It's been a while since I posted but we have been enjoying the Christmas season.  We took a couple weeks off from school to focus on Christmas and so we would have time to do some fun activities together.  Let me just apologize now for all the many pictures in this post.

 

The kids made horse cookies for Mark, the horse they ride during their lessons.  They were mostly oats, carrots and molasses.  Mark seemed to really enjoy them.  The kids certainly enjoyed making them.

 

They were very sticky to roll and put on the cookie sheet to cook.

Austin and Adelaide made a few Christmas crafts.  The first one was this very simple Christmas tree decorated with buttons.

They also made these 'stain glass' Nativity scenes.

Their favorite craft this month was these toy soldiers out of a popsicle stick.  They were able to paint them all on their own and they turned out really cute.

Sorry this is sideways but the bottom one is Austin's and the top one is Adelaide's.  I added the face but they painted the rest.  We used the sponge part of a sponge paint brush for the hats.

 

The kids also made a gingerbread house.  It was a very serious undertaking.

It won't win any contests, but it's still standing and they enjoyed making it.

We also celebrated Gavin's 10th birthday!

He had a Carolina Panthers cookie cake.

Happy Birthday Gavin!

That has been our December.  The kids are very excited to celebrate Christmas tomorrow!



We've been wrapping up the semester this last couple of weeks.  We will still do school the first couple weeks of December but we will have light days to make room for Christmas activities.

 

A few weeks ago we went to the library to listen to a man speak who had been observing a pair of Great Horned Owls for fifteen years.  He had some wonderful pictures and videos of the owls and we learned a lot about them.  The kids immediately wanted to learn more so we checked out some books about owls and read them at home.  Then we decided to draw a picture of a Great Horned Owl in our nature journals.  We followed some step by step directions I found on the Internet to draw our owls.  Since we have also been studying Lewis and Clark's journey across the west, we decided to blend the two subjects in our journals.  After the boys finished their owls (which we spent several days on), they wrote down facts about their owls in the margins around the owl just like in Lewis and Clark's journals.  We found some great pictures of their actual journal pages online.

 

Here is Adelaide's owl.  I was very impressed with her owl.  It's hard to see beneath the coloring she did but she followed the directions really well and had a great looking owl.  She even 'wrote' on the sides.

This is Gavin's owl.

This is Austin's owl.

We are almost finished with our Anatomy study.  We have one week left in our book.  We will be studying birds in the spring semester.  We are finishing up our reading about the War of 1812.  We haven't done any kind of crafts or activities for the War of 1812.

For the next few weeks we will be studying the paintings of Mary Cassatt.  On Monday we discussed some of her paintings and focused on how people were dressed and the patterns she used for their clothes and surroundings.  Then the boys worked on making plaid hats since each of the ladies in the paintings was wearing a hat.  I brought out some plaid shirts and we talked about how plaid was designed with patterns and then the boys went to work designing their hats.

 

Then they glued a silhouette head into their art books and added the hat on top.

This is Austin's plaid hat.

And this is Gavin's hat.

We continued working on our Lewis and Clark discovery posters this week.  We spent one day adding plants and one day adding animals.  The boys glued on the pictures I had copied from the computer then added the common name and Latin name to identify the picture.

In science we learned about the five senses.  We did an experiment (I don't think it was too accurate because the boys were very excited about it) where we blindfolded Austin and Gavin helped him smell, then taste different items I had picked out.

 

We did another experiment where we blindfolded someone and then I went to different places and hit a plastic bottle.  The blindfolded person then had to point to where I was.  Then the blindfolded person covered one ear and we tried it again.  The boys learned that we need both ears to accurately determine where a noise is coming from.

 

Here are pictures of our final day working on our Lewis and Clark posters.

And here are the final posters.  I made them label in pencil since they still make a lot of mistakes so you can't see it but they are labelled.