from 2nd grade-9th.    

this book is published by Master Books, a division of New Leaf Publishing Group.  You can find the link up, packed full of other reviews for this book here-   http://nlpgblogs.com/babel-and-seekers-reviewers/

Disclaimer-  I received this book as a free review copy in exchange for posting a truthful review.  The thoughts contained within this post are my honest opinion.

Random school review- Wednesday 4-3-13

I haven't posted in ages.  we've had a lot going on!  I'm still loving the kids independent work folder system i posted about last time, and i'm working on re-integrating group school, as i think its SO important.  in group school, we read good books, do Bible study and discussion, talk about history, science, whatever our focus is. right now, its science.  The kids, Led by Nikolas just completed their unit study on electricity, finishing the Academy of Science for Kids kit which was entirely self motivated, and was super cool watching them run with their own interestes.    So Wednesday, which is the random day i'm blog reviewing- we read the book "Oil Spill" which i believe was Chloe's choice of younger kid science lit- i let each kiddo choose, rotating to let everyone have a turn, from our sizeable stash of let's read and find out books- which are AWESOME.  Then we read chapter 1 of "Ginger Pye" our new read aloud, then we read, i believe chapters 6 and 7 from Robert Boyle.  Its hard to put that book down! we are loving it.  

What i ws REALLY  psyched about with our reading is that lately, Annabeth has been hearing and comprehending at least bits of what we are reading.  That's such progress from NOTHING that has been up until now.  I kind of feel bad making her sit and listen, knowing she's not getting much out of it, but now i'm starting to really have hope, which is cool :) wayyyy beyond cool, it feels like a miracle.  (annabeth has severe APD and SPD)  Besides, she enjoys sitting and snuggling me anyway, so its a "win" regardless.  I haven't been getting her therapy done though, AAAK!!  :( 

I had hoped to get out the "europe" puzzle and work on that, to tie in with the Robert boyle book, but never did get around to it, plus they were occupied all afternoon with the science kit.  

We spent the WHOLE morning outside, it was Sooooo nice out, you can see Ash is enjoying himself in our storage thingy.   :) love that dude.   

the latest organizational/motivational wonder in our lives...

So there have been major changes in the Kven household.  Thing 2 was having difficulty going to preschool.  he has autism, and at home requires 1 on 1 support.  the thought of keeping him home had not even crossed my radar as a possiblity, however, it was clear he needed it and after much discussion and prayer that it was what needed to be done.  And i have to say, though we still have some issues- like how to make dr. appointments and therapy appts. for the other kids happen, for example, our day to day life has been going quite well.  So anyway, i've been gradually shifting us toward more independent work, the plan being that if need be, all the work they really HAVE to do, could be independent.  Then i'll jump in when i can and do read alouds as Asher allows.

Well, while perusing the Well trained mind board yesterday I came across a post asking for little things that her kiddos could do that were educational to kill time.  That made me go hmmm.... and i came up with a vision- a new way to schedule that might actually work!   So i put together these folders.  Theyre these snap poly folders that you can get for a great price at target

i got on the computer and made a daily schedule that ended up looking like this.  the left column has the daily list of things that need to get done, then the bottom section has their main school work (which doesn't include dear time and any group stuff we do together- that we'll just do on the fly)   Then on the right is where they get to choose 3 items each day to do- the next day they chose 3 different items.  and so on.  here's one of them, completed! 

Isn't it pretty?? i'm so psyched that i figured out how to do colored shapes in word!! :)   Then i put them in a page protector, taped it on to the poly snap  folder that had any supplies they would need in there, and they can check off daily with a dry erase marker what they do!! 

I just had to post super quick, since i just had a second but i'm so psyched to not only START something cool but to FINISH it :)  

Ta Ta!

Rebecca

Easy Peasy Homeschooling- and panning for gold!

So, i mentioned in the last post that I've had the older kids working on a new to us curriculum, called Easy Peasy Homeschooling  I thought i'd update on how its going, and the answer is WONDERFULLY.  I am trying to figure out how to include more of science and history so we can move through year 4 faster, since we just started in Jan, and with busy-ness, sickness vacation for Grandpa's visit and a number of other things, we've only gotten through day 5! aak! anyway, that will be changing  I'm thinking of having them double up on days and do whatever they can with their time they have, and then move on to the next day, at least on days when we can pull of a full day of school.  I'll do a bit less reading aloud on those days and they can use their DEAR time to do at least some of their school reading which i'm working on adding to kindles (the curriculum includes books in public domain but i'd prefer they not read their chapters right off the computer, other than just short segments, games etc)  Then we'll school through most of the summer and finish where we end up.  Next year we WILL be starting Ancient history, we've dragged on far too long with American history.  

