This morning in our Bible study we confined on in our Bible study, in the chapter all about Noah.  After the tower of Babel incident and all the peoples scattered to different corners of the earth, the people who spoke Chinese were trying to come up with their alphabet.  Imagine not knowing how ti write or really knowing what sounds could go with which shapes.  An ancient Chinese man invented some symbols to help yell the story of Noah.   The first image on the left, is vessel, or container.  The middle symbol is eight….(eight people on the ark).  The last symbol is for mouth.  In most cultures the word mouth represents a person (like 8 mouths to feed).  This man put all the symbols together … BOAT!   BIG boat.  The the biggest boat he knew of.   Cool, right?

Having with photo editing.   We are going to the beach to ring in the new year!   Have a glorious one!

O don’t think anyone still comes here to check up on us.   It’s been over a year.  We’ve moved back to America and have been waiting out THIS year for my hubby to finish a year long tour in Korea.  I will write more about some interesting things we’ve done in homeschooling these last months and months , but for now I’ll leave ya with a couple cool pictures of our day playing hooky yesterday, at the beach. 

The kids are also doing a little copywork today, Irish style:

~May the road rise up to meet you.   May the wind always be at your back.  May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields.  And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of his hand.  – Irish blessing ~  

I love that quote… on my trip to Ireland with my hubby  we found a bunch of little encouraging cards you could purchase at touristy type places along the road.  I had to get a few. 

I think today we will also take our nature walk, and look for 4 leaf clovers.  I know they’re here!  My neighbor here in Germany gave me TWO for my birthday one year!   Happy St. Patricks Day!

so my kids have been successfully homeschooling using the Charlotte Mason Method.  i mean they’ve really changed a lot during the 8mths we’ve been doing things this way.  i love it, they love it, we’re all learning things T O G E T H E R which is so fun and sort of a first in our homeschooling career. 

so Charlotte Mason advocates using Living Books to teach your children, not Textbooks.  I’m still learning all about this style of homeschooling but what i’ve learned so far i think is so awsome.  its better explained HERE and HERE. 

well during all my studying and reading up, and then buying the 6 volumes myself , last summer, i read about Living Math.  i was way too freaked out to want to try it with my kids.  i’m HORRIBLE at math… really really bad.  that’s probably the only subject i worry that my kids wont get and then wont graduate, and just be failures , utter failures in life!!  aaaaaaaaack!  anyway, i recently found THIS POST about Living Math, and well my mind is slowly changing that it is possible for us to incorporate Living Math into our lives! 

i really do want it to be fun for these precious kiddies of mine, not humdrum, boring, or a pain, or a cause of stress and tears.  i don’t want them to hate it like i hated it in school.   soooooooooo…. believe it or not i found a used copy of the book talked about in the above post…. Family Math 

i’ve seen more than one homeschooling momma talk about this book, and i found this book at the used book store right after reading the post that was changing my mind…. i had to get it.  it was meant to be.  i cracked open the book and made up a few games right away…. AND i was green about it,  we didnt have any cardstock to print the games out on and so i printed them out on paper and glued them to cereal boxes…. yay for recyling. 

then i went through ALL of our homeschooling supplies and made up a basket of all of our math supplies for games:

we will continue to explore all the things listed in that living math post, all the blogs, books, and tools.  and continue to have fun with that book!  i’m not as scared anymore about this Living Math stuff.  how about you?

this little boy is working HARD … can you tell?  he actually does a really great job using scissors already, for only 3!

i like to celebrate these holidays with my children…. they make it special, and fun.  they always have the best ideas, and USUALLY follow through with them.  i guess we need to work on that a bit.   

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

these are couple pictures from last weekend … see Germany gets dumped with snow too!  huge amounts not seen in years!  well i remember one winter here when it snowed like this, and we almost didn’t make it home cause they weren’t letting anyone off base … thats how bad the roads got. 

i don’t know if anyone has ever heard of Homeschool Freebie of the Day but they’re just awesome!  i’ve found a plethora of wonderful resources from this site… including a Pirate Mystery!  i don’t know if you can still get this resource now, but we enjoyed it immensely!  just so happened we did this little fun activity on a day we were babysitting some friends so i think it made it even more fun for the kids.  they donned some scarves, colored their treasure maps, listened to the story of the Mysterious Pirate Pit, and even watched videos on the subject. 

one day last week the kids got up wanting to paint.  so instead of our usual morning routine in homeschooling i said “Sure!”  it was actually a really nice way to move into schooling , because after that we listened and read from this awesome book/cd:  Can You Hear It? by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The kids have really enjoyed it , especially the cat song.  and actually another wonderful homeschooling moment happened , BECAUSE of this book.  we were driving to church Sunday and listening to the classical music channel and a song came on… then the kids were kind of fussing and what not, and i said “wait!  did you hear that?  this sounds like a pirate song!”  and sure enough different sounds came into the song that sounded like clanging pirate swords, and guns shooting and cannons going off, and ships sailing the open sea.  little ocean even got into it and was the first to point out  “mom!  the pirates are shooting!” 

anyways we all recommend this resource! 

I’ve been away for a bit from this blog because of morning sickness and another deployment….  

but it’s all good… all of it!

We hope you have a Great Day!!

This is also helpfull…

I would say that reading Aesop’s Fables with Smiley, is one our easier,  fun time’s in the homeschooling day.  Papi and Ocean like sitting in on these readings sometimes….

Today we actually read from Arnold Lobels book Fables 

The main reason we read from this book occasionally and not This Version is two-fold.  I love Arnold Lobels illustrations, and he has a few different stories in his book.   You gotta shake things up when your homeschooling… and the point is to find somthing that fits YOUR child, and their  style of learning, their likes and dislikes. 

So we would recommend Arnold Lobel’s Fables.