"The Promises She Keeps" by Erin Healy is the first book of her's that I have read. This book had very interesting characters. We start with Promise a young girl with Cystic Fibrosis who sings. Then there is Chase a young man with Autism who is an incredible artist. Linking the two characters together is Zach and Portia. A mother/son team who do not like each other and each have their own agenda's in life.

This book started well and kept me longing to find out more about the characters and what will ultimately happen to them all. I felt connected to Promise and sad about her illness. I kept wanting to see one of Chases drawings for myself. My dislike of Portia was just as real as her son's dislike for her.

The books ending feels so rushed that it never felt like the salvation we were lead up to actually happened. There are parts of the story that seemed to never develop fully in the end. Overall it was a good read but left me longing for more completion to the story.

*This book was given to me free by BookSneeze in exchange for an unbiased review.

Ants!

This week we got our ants in that we ordered. We have a gel ant farm and are amazed at these little creatures. We have watched them bury their dead, dig tunnels, make hills and even talk to each other with their antennas. I am amazed at their team work skills. Matthew is a little sad that they are all girls but still loves watching them. The first thing the kids do in the morning is run to see the farm. They write everything that has changed since the night before. Several times a day they check on the ants and write down observations. The ants are a bigger hit than even the ladybugs were.

Our gel house is like the one below. There are several types of these on Amazon.com. It is so neat to see it lit up from the bottom. We really love it and I may even buy a rainbow farm to do as a follow up.

Ladybug farm

We have been learning about bugs in science this month. We have a cool ladybug land and got to go through the 4 stages in order to get them to adult status. I printed off worksheets from enchanted learning to go along with our daily observations. Abigail LOVES her "baby bugs" and even was able to tell me the 4 stages and put her cut out pictures in the right order.

We bought this Ladybug land off Amazon and loved it. We plan on cleaning it out and using it again in the future.

Catching you all up

Well it has been awhile since I blogged. We have been so busy that I just keep forgetting to do it. My cousin has moved in with us so we now have a 19 year old pregnant woman living with us. She is due with her first baby in December.

What we are learning-

Shelby has come a long way with her reading and grammar skills. I gave her a word list to read to me last week and she was able to read every word to me. Half of them were sight words. She is able to sit and read books in a setting. She still struggles to find books that interest her enough to read but we are working on that.

Shelby has moved on to memorizing her subtraction facts and has been introduced to multiplying and "groups" of numbers. She wants to skip addition and subtraction completely and just do that.

Matthew is improving on his reading and phonic work. He does not like to "have" to read daily but he is able to do it. We are still working on handwriting before we move to sentence and grammar work.

In Math Matthew is now able to count by 2's to 20, 5's to 100, 10's to 100 and 3's to 12. He is able to figure out addition problems in his head up to 12.

We have gone on field trips to a pumpkin patch, park to play with friends, Six Flags and a few others.

Week 3 Report

We have now ended our 15th day of school. Things are still going great. This week we added in more activities outside of the house and met lots of new friends!

This week we started AWANA on Wednesday nights and are now meeting weekly with a Meet Up group. The kids have never done AWANA and really had a great time. Shelby is in a class with two of her friends from Mothers Day Out. Matthew is in a class with a Male leader and 5 other little boys. He is in HEAVEN. They both have been working hard memorizing their bible verses for next week.

On Wednesday Shelby and I also went to her knitting class. We are working on making a hat before next weeks class.

In math Shelby worked on her number bonds and addition facts this week. She is starting to memorize several of the facts and is using her number line less.
In Language Arts she learned compound words and how to make words plural. She also completed another Spelling test and got every word correct.

Matthew learned about pennies in math and how to write the numbers 5, 6 and 7. He completed his letter "B" book. Abigail and Matthew made bee's out of recycled materials (cardboard, felt scraps and paint). Matthew completed another 5 lessons in his "Explode the Code" book and "Learn to read in 100 easy lessons". He is really picking up reading fast. He struggled a little bit this week reading the letters "R" and "J". He has a hard time making these letter sounds so he got frustrated quickly.

In bible the kids completed their "Creation" lapbook.

For science and history we learned more about Dinosaurs. We even made dino eggs that we will paint next week. They had fun choosing a baby dino to put in their balloon. Then mommy made paste out of flour and water. None of the kids wanted to actually cover the eggs with the "yucky" paste so mommy ended up doing that part mostly on her own.

We had a great time at our Meet Up group. It was the kick off for the new year and it rained. So we moved it indoors to a gym at a local church. It ended up working out perfect. We played lots of games and got to meet all our new friends. Next week we are going on a field trip to a Storehouse (food Pantry) and get to complete a Service project. We are very excited to learn about serving others.

(Feel free to click on slideshow and pictures to see them larger)

Neat Art Resources cheap on Amazon

As most people know I love to find great deals. I will be posting deals that I find related to homeschooling once or twice a week.

This past week we got these two Art items with our free Amazon Prime Trial (if you order over $25 in items you will get free shipping as well).



This book is really colorful and has some HUGE prints in it. There are a few pictures that I may not show the children for a few years. They may be a little mature for them still. I think I am just going to tack those pages together on the corner until they are ready for them. Overall though it is really a great book and the kids have already pulled it out to look at and read.



The second item above is at an incredible deal! This kit is so much fun. It has tons of info about Leonardo DaVinci and it includes a model to build a flying machine. I am planning a month of DaVinci study just so we can play with this kit!

Creation

The kids have been learning the 7 days of Creation both at Church and in Bible here at home. Their Bible verse the first week was Genesis 1:1 and the second week was Genesis 1:27 . We have done a lot of Creation activities and projects. We are also learning about the Dinosaurs and that God created the Dinosaurs the same time he created man. We will get more into Dino's and the bible at a later time, including the fact that there are a lot of theory's out there. We will have Dino lapbook coming soon!

The kids made a Creation Mobil, colored a sign for our wall and made a Creation lapbook. Here are video's of each child showing off their project. They learned that God made us in His image ...therefore we are special and unique just like Him.