My plan is to go through the EPH curriculum and figure out the topics being studied, then we can add in resources as we wish, i'm also going to add in younger resources for the youngers, or i could just make my life easier and check the younger kiddos link to the EPH first,  which I think i'll do.

OH, just so you know, if you aren't a facebook friend of mine, i posted this last night,

Rebecca Kvenvolden

Sunday, January 27 at 5:28pm (16 hours ago) near Federal Way

If you are a homeschooler, i cannot recommend this site enough! You know how there's a bazillion amazing free resources online but you put them into pinterest folders and never actually use them? well she gathered up all these resources and put them together into one cohesive curriculum! its REALLY good. Right now my 6th and 8th grader are working together on level 6 and its going REALLY well.

 And i absolutely MEANT it.  Good stuff! What i love BEST about the Easy Peasy Homeschooling is that you can allow your children to work independently and interject yourself into the picture when time allows, which for me right now, is PERFECT.   I really prefer to do our Bible/science/history together, but there are times when that's hard, so if i just have us do our devotions and Bible together and then send them on their way to do school together and ideally read aloud to them a little later, its still a good school day!  

If you want to try the EPH curriculum, i HIGHLY recommend you watch the video, in the How to use section, here's a link http://allinonehomeschool.wordpress.com/how-to-use-this-curriculum/  it helped me understand it much easier.  There's so many options that it can be a bit confusing at first but its well worth it.  My goal is to add in additional literature and hands on activities as time permits.  To that end, i worked last night on developing a list of what would be covered on each day-  we do 4 days a week so i can have a PRETTY good idea when we'll hit each topic.  IF the doubling up plan works, that would change it. we'll see!  anyhow here's a picture of that 

So this morning we started right off with history, missed Devotions, OOPS, and dove right in.  We read the last chapter of Story of the world volume 3 and learned about how the California gold rush came about, and then went to the Easy Peasy Homeschool Level 3 history, and found gold rush on day 122 on, and we used some of the web resources there.  Then we took our Hands and Hearts gold panning part of the westward expansion history kit, which we'd partially used in previous history cycles but never did get to THIS project, and took it outside to pan for gold! 

It was a BLAST! everyone was super into it, and it was enlightening too- we'd learned that the President had announced that Gold had been found, to the whole country on December 5th, and our weather now, is pretty similar to northern California weather in December, so it was almost accurate.. of course the kids weren't up to their knees in river water or anything, and they did get tired of being in the cold, with wet hands after about 10 minutes, so it sort of drove home the point that way :) 

They found all 8 of the little gold balls that came in the dirt in the kit, but proceeded to lose one once inside the house, then Elliott lost another, so we have a net total of 6 of the 8 pellets  

We also thought it would be fun to try and hammer out the gold to see if it would flatten, but as soon as the hammer started chipping at the step, i vetoed that experiment.  It dented the ball but didn't really flatten it.  

Then they took turns looking at the gold through a hand lens and comparing it to iron pyrite (fools gold)  they were NOT especially impressed with the gold- they found the pyrite to be much prettier!  

All in all, it was a fun experiment and well worth our time.  I think i'm going to have them get back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, and offer the 2 historical fiction books i have on this topic for optional reading during dear time if they'd like to learn a bit about the Yukon Gold rush. 

A quick glimpse of one moment in the first day of winter quarter

I think i'll post more "snapshot" like posts, in hope of actually DOING it.  time has been tight and i've been super, super busy lately... here's what's going on with us.   Much has changed this year, we are trying a bunch of new things, Before five in a row (elliott Leif) Five in a row (annabeth, Leif)  and easy peasy homeschool (Nik, chloe, Annabeth, MAYBE Leif)

Leif, Elliott and I just finished up working on our "before five in a row" reading "a carrot seed" We read the book, discussed the story, the plot, the moral, and today we focused on the art of the book. 

Chloe just finished sewing her owl, below, and finishing her easy peasy school, and is getting ready to work on her Saxon math- above, one of the few curricula which stayed the SAME for us! 

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Nik, below is working on his easy peasy homeschool.

Annabeth is working on her triangle sentences/word maps for her therapy that her therapist is wanting her to work on for her learning disability issues. 

That's it! more to come later, but my computer is slow and its time to pick ash up from the bus!