Relaxing, yet learning...

Gabriel and Jeremiah.

I don't post much and this will be my goal for the new year, I think it will be so cool to keep sort of a journal for us to have and share online.

This past month we made a routine with the work boxes and now that I have the system down and the children understand and love it. We are just relaxing.

We set up a pool and they are having long days enjoying the water. At the same time we keep learning but in a totally different way. We have our garden and is great to find what kind of new fruit or veggie will be ready for picking, is nice to get to plant something new too and watch the plants peek out of the ground and grow into mature plants.
We've done a load of landscaping work and the kids haven't miss one little bit, they have been helping us along the way.
Laundry is usually a fun thing (for me anyways) to get them to help with and learn how to sort the colors or the towels and then carry to the laundry area and get it going.
This past month Angie (now 7) got her first daily chore, now she empties the dishwasher every day. I like that she is learning to do her part to keep things in place.

Books from the library keep coming every week and so is fun to get new interesting things to read. Our subscription to little passport is really fun, they play travel the world almost everyday and get to use the map and the goodies that we get every month.

Another thing they love to do and learn more is about our business, they keep pretending to be calling stores or receiving stores with huge orders to fill in. Then they have to (pretend) call all of our suppliers and order things before our inventory runs out. lol!

I love my children! I love my Family! Thank you Lord!

Workbox once again.

Today we started the workbox system once again. The kids loved it and did all of their work, they were very motivated to finish their tasks knowing what was next.

I found some wonderful fun activities at Totally tots!


Daddy was very impressed with the new system and will work on some ways to help me perfect it, I have a problem with the Velcro stickers staying in place, I tried making the box numbers and strips in a magnet strip but that didn't work either, so we will try something new with dad's help.


It was so nice to have them happily finish all of their work and have so much time left to do whatever they wanted to.

More about our day<=

A closer look at caterpillars.

This summer we found many little bugs in our garden, some weird looking, some colorful and some scary and even some smelly ones. We picked a few caterpillars and put it in the house in jars, it takes a little time, changing the leaves every single day and cleaning the poopy out, I decided to let go of 3 of the jars and release the little poopers and we kept just one for study. This picture was taken the day before we had Daniel when we got home from dinner out the we found this.

I helped Angie and Gabriel release the butterfly and we all said goodbye to our little friend.

Sunday Morning, everyone all cozy up!

Angie still sleeping in her bottom bunk fort.

She is supposed to sleep on the top, Gabriel the bottom and mommy is supposed to sleep with daddy, instead they both end up on top of mommy's arms in the bottom bunk, ouch! Can you see the mix of bedding, lol!

Since Angie is still sleeping, I'll wait quietly in MY BOX!

Working in the garden.

Working hard this weekend. Gabriel just loves to mimic his father.



Here he is observing.




Our compost. Angie had hear the word compost on TV, but she didn't know what this was until now, this is what she tells me :).




Their favorite part of working in the garden is to get to pick a few strawberries everyday.

Resourse links.

http://www.starfall.com/ This is a fantastic site for kids to learn the alphabet and to read, with print outs and online books.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/ We print out school work almost everyday from this place, from ABC to reading, math, geography and more.
http://www.atozphonics.com/support-files/satinp.pdf
I haven't tried this yet, but want to place a bookmark here, is a book with first steps to reading with print out flash cards.
http://www.yourchildlearns.com/ Maps and more maps. http://www.yourchildlearns.com/letters/make-a-town.html Patterns to make houses and buildings, very cool for crafts and recycling cardboard. http://www.adaycare.com/PreschoolCurriculumSamplesDL.html Preschool activities. http://mybiblecoloringpages.org/ Bible coloring pages. Full of links.
http://www.montessorimom.com/ Montessori teaching ideas.
http://www.123certificates.com/ Print out certificates.
http://www.funfonix.com/worksheets/spelling.php Phonics flash card maker.
http://www.christianpreschoolprintables.com/ the name says it all, great biblical work for preschoolers.

Angelica's Family Tree.

This was something we were supposed to do weeks ago. we got caught up doing much hand writing and learning to read (still working on that).





Angie really wanted to do this today, she put her little touches to the tree.
Our board is a little bear now since we cleaned it up some days ago.

She wanted a leaf for Jesus, so I ask her to stick it in the trunk because he comes before any of us. Also at the top is our little Baby Angel and our baby in the making, we don't know what is going to be so she draw a boy and a girl.