We had a good Thanksgiving holiday.  Unfortunately, Austin got sick Thursday night and couldn't keep anything down until Saturday night.  He is feeling better now though.  Here's a couple pictures from Thanksgiving morning.  Gavin was watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Monet hatched!  And he was beautiful.  We fed him honey water for a couple days and then let him go.

We got our Christmas decorations and Christmas tree.  Gavin was actually helpful when it came to decorating this year.

Yesterday we did a little school.  Just reading, cursive handwriting and telling time to 5-minute intervals.  We read two books about teeth.  We are officially done with the human body in science.  We will be learning about weather starting in January.

Since Gavin has Awanas tonight, we celebrated Dad's birthday dinner a night early.  We had Italian sausage soup with salad and bread and a chocolate layer cake with chocolate frosting.  Austin, as always, was a big fan of the cake!

Here are the books we read.

I put up our 25 Days of Christmas tree this morning.  We will start tomorrow.  Today we will finish Colonial America so starting tomorrow we will just do a short phonics/cursive and maybe some math reviewing.  Then we will do our Christmas activity which will be different each day.  We won't have a poem, artist or composer this month but we will be listening to Christmas songs! 

You can't tell from the picture, but there is a number on the front of each ornament and an activity on the back.  Each day we will take that day's ornament off the tree and do whatever is on the back.  Hopefully this will be fun and not become cumbersome.  I tried to plan short/easy activities on days when I knew we had something else going on.

The boys got into their sister's hair bows this morning and were running around the house in them!

Here are the books we read today.

We are done with Colonial America!  We are still reading The Matchlock Gun before bed but will be done in a few days.  It's a true story about the French and Indian War.

Yesterday the boys and I read some more books about Colonial America but that was all we did for school.  The plan is to be done by the end of November because in December we are going to be learning about the history of Christmas traditions and doing our 25 Days of Christmas activities. 

Today I wasn't going to do anything for school so I could get some things ready for Thanksgiving but Gavin kept asking to do school so we read some more books about Colonial America.  While I was making our apple pie this morning, Gavin read a book to Austin and then read it to Jackson.  I found a few more books for him to read yesterday.  This one is about baseball and he really likes reading it.

While Gavin was reading I made a centerpiece for our table using a couple of the candles Gavin made.

And my apple pie looks good, we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if it tastes good!

Here are some of the books we have read.

"Kids in Colonial Times" by Lisa Wroble.

This is a really cute book about an alien who crashes into Earth and starts looking for healthy food to eat.

"A Day in the Life of a Colonial Cabinetmaker".

"A Day in the Life of a Colonial Glassblower".

"A Day in the Life of a Colonial Sea Captain" about a whaling ship.

This book is about an Englishmen who comes to America as an indentured servant.  It's a great book that has pictures of 18th century farm tools and equipment and describes how a farm was run.

We finished "The Wind in the Willows" last night.  Tonight we are going to start, "The Courage of Sarah Noble".



We are having an easy, relaxing week here (hopefully).  We aren't doing much school but we are catching up a bit on a couple things and still reading.  Yesterday Gavin finished his Picasso painting by gluing geometric shapes together to make a theater performer.

I've decided that from now on we are just going to do our artist-of-the-month work and not follow the Artistic Pursuits curriculum anymore.  I think the Artistic Pursuits is a good program that we may pick up again in a couple years, but for right now it is too technical for Gavin.  Art is not really his thing and learning about line, shape, etc. is not interesting for him.  However, he really enjoys learning about the artists and their styles and I think he's learning more through these projects then he is from the formal curriculum.

We've been reading chapters from 'Everyday Life in the Colonies'.  We read a chapter about making soap and a chapter about making candles and now we are reading about telling time without clocks, which of course talks about sundials which we learned about when we were learning about the sun so Gavin has enjoyed seeing how they were used everyday.  So our project was to make candles.  Our process was not nearly as difficult as the process in colonial times but we had fun anyway.  We were supposed to do it last week but didn't have time.

I melted blocks of wax in a pan while Gavin put wicks in old jam and canning jars.

Then Gavin put a little red food coloring in the wax.  It made a neat bubble effect but after it dried the bubbles streaked so it doesn't look that great.

While we waited for the wax to dry Gavin played with the Duplos.

Austin has been playing with the Playmobil knights.

Here is our finished candles.  We haven't tried to burn them yet.  I'll probably put them on the table at dinnertime.

Austin was napping while we made the candles but he wanted his picture taken with one when he saw me taking Gavin's picture with them.

We have read these books today.

This book was interesting because it focused more on the French settlement of Canada instead of British America.

We have read this book before and is a favorite.  It's a true story about a three-year-old girl in New Hampshire in the early 1700s (before the American Revolution) who got lost in the woods after wondering off her family's farm.  She was lost for four days before they found her but a black bear had been staying with her and protecting her.

And we read 'Milly and the Macy's Parade', a semi-true story about how the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade got started.  It's a cute story!