November 23-27

In preparation for Thanksgiving the next week, we spent a portion of Saturday cleaning. The twins have become rather pro at cleaning the bathroom!

We had homemade poutine for supper as well! One of the main foods I miss living down here. How can you go wrong with fries, gravy and cheese??

We had our usual Sunday School on Sunday… with the added excitement of have the twins take on SPEAKING parts in the Christmas pageant! So we have songs to learn AND some dialogue. Quite the ambitious addition to our homeschooling days.

The week of Thanksgiving started with the usual day of school. Heavy on the Thanksgiving theme. After all, Trinity REALLY loves a good themed worksheet!

Thanks to Activity Village

With a cornucopia craft as well. This is included in the reference blog post I will post with our completion. Just a two page print out where we coloured the horn and then the fruits and veg. The added suggestion was to have something we are thankful for on each piece of food but with how many activities we have done with the same idea we chose to just colour and glue.

We had time for tv together time…

AND making little decorative hats with Nana. yarn and rings of toilet paper rolls! Adorable!!

The first time…

And then another day… we actually made these over the span of a week!

We continued our Thanksgiving theme with storytime. A Louisa May Alcott story that has included an interesting apple based recipe we may need to try one day.

Trinity and Emanuel STARTED a craft with Daddy that uses coffee filters to make the tail of a turkey. You draw on it with markers and then wet them down to spread the ink.

Daddy also assisted in the assembly of our long awaited Grocery Unit. So much gluing and pasting and a little singing of the song we learned. You can see our resources and links on our companion blog entry HERE.

Of course we had to continue our Minnesota learning… the state bird is the common loon!!

There was another Thanksgiving book… though this one was more of a Halloween/Thanksgiving idea. It was in the Thanksgiving section at the library though and the kids really enjoyed it!

I think my days rather jumbled together here… but those were  the high points of our Thanksgiving week up to… well… the day! With a completed lapbook under our belt we ended our learning before Thanksgiving on a high note, that is for sure!

November 29-30

After Santa where can you go but… well… comfortable. We of course had to get to work on pictures in our journals about the visit with Santa…

Don’t forget our last turkey!

And then there was the final push to complete Thanksgiving. I think with meeting Santa for the first time all thoughts were firmly placed on Christmas though. Of course first the kids HAD TO play UNO with Nana! A brand new deck of the cards made its way into the house and the kids were in heaven!!

UNO!

Zander and Gavin FINALLY finished there Where I am books I had found online… this one goes from I am… to This is my world. For each level they draw the location going all the way up to the earth. It was a fun way to remember our country, state, etc information.

A great illustration as to how the world just keeps on getting bigger and bigger

Nana and Baba came home Wednesday night from their Gabriella and Zachary visit with a large Little People farm set. I thought Echo would just go to pieces in joy in the morning!!!

LITTLE PEOPLE!

Thursday the twins  took advantage of the quickly melting snow and created a snow man and some sort of small snow fort. They are so confused by the lack of snow.

Working with what is there

Wild Kratts has been a huge help with their animal centered episodes. Here are two pages the 3 boys have created lately!

Deep Sea Life

Spider Silk

Again now a HUGE busy day… BUT we have news… Karyn is coming to visit in January… I am beyond excited!!!!!

I can’t remember if I shared the Gecko one but I love the work they put into these!

November 13-14

Another round of thankful children… or at least I HOPE this is helping them stop and realize how much they DO have to be thankful for! I know that through all the ups and downs of the past 3+ years I am much more appreciative of what I DO have!

Trinity: my family

Emanuel: for the beach

Gavin: for Jesus dying for us

Zander: Having clothes to wear so I don’t have to be naked outside.

That turkey’s tail is growing

We are having minor issues with the kids being up before us and being loud! I tried having them finish their word searches (the twins) that were left over from the day before and that seems to be helping. I think we need a special box of early morning activities to let the early risers in the family keep busy and those who need a little more sleep (like the 3rd man out in the bedroom from time to time) get it. The little ones did enjoy colouring at the blue table after breakfast though! Emanuel got his Thanksgiving feel on with these colouring pages HERE.

Colouring time

We are without colour toner so unable to do the last part of the website we have been working from HERE. But, we did talk about what we know for sure and what is important to share with people about the event. I may go back and print out the last assignment as a group once we DO have toner.

The weather is still gorgeous and fall like here for the most part so of course there was time for the boys to run outside while the girls coloured with their Colour Wonder paper. Echo loves sitting with her big sister!

Spending time together

Each day brings new thought on what there is to be thankful for! and Wednesday was no exception…

Zander: the zebras and lions

Gavin: the earth

Emanuel: Mommy

Trinity: seashells because they are my favourite

The turkey is a family favourite

Emanuel got to open his newest Little Passports on Wednesday. Now the race is on to supplement it with some more information on Brazil. I have some links I have found to share when we cover this mini unit.

We did ANOTHER advanced copy kids’ review. This one a great story in a series about teddy bears. You can read the kids’ thoughts HERE. I went back to Netgalley and requested another stack of children’s books. A couple were instant download so keep an eye peeled, as long as I have them we will post one a day! Anything we can do to foster reading, or listening to stories is a total bonus for us! In fact, Gavin is my top reader this month and determined to earn his November pizza coupon!

Working hard

Don’t forget our poem… a daily practice has us all memorizing and nearly ready to record!

So cute

Ken had borrowed a video about NASA and the early space program from Cory so we had the kids watch a portion of it together. The plan is for them to do a creative and related project with Ken the following week!

Movie time

So all in all a good 2 days. With the normal ups and downs of course!!

Echo escorting Pocoyo and Hello Kitty on their date (we think permission was gotten from the Groovy Girls to use their car!)