"E" week time!

"E" week is up and it's mostly Elephants and Eggs because those are short E sounds, but my oldest helped draw Elsa too and gave me a few more ideas for the chalk board. 

I started with the Elephant and the 'e' egg and just kept adding stuff till I thought of "Encyclopedia" and how I could make it all look like they were coming out of the Encyclopedia.  Pretty happy with how it turned out!  The chalk boards take a few hours each to do, but I think the girls really like them and they are quite memorable.  Perhaps I'll print out the pictures and make a book with them. :)

Before I made my elephant my 6 year old did her own chalk drawing of one!  I think it's adorable.

The pictures are out of order, but this is the final product of this fabulous puzzle globe.  You can find it here.

Pointing to about where we live in TX.

Also, I have to say, when we were reading a missionary story I was happy to see my oldest get excited about asking where the story took place and asked if I could show her on the globe.  :)

Oh, and I should share that book too! 

"Ian and the gigantic leafy obstacle" is a missionary story (my girls were super impressed at hearing that it was a TRUE story) and is about how God uses an elephant to answer a prayer, but there's a bit more to it than that.  It's really quite well told though I had to clarify a few things as the wording was a bit grown up in places.

Half way through at this point they wanted to put something inside of it and Lily picked a picture of her favorite Uncle who's more like an older cousin or big brother to her and then we wrote a note of all the things we are thankful for and put it in.

The puzzle starts in Antarctica and only has 180 pieces... if your kids are older and you like this idea you can find some that have over 500 pieces!

I don't know how the other puzzles compare but this one was super sturdy plastic and was numbered with arrows so we could easily put it together on the wrong side and then keep flipping it over to see what we were making.

One of our library books for "E" week was this one by Dr Seuss.  And to go along with the idea of funny scrambled eggs we put fun stuff in ours too!  Green sprinkles, chocolate shavings, and vanilla extract were the first attempt.  It actually wasn't bad.. sort of like french toast because it was sweeter eggs.  They looked funny of course!

We kicked off "E" week with a visit to the zoo and a "keeper encounter" with lots of fun info about the Elephants. 

Some interesting facts about Elephants--  Adult male elephants live on their own and females live in a group with young ones.  One elephant can poop up to 80 lbs in a single day (support your zoo workers because they have to clean that up!)  Elephants trumpet of course, but they also communicate with sounds too low for humans to hear and they also can feel vibrations in the ground.

Another book to recommend is this one.  I got it used on amazon last year and it is the story of a young elephant that has a super memory (even better than most elephants) and he thinks of the good things that he's learned which is great (has a few facts about elephants in the story) but one day when he's playing with his big brother and sister his brother pushes him down in the water and mud and was too rough on him during play time.  The little elephant says that his brother is bad and decides that he won't forget what his brother did because he's the elephant with the super memory.  He grows thin and sad and one day the grandmother elephant that is in charge asks him what is going on and when he tells her she says, "you have forgotten what is most important, and you and he are brothers." (That's not an exact quote, but it's close.)  I feel like I'm always having to deal with fights of some kind, but it IS getting better and stories like this do help.

Sitting on a little statue.  So cute.

Another fun project was using this cookie cutter (That I got during "B" week I think) to cut out some brownies (I have a fabulous gf recipe for them!) and decorate the elephants!

 I got the idea for this sort of decorating when I read this book to the girls "Elmer's Special Day" Where in Elmer (the colorful one) paints himself like a normal elephant color and all the other animals paint themselves all different ways and have a parade.  Even animals that aren't elephants joined in, but they just wore elephant masks.  Anyway, it was a cute story and a great way to have some fun with our elephants.

This was the Daddy's decorated elephant.  He said afterward how he'd put a bit too much frosting on it.

This was Grammy's elephant.  It was really fun that she got to do this with us too!  We had dessert right before dinner.

The three year old decided to paint hers all blue.  Look at that crazy grin.

The middle one working the colors while the Daddy stuffs his face.  ;)

My oldest made a whole scene with frosting on her plate and colored her elephant as close to how Elmer himself looked as possible.  Totally like her to strive for excellence like that!

This one was mine... less frosting because the brownies didn't need it!

After reading some books about elephant facts and after watching a Wild Kratts about Elephants my oldest set to work making a beeswax model of an elephant.  The only thing I helped her with was the eye position as they just needed to be a bit more on the sides of the elephants head to be realistic.

The realistic elephant meets the "melephant"-- she'd created that one a while back after watching "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2"  It's a watermelon/elephant in case you wondered.  ;)

And winding down "E" week we decided to do another trip to the zoo.  No one was taking pictures here so we jumped in for a shot.

The girls wanted me to take a picture of them in the egg for "E" week too.

And they got to ride the carousel 3 times before we left!  I asked them to ride the elephant and dinosaur so I could take this picture.  They were super sweet how they held hands.  I'm so glad they are such good friends.  :)

I still have one more day that we'll being working on "E" things.  Just finishing up some library books and I'll have them do some copy work from the chalk board into their books.

"D" is for Dragon!

And here's our chalk board for "D" week.  You should probably know that I get my ideas for the drawings from alphabet books and kids dictionaries.  The girls come up with ideas for us to do as well (like the dew drops), and the only thing we ended up changing on this board is that the "daring dude" became "daring daddy" - so that was pretty fun.  ;)  My oldest especially is loving how the shapes of the letters are the things as well.  Guess who will ALWAYS see a dragon and a daring dadddy when they see "D" and "d" .. yep.. all of us.  ;)

This is all kind of random.. we'll call it "doing stuff" because it doesn't really fit into the "d" category. 

