Letters From the Homefront

So it wasn't a very catchy title jumping out at you this time. There was just - not really a good way to bring a post about two totally different things together in to a one-liner description. :)  On top of music this year (another post) my three older children, LM, Hoss, and Miss Priss, are participating in a drama. Through their music teacher last May, we learned about a church not far from where we live that hosts a Christmas play every other year - A Christmas Carol.  LM is playing the part of the 'First Spirit', Hoss is (chuckle) Tiny Tim (he's anything but tiny, but they said he does the part wonderfully) and Miss Priss is one of the younger Cratchit daughters.  Here is LM with old Scrooge himself, working in one of their first rehearsals together. She is super excited to get this part - it's what she wanted, and it's also her first to ever be in a play like this. Unless you count those they come up with at home, which can't really com...

One day last week, while cleaning up from breakfast, Hoss discovered this guy sitting on the window outside of our kitchen.  Hoss grabbed a plastic food container, captured this guy, and brought him in. I think he figured he was probably not fully alive - which was a WRONG assumption, by the way - and wanted to preserve the body. He put a lid on it, and for a while this huge moth didn't move a hair ( pun intended ). LM took this time to observe every detail she could about the outward appearance, and recorded them for keeping.  (which my phone has apparently turned sideways for me) Then it got interesting, when all of a sudden - he woke up. Then, we heard nothing but frantic wing beating through this container. We let him go, but not before we would at least figure out that what we had found was a 'Waved Sphinx Moth'.  We finally found our moth here , where you can find a good description of this type of moth. They all loved to watch his movements, fee...

Although I wasn't present on the blog much over the summer, we actually have tried to keep up with some school related work. Or - maybe school related is too strong a word. We have been busy. That's probably more accurate. My husband, who was gone the first half of the year, is now back every other week thankfully. The down side is, it will probably continue that way for the rest of the year, unless he gets longer orders to go elsewhere. I know that it's hard to understand a schedule like that if you aren't married to a man who is #1 In the military or #2 Travels for work. A LOT.  We began school in August, slowly, as we tend to drift out of school sometime in May of every year and drift back in around the beginning/middle of August. At a time when everyone else is vacationing, we had already had our vacation ( back in February ) so we stayed busy at home base. I was very blessed this summer to acquire some new (to me) materials from the local Montessori school...

A story of a work that's old, made new for a child, revisited by another.  These pictures were taken almost 2 years ago. This was the first time Bug demonstrated mastery of numbers and counters.  Fast forward to this past week, new materials since then (the sandpaper numerals) and new child (Buddy Boy), work that's old (numbers and counters), and something blue - these nice $1 gems from the Dollar Store - the same in both the pictures above and below.  Here is Buddy Boy and his first presentation with numbers and counters. We are still working on visual recognition of the numbers, but I added this work in because I knew he would enjoy it, and that the visual representation would further aid him in seeing the difference. Without the  gems, 5 and 8 mine as well be the same - both have a circular motion in them, so seeing the gems helped.  He did fairly well with this work. I was with him the entire time, as he is far from mast...

If an unclear picture bothers you, I apologize in advance. I definitely never started blogging because I wanted to showcase my perfect picture taking abilities.  Here recently we have started something a little new. We are going to try it out over the next couple of months and see if it works well. You may have read in this post before about our expectation cards. They do work very well, but right now we are working with a little less space and a busy schedule - baseball, summer coming up, and I'm still the only adult here to get all the other non-school things done. So in an effort to streamline each day of school and be able to add in all the summer fun that is coming in a few weeks, we are going to one subject a day. For their expectation cards right now, I printed out a card for each day except Friday. Monday is math, Tuesday is grammar, Wednesday is language/spelling, and Thursday is history. I listed every thing that might apply to them now or in the future, and their jo...

You don't have to feel like super woman. In fact, chances are you - usually, you don't. That's okay, though. You don't have to. Your children already think you are.  With Love -  Amy@No Greater Honors

It's really awful. She's been neglecting her blog. No, that's not really what's happening. We are just so busy with school and life! The very thing I started a blog to cover has kept me busy! I just felt the need for myself (and anyone else that cares out there, but mostly for myself) to say that I am still loving being able to blog, and sometimes it just means playing catch up after a couple weeks.  I have found that trying to overly focus on catching pictures of everything we are doing can sometimes overshadow actually doing them. So I grab one if I can, but I want to make sure I keep my focus where it's supposed to be.  That, and the fact that I am starting to work on an at-home business (Plexus) and that has taken some time working that in to my schedule.  Sometimes, things get a little crazy around here....  But what I love is this: Lunch dates I love seeing the light come on when a child learns to read.  ...

Just an update of some of what we've been doing around here. MATH Bug finished the addition booklet I printed out for her to use with the addition finger chart. I also gave her the first presentation of commutative addition (modified because it's been a while since I gave it to Miss Priss, couldn't remember exactly the steps I  used last time, and I needed to give it immediately that day) with the printed bead bars. I am in the process of  making her a new version of the addition booklet, to practice identifying the commutative addition equations. \ Miss Priss was working on some pages she tore out of an old workbook we had eons ago, that had been hole-punched and put in her binder. She came to a page that had addition equations involving money and several addends. She was having a difficult time, but has been resistant to using the stamp game - I think it's becoming more time consuming than she feels is necessary. I showed her how it is possible to do the s...