October 12-13

And so our week, that started so oddly with a trip to an Urgent Care facility ended rather quietly… We took a light day with school as the kids simply were not focused, but I was determined to finish our basics. In what is now our dinosaur pattern, today was a drawing day and draw Emanuel did. First we worked out the name of the dinosaurs we have covered to date!

1. Coelophysis
2. Xiaosaurus
3. Nodosaurus
4. Triceratops
5. Deinoychus
6. Quetzalcoatlus
7. Tyrannosaurus
8. Sauroposeidon

So far we have actually gone 50/50 on our herbivores and carnivores and I DO promise that each of these dinosaurs WILL end up on the blog. I am double posting for a while just to get them up and out. I have linked everything we looked at and included our videos of choice. So, hopefully they will come in handy for other people! 

Drawing those herbivores

Very creative

We have finished our Halloween book… it covered the origins of a lot of the things we do and ways we celebrate the season. Really a great read though I am not sure the boys took too much from it. It is called The Story of Halloween by Carol Greene. 

Gavin finally caught a break and was able to do his SCARY Jack-o-lantern (whose history we traced back to Ireland and a bad man name Jack) off of our absolutely favourite art instruction site Art For Kids. You can find them HERE. Remember to join their Facebook site! 

Pumpkin patch

We have continued our work on the poem of the week. I think ALL of the boys will be ready to debut it on Monday! So watch for the video. Emanuel was absolutely excited to get a chance to learn it with the twins. 

Gavin wrote HIS spelling test again, and this week was a straight across 100%!!!

PROUD!

Saturday was a full day – we had not only our kids and Nana and Baba but ALSO the cousins (Gabriella and Zachary). They got here late Friday night when the kids were already in bed so in the morning it was happiness overload… inside, outside, up in trees… noise and laughter and tons of fun going on!

TREES

So Ken and I snuck out (sanctioned by Nana and Baba of course)… our first time out just the TWO of us in AGES. A definite necessary recharge! We drove a bit, walked through Jo-Ann’s a bit AND spent quality time just talking, holding hands and being together. I have missed our time together, when we left Canada we left behind a rather amazing network of friends and family who were often willing to take over the supervising of the minions. 

See the snood!

It was nice to not have to be somewhere at some time and still have the kids in the middle of a playdate! A movie and popcorn later and the day was over and the kids in bed. A success! AND Trinity’s owey is looking GREAT! YAY!

Bitty Baby

Emanuel picked a real tough one this time! Apparently the Nodosaurus is a sneaky dinosaur, not only is it only in North America but only two incomplete skeletons have been found and those AGES ago. Although THREE places are listed when you read up on it. As well, no skulls found! Add to that VERY few images and the fact that more than a couple of my new favourite dino websites did NOT cover this dinosaur and it was rather slim pickings. Even with these difficulties I DO have some information to share as well as a video. Don’t get me wrong, it is a VERY simple video, just two girls reading info about the dinosaur but Emanuel was excited to have something to watch however brief!

Now onto the nitty gritty… the links for the (limited) information we found. About.com had a little blurb in their herbivorous dinosaurs section right HERE. I rather preferred this site’s chapter format with basically an honest – we really don’t know much – HERE. Wiki had a short article HERE. And as usual, EnchantedLearning had something HERE (I REALLY miss my subscription with all those print out privileges!!!). Coloringpages101 had the best image for colouring HERE. Emanuel was rather impressed by the pattern the armour on this dinosaur. KidsDinos.com had something for us under their Cretaceous period list HERE. This plant eating 4 legged (5 toed??) dinosaur was often compared to a hedgehog in the literature due to its inability to fight back (no club on tail) and rather hunched down and did the hedgehog thing – no soft bits exposed. I had to make Emanuel his own fact page and we printed out the skeleton image on the Wiki article. 

Terrific picture

October 1-2

Mondays are always a bit of a minor struggle… after all we have been PACKING our weekends full of fun. And with the friends in school and the job hunt on weekdays we feel our difference between weekends and weekdays more than ever. So we hit the ground running, right into spelling, book work and colouring. Echo is especially interested in having her own page or colouring book while everyone else is working.

Baby at work

Of course we had the difficult dinosaur NODOSAURUS… with an under the weather Emanuel (I will have those links etc on another post), and Trinity had her usual book. However, Trinity was over the moon with the chance to work on one of the new workbooks Gammie sent us. She sat down and traced the patterns with great gusto. I love it when she gets motivated.

Ready to go

We officially started our Pizza Hut sponsored reading program with a colouring sheet and a book each. We lucked out, one of the set of pictures uses a family favourite – the ring-tailed lemur. Even Echo had a picture to colour. 

All 5 with their pictures

The boys are working on their personal projects, Gavin in his cross stitching and Zander colouring in the new books. With a new box of craft supplies from a friend of a friend on Facebook I am hoping to get them both into some new art projects! I am very happy to have new supplies to add to our slowly growing supply. Of course as part of a thank you we HAVE TO make a card… and then there is the letters and thank you pictures for Gammie… we have had a slow down on our pen pal responses so I am thinking we will send out some letters to some of our families to kick start in case  of missing mail!

So thankful

Tuesday was an at home day as well… we covered the basics – spelling, reading (gotta get those books in to get pizzas), a little math for one, some colouring for another… all in all we were WAY productive. Our new favourite art site added ANOTHER how to… so of course all work stopped so Gavin could make his attempt at drawing a bat according to the (once again) amazing instructions!

Bat with an original ghost

Surprisingly ZANDER then wanted to have a go!!! And with his lower concentration it was HUGE that he could follow through and really create with success… what a confidence booster! And then to top it off… Gavin created his own step by step instructions to draw a cow!

Step by step cow

Then to fill the time we decided to get creative on a smaller scale… black construction paper and white crayons! Spoooooky pictures for fall and Halloween! Even Echo sat down and had a go!

Zander and littles

Echo’s

We actually had a series of Gavin creativity during the beginning of the week… there was his AMAZING chalk creation with a dragon…

Amazing chalk image

His leafy creation… using nothing but the stems of the leaves to hold it all  together…

Leaves

And his outdoor table for Trinity…

Table for 2?

With Emanuel just LOVING the dinos and Trinity diving head first into the new workbook that just leaves a passion for Zander…

Creativity