During "D week" (which btw isn't really a literal week, but usually longer) we were helping my husbands Mom move into an apartment right near ours and his younger brother was staying with his Mom for a few weeks so that was fun to get to know the girls Uncle.  Most of the "D's" of "D week" were in watching Netflix shows about Dinosaurs and talking a LOT about Dinosaurs and creation and different theories. 

We'll call this "do you want a turtle?"  As that's what happened this morning when we got a knock on our door.  The maintenance guy at our apartment complex asked if our girls wanted a baby turtle that he found in the pool.

We just watched it for an hour or so and then let it go on the golf course right near us (The girls can squeeze through the fence to get to the creak in there.)  It pretty clearly wanted out, but was oh so cute to see!

The book pictured here "what really happened to the Dinosaurs" is a great way to talk to kids about dinosaurs from a Biblical perspective if that's important to you as it is to us. 

I enjoyed reading about new discoveries about Dinosaurs and seeing scientists putting the pieces together though it can get annoying how they continue to try to dismiss any evidence pointing to a flood or Biblical truths.   If you are like us, you want to teach your kids what the Bible says and what your family believes, but you also want them to be aware of what other people believe and be informed. What I chose to do with my girls is say that whenever we read something we need to compare it to what the Bible says, so as we read from their Encyclopedia we talked about what the Encyclopedia said very matter-of-factly and we asked the question "what does the Bible say?" and also other questions like "do they know that for sure or are they guessing?"  So, saying that Dinosaurs were around before people.. is that true?  No, because animals and people were created on the same day according to the Bible.  What did Dinosaurs look like or how did they live or how long ago did they live ect ect.  We can make educated guesses, but I wanted to teach my girls to not just blindly believe the things, but to search it out for themselves.  Look up Dinosaurs and the Bible if you want to search for more. 

Went to the zoo and happened to get to see this lizard that had Dragon in it's name!  And it's enough weeks later that I totally don't remember what it was called, but it was in the same family as the Komodo Dragon.

Not sure how this fits into "D" but you could say it was "do you want to spend your savings?"  And yes they did.  The littlest was super excited about the lolly pop.  ;)

And the middle one lost her second front tooth.  My families tradition was to put the tooth in salt water and our new tradition is to write a note to the tooth fairy.  The girls are totally digging the notes to the tooth fairy.  It's pretty cute. 

Making a Dessert for the girls Grammy and Uncle's birthday! 

I've never been naturally good at spelling and always couldn't remember which dessert or desert was the one you eat and the one with the sand.. so, this week I actually took the time to figure out how I could remember this.  I'm sure this seems silly to those of you who are naturally gifted with easily remembering how to spell words, but for those of you who are more like me perhaps this will be helpful for you too.  Okay, DESSERT is the one you eat because you want SECONDS hence the two "S's"... and of course I'd hope for less sand if I were crossing a desert.  And there you go.  ;)

And there you have "D week" which lasted at least 2 weeks but who's counting.  Like I said, most of what we did didn't photograph well, but it's a good overview anyway.

Oh, and I forgot to share one of the fun books we found for "D" week!  
I actually found this through Sonlight since I got a lot of their books to use around and about even though I don't use their teachers guide and do the whole shabang yet with them.  Oh, and I found My Father's Dragon on amazon for a dollar for the kindle version!  It's a super imaginative book and fun to read out loud to the kids. 

"C" is for "cow"

Our "C week" chalk board design.  In case you can't read music the song is Mary had a little Lamb... only we sang it "Mary had a little cow..."  I forgot to take a picture of the chalk board later when we'd added a bit more to it.  We added "chocolate chip cookies" with all the "C's" in that looking like partly eaten cookies.  This was fun.  :)

Other school stuff that didn't start with "C" was working on their hundreds chart.  I found it interesting how my girls went about filling in the slots.  The middle one (above) went row by row and the oldest one (below) added numbers down and over and all around to fill everything in.  Hey, whatever works!

Playing "Candy Land" and eating Candy Canes and then writing in their copy books some "C" words was a popular activity.

Also, everyone noted how "chocolate" does start with the letter "C" and "Chocolate chip cookie" is even more full of C's... so of course we had to make some (gluten free of course, if you want a pretty good gf mix go for Pamela's pancake mix and it will have a recipe on the back for Chocolate chip cookies as well.) 

The 6 year old was digging the part about biting the cookie till you got it into a "C" shape.

This is just some random school/activity time for the littlest while I help the older ones.  She gets to do her puzzles and other things that I've got in separate stacks on a shelf so they are easy to grab and then put away.

Doing her work box... and this bit of school is one of her favorites.

My oldest doing her workboxes and in one was a fun time of practicing her cats cradle string!  Here she's made cat whiskers (which seemed quite appropriate for "C" week.)

Ice Cream Cones were another favorite moment.  My girls loved finding words like this as we were out shopping, "Mommy, CONES starts with "C" can we get some?"  Yes.

A color by number cow that we decided to change the colors on!

The girls made some artistic cows with crowns

A few weeks down the road we finally finished the hundreds charts (noting that "chart" starts with C and talking a lot about the "CH" sound... chocolate was useful in this discussion of "CH")

They made cookies out of play dough while I read them a bunch of "C" related stories

Thought this poem was so cute that I wanted to share it

We jump around a bit depending on what comes up.  So with this writing project we talked about the "oo" sound in cookie.

And there you have it.  Slightly cooky, sometimes crunchy, continually crazy creative concoctions of our days during "C week"  ... of course there's much that I can't take pictures of, but I think this gives the general feeling of it all.