B Is for Beautiful, Bountiful Blue Ridge Mountains

This week, we went on a wonderful field trip to a national park tucked away in our beautiful mountains. We saw breathtaking views. It seemed like we could see for miles.

We also saw many historic buildings that we were allowed to walk through. This three story barn, with its holes in the floor and loose boards, was just dilapidated enough to make it an interesting adventure for the kids.

We saw beautiful elk. They came right up to the car. They roam wild and free in the park.

We enjoyed several bubbling brooks. Some of the foot bridges were really bouncy.

We also saw big, big sycamore leaves. Look at the huge one that Anne is holding!

It was a very blessed day.

I am joining http://throughthecalmandthroughthestorm.blogspot.com/ for blogging through the alphabet.

Blessings, Dawn

Nature Study for Urban Homescoolers ~ Week 3

It was chilly today when we went on our walk. It truly felt like autumn. The sun was brilliant. What a relief to see the sun after days of gray clouds and rain. We really wanted to find some wildlife today. I thought this was going to be a very big challenge considering our urban study area. However, we saw a squirrel, a wheel bug, and a ladybug who really wanted to go home with us (look closely at the photo of the crayon).

We also wanted to find a dead tree to follow for a year. We saw two possibilities. One of the trees we are considering was hard to get to but had interesting fungi on it. The second tree was easier to reach and was filled with termite and other bug holes. The second tree was covered with poison vines. I am not sure which one we are going to follow.

We checked the river to see how it was doing after all the rain. It was still high but not near the banks. The water was moving much faster than last week.

Next, we went to see our tree. We are trying to figure out if it is a Mountain Maple or Red Maple. We may not know for sure until spring when it flowers. We took bark rubbings of the tree and also did free hand drawings of the bark. 

They added the drawings to their nature journals when we got home. It was another lovely nature study.

Blessings, Dawn

A Is for Advent

Advent begins Sunday, November 29. I love the weeks leading up to Christmas. This year we will be able to embrace Advent even more than usual because we will be taking a five week winter break from our lessons. I can't wait!

Books we will be reading ~ We have many Christmas books and I am sure we will read many others that are not on this list. However, these are the ones I plan to do activities around.

• America's Christmas Heritage
• Cole Family Christmas
• Kirsten's Surprise
• The Legend of St. Nicholas: A Story of Christmas Giving
• Too Many Tamales
• Christmas in the Trenches
• Silver Packages
• The Crippled Lamb

The kids' absolute favorites

Advent activities ~ We have some old and some new plans this year.

• Visiting the Gingerbread House Display at the Grove Park Inn
• Celebrating St. Nicholas Day on Dec 6
• Celebrating St. Lucia Day on Dec. 13
• Going to Return to Bethlehem, an annual Christmas story reenactment 
• Making Advent wreaths at church
• Going on a Christmas light drive-thru
• Visiting Christmas window displays downtown and having hot chocolate
• Going to the annual Christmas parade downtown
• Visiting the display, Christmas Creches from Around the World

Crafts and Baking ~

• Making snowflakes
• Making a wreath crown for Kirsten (Anne's American Girl Doll)
• Baking all sorts of cookies
• Making treats for others
• Making mason jar gifts

Charity ~ Charity is very important to our family. As the kids are getting older, there are so many hands-on opportunities for them. I know we will do some of our usual charities: Operation Christmas Child, the library book tree, Manna Food Bank tree, and Meals on Wheels gift boxes. However, I think we will be doing some new things this year. There are so many opportunities from "adopting" a teen off the gift tree at church, to packing lunches for the homeless and a host of ideas in between. We will announce soon our final choices.

The Nutcracker ~ Of course, our Advent season would not be complete without the kids performing in the Nutcracker. It completely takes over our lives for about two weeks of Advent. This is their sixth year of performing in the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. I can't believe it! Anne has four roles this year and Dean has three. It is going to be very busy back stage. They will be performing in four shows this year. Here are a few pictures from the past ~

2014

2013

2012

2011

2011

2010

I am joining Blogging Your Way Through the Alphabet with
http://throughthecalmandthroughthestorm.blogspot.com/ and http://www.adventureswithjude.com/

Blessings, Dawn

The Medieval Age ~ Part 2

This week was filled with some hard times. Our sweet old dog of 16 passed away at the very beginning of the week. We also had a host of dentist appointments (with fillings for me) and other smaller complications along the way. We made it to the end of the week and for that I am grateful. I thought we hadn't accomplished much. However, when I look back over our recorded lessons, we did accomplish lots of good stuff.

