Our oldest turned 7 today! He is full of imagination and boyhood; he loves weapons and dress up. His current hero is Robin Hood.
Today we all became the merry men of the forest…or maybe the merry women and their fearless leader.
We invited a few others to join our band and the festivities commenced!
First came archery practice – shooting arrows through the hoops.
I made bows out of pvc pipe and string. The arrows were dowel rods tipped with pointed erasers. Simple and very effective
The girls opted for a game of bean bag toss. I don’t think the boys even bothered with this game, they were too busy shooting.
Next, Little John (a.k.a. Aunt Katie) led the band through the forest. This gave Friar Tuck (a.k.a. me) time to prepare the woodland feast.
Bread and cheese, fruit and chicken nuggets were set out for the crowd.
We all dined happily among the green trees (on our back porch).
Lance had a target cake with an impromptu arrow made from a tootsie roll and starburst candy.
After cake was presents! I had fun wrapping this one. It says: To Lance, my mighty arrow. May you be swift to obey the Lord and always keep a straight and true course, May you always hit the mark and be useful in the Lord’s service.
Last activity was a treasure hunt. We had made two sets of clues – indoor and outdoor – due to rain in the forecast, so we split up the boys and girls and ran both sets. We had the boys running back and forth all over the place! Treasure was found and fun was had by all.
At the end of 2014 I picked a word to be my focus for the coming year. For various reasons (explained in our newsletter) I picked the word “Love.” This is a really big word with a lot behind it, but I’m using the “love is” description from 1 Corinthians 13 to direct my study of this concept. As I tackle a word from the list in the passage, I am using it as a monthly character focus with my children. The word for January was ‘Patience.’
Iris practices patience with blanket training.
To my encouragement, right after I had decided to do this, my mother in law sent a character curriculum she found. It puts lyrics to classical songs and suggests simple activities to reinforce the idea.
For the song “I want it now” we planted seeds and talked about how a farmer has to be patient, waiting for his food to grow.
“Turtle Joe,” was a song where other animals wouldn’t wait for a turtle, which made him sad. Then some animals were friendly and walked slow with him. I printed little characters which we used in a puppet show for Dad. We also went on a “patience walk,” waiting for the slower members of our group. This was very hard. We barely made it to Grammy’s house next door.
I checked a few books out from the library that talked about patience. One was about a little bunny that couldn’t wait to eat some chocolate cake. So we made a cake and had to wait all day to eat it!
Ready to devour our yummy chocolate cake after eating our supper of carrots, potatoes and peas (same thing the bunny in the book had to eat).
An unexpected chance to use patience came when we visited the new children’s museum in town. The grocery store was a popular exhibit and the kids had to wait up to 15 min. for their turn to check out. This was done on their own with much calm and order – more than adults are known to exhibit at the real stores! Not one of the children – mine and others alike – could be dissuaded by a bored parent to abandon their cart and move on to another exhibit.
Another song “Are we there yet?” talked about patience on a car trip. I looked up ideas for a car toy that didn’t have a bunch of pieces to lose and pick up and settled on little play boxes. This activity was a big hit with the kids – they LOVE their boxes and find it hard to leave them in the car for next time.
Here’s a close up of Flora’s and Lance’s boxes. They had to scour their treasure boxes for a toy that was small enough to fit inside. Then we created a home around each toy.
Eden and Ivy’s box. Ivy loved using the glue gun and decorated the outside more than the inside!
For the song about growing up, we looked at our photo albums when the kids were younger and then talked about waiting for our new baby to come. We ended up taking a little peek at the baby and “impatiently” found out what we are having!
We used cupcakes with colored icing inside to let the kids in on the secret.
During the month I did a focus topic study on the word patience in the Bible. Specifically looking for two things: How does God love me with patience and how can I use patience to love God. I did a little write-up of my thoughts and observations if you care to read it by here: Love is Patient.
Up next month, coinciding nicely with Valentines, we’ll be looking at kindness!
For January we did a little unit on snow and ice – even though it only really froze for two nights this month.
We made observations on ice: Everyone picked their container and amount of water then we put them in the freezer and checked periodically to see whose froze the fastest. Eden won with a shallow layer of water in a plate.
Making foam snow at our co-op.
We collected milk jugs (from other people) to build an igloo!
Lance and Ivy enjoyed the chance to use a glue gun.
Mostly finished – we used every milk jug we had!
Since we were out of jugs, Lance and Ivy painted a box to be our igloo tunnel. This house turned out very sturdy and has lasted two weeks so far, taking up a nice amount of space in the school room.
We made play snow from baking soda and shaving cream. It doesn’t pack super well but we managed to make snow men.
Flora played “Katy the Snowplow” with her snow.
Since this snow is made with baking soda it makes for quite a meltdown. Lance enjoys a spray bottle full of vinegar.
Melting snow makes for an epic mess – even in Texas! Had to mop twice after this, but wow did they have a good time!
And finally, we made crystal snowflakes by putting pipe cleaners in a borax solution over night. The kids were quite thrilled with the result.
(note: Flora wasn’t feeling good and had slept most of the morning)
Good thing they don’t remember rock candy because this looks good enough to eat! Maybe we’ll try again with a sugar solution.
Along with our projects we read library books about snow and igloos. Grammy also supplemented with northern lights on youtube, Balto and sled dogs, Alaska pictures, splatter paint snow and more book reading.
