Surprise Surprise… I am almost current! Woo! Well, October is Halloween (of course), and Ken’s birthday (39 this year!) AND Canadian Thanksgiving (yup this Canadian girl still celebrates).

We started off the month with a trip to Home Depot.

Visited a pumpkin patch with a lovely group of friends.

We all got a little sunburned after so much time in the sun.

We visited the Schwartz family for a bonfire and shooting off of rockets.

Spent time at the Novak’s.

Anthony

And had them over to our place as well.

We met Chloe, Anthony’s girlfriend.

Enjoyed all the colours of fall.

We learned about bats and made our very own cave in the cabinet.

We found plenty of time to do crafts and worksheets and learn as best we could.

We celebrated Nathan’s birthday at a super fun trampoline place.

Sang in the choir at church.

We spent time at the YMCA – swimming, working out and club.

I crocheted whenever I could.

Early Christmas present for my sister in law – a cupcake blanket

Cowls

And we snuck out on the warm days.

Cleaning the van.

October was a lovely refocus of our time. Lots of friends and family and quiet celebrations (we had take out for Thanksgiving, nothing fancy).

Snoopy

Lovely hair by one of the girls who run cluby

So enjoy the photos and the memories as I work my way to current and we currently wrap up 2016.

Playing Magic

Doing her own hair.

Fishing for letters

Sneaking out for coffee at Caribou.

Sunset

Ready for dinner out

Beyond costumes and candy, trick or treating and jack-o-lanterns we decided to have a study of all things Halloween.

Lapbooks:

• For the younger two – Homeschool Helper Online’s free lapbook by JoAnn S. HERE
• For the twins I bought a lapbook off of Currclick “The History of Halloween” HERE

For our pumpkin section for the little ones we used worksheets from Mama’s Learning Corner HERE. There are different levels of complexity for the worksheets though we chose to do all 3 together. We used two different books for our life cycle research. A storybook called Pumpkin Cat by Anne Mortimer and then a section out of the book Exploring Autumn by Sandra Markle.

We used a long list of interesting and fun books:

• Halloween by Gail Gibbons (I used this book to have the twins try and pick out facts and ideas of interest as I read. A nice basic intro on Halloween)
• Halloween by Mari C. Schuh
• Halloween is… by Gail Gibbons
• The Halloween Book of Facts & Fun by Wendie Old
• National Geographic Kids Halloween by Laura Marsh
• Halloween by Natalie M. Rosinsky
• The Story of Halloween by Carol Greene
• Halloween and Day of the Dead (Traditions Around the World) by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Story Books:

• Halloween Sky Ride by Elizabeth Spurr
• All Hallows Eve: The Story of the Halloween Fairy by Lisa Sferlazza Johnson
• Alpha Oops! H is for Halloween by Alethea Kontis
• Katie’s Tricky Treat by Slade Stone (a great book that deals with peer pressure on Halloween)
• Trick or Treat, It’s Halloween by Linda Lowery
• Room on the Broom by Axel Scheffler
• Clifford’s First Halloween by Norman Bridwell
• H is for Haunted House by Tanya Lee Stone
• Spooky Beasts: Thunder and Lightning by Karen Wallace

Videos/movies:

• The Haunted History of Halloween by The History Channel (a little dry but some unexpectedly interesting facts, did you know the county of Anoka here in Minnesota is the Halloween Capital of the USA?)

For one of our lapbook activities I broke the kids up in pairs… one twin per little kid and they worked on defining some Halloween words. I used an online kid (mostly) friendly dictionary instead of straight Google. The littles typed the words in and the twins read them out and wrote out the definitions. You can find our choice HERE… Wordsmyth. I loved that I could pick the level of difficulty of the definitions. We chose beginner.

The littles also covered Spiders and Bats… We had two books – for bats: Bats by Gail Gibbons and for spiders: Spiders by Seymour Simon. The pictures in that one were a little too big for myself and Emanuel. Totally NOT fans of spiders but we managed! Since the life cycle of a spider can be a wee bit complicated I found a site that had a printable we could colour and glue into our books… from BlockPub.com HERE.

The 4 main festivals of Samhain were covered in the wiki page HERE. Though we did get our info from the small blurb on the Google search page, not the whole article.

Live Science had a great article on the history and origins of Halloween HERE.

The history of the term bonfire or BONEfire. Off of SuperBeefy.com HERE.

As always hunt on Activity Village by looking up Halloween for a lovely variety of resources HERE.

AND Education.com you can check out the file I had made for the sheets I have set aside to use over the last couple years HERE.

So I hope these are helpful! I know I will be referring back to this next year! 

For all of our Easter resources please refer to the blog entry titled “Easter Resources“.

April 1-2

Not emotional but educational… and more importantly – LAUNDRY!

Looks like an episode out of hoarding but it actually is a week and a half of laundry for 7!

We tricked/convinced the twins to watch half of the first load!

But first… MONDAY… April Fools was a non issue here… except for Anthony (god son) contacting a bunch of people with his joke and getting trouble with his mom. I don’t talk to the kids about it at this point. We have enough problems with behaviours right now, I would rather not tempt fate! BUT we did make our April poster… again talking about spring is still somewhat theoretic but we managed.

April

We started working on our Easter assembly only to RUN OUT of glue stick!!! WHAT??? I could have sworn that I had enough to last a while yet. Which means I probably do but have misplaced where I put them. So instead we started on Wild Kratts… 3 episodes!

Bats

Zebra

Firefly

The boys worked on copywork out of our Julie Andrews’ Treasury – The Easter Bunny by Rupert S. Holland.

Poetry

We also had some Easter games I picked up at the Dollar Tree.

Gaming together

Emanuel got a head start on the penguins with his own two page illustration.

Penguins at play

Tuesday was a Ken at work day, and the kids and I started right on the penguins with Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Again I am going to do the resource page at the end! This was Emanuel’s suggestion, he has always loved penguins best. We had some worksheets and a second book from the library… What’s in the Egg, Little Pip? by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman.

Cute little story

We had worksheets to accomplish…

Colour by words

Zander created his own little car ramp/jump for his remote control car.

Jump/ramp

This also marked the end of our reading program for the school year… one last round of pizzas!

YUM

Daddy also had a special picture waiting for him on his desk here at home at the end of the day!

Beautiful

And so our week has begun, as has April!

Colouring in the sunshine