We accomplished reading, spelling, math, and CNN Student News each day. Then we got down to the cool history/science stuff!

Books we read this week ~ 

• A Street Through Time A 12,000-Year Walk Through History (We only read up through the Bubonic Plague)
• The Kingfisher Atlas of the Medieval World
• Good King Wenceslas with DVD as read by Jane Seymour and the Tabernacle Choir
• Crispin and the Cross of Lead
• You Wouldn't Want to Live Without Antibiotics

Activities we did this week ~

• During medieval times (and long before that), rosemary was used as a preservative for meats and other foods. So we explored the properties of rosemary and whether it was a good preservative or not. We cut a potato in half and placed rosemary on one slice and left the other alone for five hours. We wanted to see if the rosemary would help keep the potato white and slow down the process of color change. We thought the potato slices had changed color about equally, so the rosemary was not a good preservative, at least not for potatoes.

• We did a blindfolded smell test of sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley. The kids only struggled with identifying parsley, which we do not use often.

• We learned about and made Celtic Knots and Celtic designs.

• We learned more about medical care in medieval times. We learned about the use of maggots and how they are being brought back into use in hospitals today. We also learned about the antibiotic properties of moss and how clean moss can be packed into a wound to help keep infection away. We also learned about advances in surgery during the Middle Ages.

• We created our learning board for our medieval dinner. We will be hosting a medieval dinner with show and tell for family and friends in a week or so. 

• We read Good King Wenceslas and watched the DVD by the Tabernacle Choir. I just love this book. It is one of my favorite Christmas stories and the music on the DVD is divine. You can hear this lovely book and DVD on YouTube here.

• We created our Operation Christmas Child boxes and talked about Good King Wenceslas and the spirit of giving.

We watched some great videos on YouTube this week ~

• Marco Polo ~ Link
• History of Medieval Music ~ Link
• Ave Maria Gregorian Chant ~ Link
• Composers of the Medieval Period ~ Link
• The invention of the printing press ~ Link
• Magna Carta ~ Link
• Middle Ages surgery ~ Link
• How to draw a Celtic knot ~ Link

Next week we will be learning about a  medieval Christmas!

Other Posts on the Blog this week ~ 

• Urban Nature Study week 2
• Operation Christmas Child ~ Keep it simple sister

Blessings, Dawn

Operation Christmas Child ~ Keep It Simple, Sister

I love to find ways to encourage my children to have charitable hearts. We started making shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child when they were preschoolers. They were so excited when they were little. They wanted to hold all of the things and put them into the boxes over and over again. Then when the box lids went on and they realized the stuff really wasn't for them, oh! how the tears flowed...

2007

Things go much better these days. My kids look forward to doing these boxes each year. This year I really wanted to keep it simple. I hadn't managed to collect very much throughout the year, but we did have some sweet teddy bears and small stuffed animals. Every child should have something to love and hold. We decided to build our boxes around the stuffed animals. The kids decided we should have art supplies, stuffed animals, soap, and toothpaste. We went to the store to get some personal hygiene items and set all of our stuff up in an assembly line.

(Left to right ~ candy, pens, art supplies,  fast food toys, cards, toothpaste, toothbrush,
bags of soap, small and big stuffed animals)

The kids made bags of  art supplies for each box. Each bag contains a glue stick, scrapbook paper, stickers, pens, and craft scissors.

We assembled the boxes and wrote letters to each child.

Each box contained a small and large stuffed animal, a new fast food toy, small bag of hard candy, toothpaste and toothbrush, art supplies bag, and a few small bars of soap. We kept it real simple this year.

2015 ~ My babies are growing up!

