Easter Celebrations.....hunting for more fun.

Just a few hours later....after the first Easter egg hunt, we joined other friends (this time from our ward) at Heather and Jeff's home for another egg hunt--because it's just so much fun!!


The kids clamored upon the tractor trailer for a hay ride, meanwhile, the mom's hid many plastic eggs for the kids to find.

When the tractor returned with the happy, joyful critters, they ran to find the treat filled eggs.
After that, they enjoyed looking at the many baby goats.
Thanks H & J, for another wonderful afternoon!!

Easter Celebrations

One of our favorite Easter traditions is an egg hunt. This year we were invited to two of them....and joined in the festivities of them both.

While sitting on a long trailer we enjoyed a tractor pull us along the beautiful country side...escorted by the Easter Bunny himself. Afterwards the hunt began.....kids were divided up according to age, the shout to begin was given and.....they were off. Who could find the most is always the goal.

But, lest you think they are selfish and gleaning only for their own candy stash, I saw many of the kids helping each other to find eggs when they realized that someone was with out many eggs of their own. What great kids!

Afterwards, a grilled lunch of hot dogs, hamburgers and sides. Yummy. Then the games began--Tug of War, 3 legged races and the such ended our wonderful day. Thanks to our wonderful friends the Pohlig's for such a fun day.

(Connor and Ryan are not shown because they were busy helping with others from the ward helping clean up from the tornado.--Barry was at Tech helping at a football game.)

The Colors of Easter

We always have fun dyeing Easter Eggs

So many colors and designs to choose from....what to do?

Inspecting the final product.

Book Group--Archimedes and the Door to Science

(Liam with his Archimedes mobile)

Ahhh, a book about science....Connor was in heaven! and Archimedes no less, I suppose he'd have been happier with one about Newton, but he had fun...as did all of us with this read.

We created an Archimedes mobile....harder to get it balanced than you think!

Well done!

We read about the Archimedes screw. To see a screw in action we used the wheat grinder to grind wheat kernels and.....

turn the flour into pie...or is that Pi crust! He discovered (among a zillion other things), the numerical equation to represent the area of a circle--or pi.

We read about his discovery of buoyancy, his love for geometry and how it thrilled him to see that his inventions really did work, (not just in theory), and used to protect his country from invasion of the Roman army.

We enjoyed reading about his life and all the wonderful things he did and discovered.

Ryan's CC Challenge Class

Well, he did it! Ryan completed Challenge A with Classical Conversations. Here he is with his tutor, Mrs Quek and classmates, Will and Claire.
He loved being with this group....he even missed them over Christmas break, wanting to get back with them. He learned to get out and enjoy time with others, playing football during lunch breaks and after classes in the afternoon.
He struggled with the writing....every week they wrote two papers, one for science and one for IEW, writing class (the first semester was Bible story based, 2nd semester was literature based)
He didn't enjoy geography but look what he could do.....

Every week they practiced drawing--copy, trace and free hand draw the different continents with all the countries therein, by hand. By the end of the year he could draw, from memory, the entire world. He had also memorized each country and capital. Yeah, this most definitely was a challenge, but he did it, and did it well!

And, that wasn't the end of the drawing lessons either. For science during the 2nd semester, they learned about the different systems of the body--drew each one by memory, named each part and could tell how it all worked. (Respiratory system, circulatory system etc.)

He took his first year of Latin and loved it. For math he moved to another group for Algebra 2.

In the end he was greatly challenged and grew in many ways-- socially and academically. It was a tough year, but a fun one....especially when he could finally beat Claire in the memory games of Rhetoric!!

Aristocats

For the past two months we've joined other elementary and middle school kids at the high school preparing to perform Disney's Aristocats.
The girls had quite a bit of fun learning dance, songs and lines to perform for family and friends.


Posing with new friends and old friends.

Between the Mattson's, Brame's and us, we have the entire cast of animals represented--Aristocats, Alley cats, geese, dogs, and mice. Crazy man, crazy!!

Cailin was cast as Lafayette. Delaney was Escargot

The Cast....Cats and dogs, mice and geese!

The Canine Brigade...out on patrol...."I think I smell a human!!"

Duchess and her aristocats.

