Cozy sees a pumpkin patch!

Gma and Cozy met us at Fir Point Farms for a little adventure.
Is this pup not the cutest thing ever!?

She enjoyed nibbling on pumpkin stems and frolicking in the grass.

We found a tire swing. *Big Sis is looking so grown up these days! I adore her.

And we even got to hold a baby goat! It cried like a real baby. So cute.

We {heart} fall

The crisp, colorful fall air has us outside as much as possible.
These first few pics are from Tryon Creek.

We stole Alex away and went on an afternoon hike. Gorgeous.

Three trees from one trunk base. :)

These next pics are from our favorite, local state park.
The kidlets are always chipper {and last longer!} if we bring snacks along.

I see you.

We found our favorite shrooms!
A little research on the web and we learned they're called fly agaric mushrooms - and yes, they are poisonous if eaten (that color's a dead giveaway - pun intended. ha!)

But aren't they stunning!?!? A gnome's paradise.

We found a little caterpillar and made the mushroom his new home.

Homeschool bodies: Heart & Blood

You can't talk about the heart without talking about blood - so we combined the two subjects into one week. The gnomes learned that our heart is the size of our fists, and that it pumps oxygenated blood to our body through arteries, and veins carry oxygen-low blood back.

 Nice coloring in the lines, E!

Then we made our own blood (thank you Pinterest), with red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma and platelets. The kiddos know that white fight (germs); red are made of a protein called hemoglobin, carry oxygen and are what makes blood red; platelets help scab and plasma carries it all together.

It was difficult to resist eating the blood ... ;) but the bowls sat on our table for a few days (until one bowl spilled and broke). Every visitor got a quick lesson about what's in our blood - which I love, because every time they teach someone else, those bits of knowledge plant deeper into their absorbing brains.

 

Big Sis devised a heart for our bodies which could actually be pumped! Pretty creative!

Though it looks like they're lined up to the wall in trouble ... or maybe kissing their paper bodies ... they're really just getting their paper bodyies' hearts pumping. :) ha ha.

Homeschool with a three-year-old

I have to say, E! is a champion when it comes to school time. He's either right in the action, or finding something to do on his own. Occasionally he'll need some redirection or an activity just for him, but once I get him set up, he takes his job seriously. Here are just a few things we do with a happy three-year-old at homeschool.

 

Above: E! pushes a variety of vehicles (or balls) down the ramp and tells me which letter it lands on - and what sound that letter makes. (this activity does require me or a sister to be close by and paying attention.)

Puzzles! Puzzles are perfect, because they hold his attention for a long time. Plus, it's a quiet activity! PLUS, it's a phenomenal workout for his brain muscles. He does lots of puzzles.

His sisters help him a lot during school! For example, I'm sure his sisters folded those pointy finger and toe nails for him. He can't resist a little imaginative dress up play.

Games like this one can be played alone and boost critical thinking skills.

Gotta be honest - saw this on Pinterest. I thought, "this will keep him busy - and I bet he'll really like it." Well it did, and he did ... but it lasted 30 seconds. Then he brought over his "spaceship" and asked, "What's next?" Maybe I needed 50 more pipecleaners! lol.

Most often, if I'm working with one-on-one with one girl, I can find the other girl teaching E! in some way. They're such good mommies and friends to him. The bond between them makes my heart smile.

Homeschool Math: Making math fun with weights

A sweet pal lent me a food scale so Big Sis could complete her chapter about weight in her math book. One day it discussed kilograms, another day was grams, then another was pounds and ounces.

Really, they simply learned how to read the food labels to see how much something weighs. They also learned how to weigh the object on the scale tp see if the label was accurate. I think they may have tucked away the fact that a kilogram is heavier than a pound ... not positive though.

Of course, they had fun while weighing all sorts of things. Big Sis weighed our pumpkins to see if we got a great deal by paying $1/pumpkin from someone's yard vs. .29 cents/pumpkin at the local p. patch. And I keep trying to remind myself, that it's not about the numbers or facts they can spout off, it's about learning to love learning!

Homeschool: Making math fun - Monsters!

 

I love all of the creative teachers in the world who share their talents on the web!

I printed off several fab monster math worksheets, and Lil Sis looked forward to math every day this week. At first, she'd roll the dice, add the numbers together and then put a coin over their sum.

 

Then she tried subtraction, and even got some manipulatives (jacks) to help.
This time she colored the sum circles.

 

Two days she divided monsters with numbers on them into  piles of even or odd. She had manipulatives here too (gold coins) to see if she could divide them evenly between her and Big Sis or not. I loved watching how quickly she grasped the concept. These little minds are wonders!

Homeschool art and nature: pine needles

There was a huge storm that a blanket of pine needles in our front yard. One by one, we picked up the needles until our hands were full. We hope to make witches' brooms, but haven't gotten to it yet.
We did decide to take some of the pine needles and see how they'd do as paint brushes.

Great fun.

Homeschool anatomy: Our eyes

We took a week to learn about our amazing eyes.

We transformed this t-ball into a snazzy blue eye, complete with plastic wrap cornea and yarn optic nerves.

A different day, we did a pupil study. The children ran all around the house trying to figure out what made their pupils large or small. They tried laughing and being surprised, they tried hiding under the crib or in closets, they even went into the fridge to see if temperature had something to do with it.
They now know that a pupil's size is related to the amount of light available.

One day we made our eyes for our paper bodies. I had set out supplies, but gave very little directions. There were different sized coins and circular containers to trace, scissors, yarn, paper, tape, glue sticks, etc. We just figured it out as we went ...

 

It's hard to tell, but they too are wrapped in plastic wrapped corneas.

The children can identify the pupil, iris, sclera, cornea and nerves.
Big Sis also remembers the retina and lens.

Here's looking at you, kid. :)

Ballerinas

We have two "official" ballerinas at our house.
They've always tip-toed across the room, twirling this way and that - but now they're enrolled in actual ballet classes. Coming to a tutu near you ... :)

Homeschool Bodies: Nerves

After learning about the brains, we moved onto the peripheral part of our nervous system. In the pic above, the kids are adding nerves to the spinal chord. In the pic below, the kids are playing "Nervous Nellie" - where they draw a card with a picture on it, then act as the nerves by sending the message to the different body parts. For example, if the picture was of a flower, the nerves would notify the eyes to see it, the hand to touch it, the nose to smell it, etc.

Then we made our own neurons out of pipecleaners, and labeled them.
We even created a nerve by linking all the neurons together in one long chain.

Homeschool: Pizza box grammar

Some days you just need an element of surprise to take a less exciting lesson to the next level.

Enter the empty pizza box. The objective: to recognize a real sentence, to make appropriate capitalization and punctuation, and to practice penmanship.

 

For some reason, pulling out a blank pizza box out of the recycling bin really saved the day for this lesson. The kids giggled and colored, getting the little assignment over in good time and with cheerful hearts.Yay.