We usually look through a book that shows life in Third World countries when we make our boxes. One of our favorite books in the past was Material World. This year we enjoyed Toy Stories: Photos of Children from Around the World and Their Favorite Things.

National collection week is November 16 - 23 this year.

Blessings, Dawn

Nature Study for Urban Homeschoolers ~ Week 2

Our nature walk this week was a very rainy one. We headed out with umbrellas and Boomer (who dislikes rain intensely).  Our goals today were to visit our tree and to visually see how much the river was rising with the rain we've had for the past several days. Although it was raining steadily, the temperature was pleasant enough. We had the park to ourselves today.

We checked on the river first. It was definitely higher than last week but not anywhere near flood stage. It was moving swiftly and we did not attempt to get very close for safety reasons. This part of the river doesn't usually overflow its banks. However, it is possible that it will at some point during our year long study.

We then followed the path to our maple tree. We were shocked to see how bare it was after only a week. The wind really had stripped it bare of the lovely autumn leaves.

We collected a few of its remaining leaves to sketch at home. We then walked a little bit farther down the path. The rain and wind picked up and Boomer was whining about going home. So we called it a day.

When we got home, the kids sketched their leaves and put them in their new nature study notebooks.

We finished off this week by preserving our leaves with a glycerin and water solution. They should be ready to remove from the pan in a few days. We hope they will be preserved enough to last until we are able to collect next year's leaves off the same tree. That will be a fun comparison.

We are enjoying exploring our urban setting. I think it is going to be a fantastic nature study this year.

Blessings, Dawn

The Medieval Age ~ Part 1

For the last week or so we have been studying the Middle Ages (500 AD to 1400 AD), also called the medieval period. I very much enjoy learning about this historical time period. This is what we have accomplished this week.

Books we read or are reading ~

• The Door in the Wall
• Crispin: The Cross of Lead
• Knights and Castles 50 Hands-On Activities to Experience the Middle Ages

We made rose water and rose water bread ~ Rose water was a common flavoring in the Middle Ages. We purchased dried rose petals from a spice store and made rose water. Making rose water is very simple. We put the roses into a pot and covered them with filtered water. We brought the pot to a gentle simmer and watched the water change to a deep red. We then strained the petals out and let the rose water cool. We stored the extra in a clean jar in the refrigerator. We then followed the recipe for rose water bread in the Knights and Castles 50 Hands-On Activities to Experience the Middle Ages book. It was truly a delicious bread and we will be making it again soon.

We learned about Halloween's connection to the Middle Ages ~ We learned that the ancient Celtics carved turnip lanterns just as we carve pumpkins today. We also learned about "All Hallows' Evening". We had to carve our own pumpkin.

The kids wrote a code of honor just like knights did ~ They also wrote a paper pretending they were news reporters reporting on the local medieval fair. Lastly, they wrote a letter to their parents to explain what they had experienced during the plague, just like Robin did in The Door in the Wall.

The kids watched The Black Death - Worst Plague in History on YouTube ~ We learned a little bit about bloodletting and other different ways that doctors treated people during the Middle Ages. We also learned about the medicinal uses for parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. We learned the story behind Ring Around the Rosy and what it tells us about the Black Death.

We learned about illumination of books by monks ~ We learned what life was like in a monastery. The kids illuminated their initials.  

The kids bobbed for apples, which was a popular game even in the Middle Ages ~

The kids learned about stained glass and watched a short documentary about the Chartres Cathedral and its rose windows ~ They then made their own stained glass windows.

We wrapped up the week by making dioramas of the Four Alls. These depict some of the roles assigned by God to people during the Middle Ages.  ~ 

"The peasants who worked for all,

priests who prayed for all,

knights who fought for all,

and kings who ruled all."

The Kings

The Knights

The Priests

I must say, if I had to live in medieval times, I would want to be a monk. I think that, by far, they had it the best. They were surrounded by more books than anyone else; they spent their lives serviing others and showing kindness; and they didn't have to fight in wars. Yes, that would be the life for me!

I have a few more things to do with the kids next week. I can't wait!

In case you missed it on the blog. We are starting a 52 week urban nature study. You can read about our first week here.

Blessings, Dawn