The Alley Cats..."Everybody wants to be a Cat, cause a cat's the only cat, who knows where it's at. Everybody picking up the feline beat. Cause everybody wants to be a cat!"

A happy and very satisfied member of the audience...chocolate smile and all!

Tornado

(The land behind these homes were once thickly dense with trees.)

While we were at the Pulaski Co. High school, watching Delaney and Cailin perform in the play, Aristocats, a storm brewed and developed into an F2 tornado. According to the weather service in Blacksburg, 2 tornado's touched down in Pulaski County. One in the town of Pulaski, the other near the I81 exit near Draper. Both of them caused quite a bit of damage.

The night it struck, as we came out of the theater, people talked about the tornado's. I remember thinking they were crazy--just a tad bit dramatic. I didn't worry about Ryan who was home alone. Once we got home and Barry obtained more information from work--and hearing Ryan talk about the storm, I said a prayer of thanks that all was well with our home and Ryan too (he talked about it quite a lot, which for him, means it really scared him--I was also so grateful that we had moved a few years ago, our old home wasn't so lucky, it did sustain some damage).
Then my mind went to my friends who, weren't as lucky, and did receive quite a bit of damage to their home and a total loss on their vehicle. Barry has one family, whom he home teaches for our church, who was also in the path of the tornado.
Because of his job, he was able to go and check on these families the next day. What a mess.

A day or so later, I was able to accompany Barry to see if our friends were okay. I was sadly amazed at the roofless houses, windows blown out of many homes and so many trees downed. Our friend use to have a wonderfully large tree shading their home, it's no longer there. I was amazed to hear their tale of the storm and the complete trust and faith they had in the Lord.
The father had just completed 6 months of chemotherapy for a rare liver type cancer. The day of the twister, he had just come home from gall bladder surgery. Tony's been out of work for a while due to medical reasons, he can't take care of the kids so Shelia stays home with them (they too have 6 kids). I know their house is paid for, but with no insurance ( or car insurance), and a constant battle to keep food on the table (and medical bills mounting)--what comes out of her mouth?-- "My God is a great God, he is truly a God of miracles". I was taken aback by the trust and peace in her voice. She wasn't just saying this, she really believed it.
An anonymous person gave them a van to replace the one that was destroyed, plus many people helped repair their home. In fact they had such an outpouring of love and help from their church and other friends, that all I could help her with was wash 5-6 loads of laundry, which of course I gladly did.

Ryan, Connor and Barry went up by themselves and with our ward to help people with the downed trees--or anything else the home owners needed help with.
There was quite a bit of damage, but, thankfully no deaths occurred. This spring season has been full of wild weather. We as a nation normally have __________tornado's. This year, we've had over 600, many of then extremely violent, in which, lives were taken. This luckily was not the case here. To quote Shelia "We are blessed."

Visiting Ancient Rome...again

Here we are...visiting Ancient Rome again. Cailin's project based learning activity was on the various buildings in a typical Roman town. We created an aqua duct and bath house, Colosseum, temple and theater.

She enjoyed researching what took place in each building. (Since I'm finally writing the post about this two months later, I don't have her notes about them to add--so sad for her future knowledge of family history.)
I do know I had fun staying up late one night, playing with card board, hot glue guns, and paint while we created these miniature replicas

I'm SO cute!!
Delaney and Liam talked about mosaics. An afternoon was spent creating these and Delaney presented to the history group what we learned.

Connor's be intrigued with government lately and he chose to do a compare and contrast of our modern day government to Rome's government.

His ever, clever, witty, self came through with this window--his favorite screen--"This slide is closed for renovation, please continue to the next slide."

I never feel that we've learned all and discovered all about a topic. I wanted to make real mosaics with glass dots and cement for the garden. I wanted to make a real working aqua duct. Plus, there were movies to watch, 'I Spartacus", and others (I'm sure) but we didn't, I guess it'll have to wait till we get back to the ancient history in two or so years. We're moving on to American history this next year( we did medieval history with CC so we're jumping forward to the 1600's)...and I'm getting excited!

Roman Builders

During our study of Ancient Rome, we took an afternoon and spent the time creating a mock roman road.

The first layer....sand.

Second layer--small crushed rock or gravel.

Next, a cement like substence. We used sand mixed with glue.

The last layer was large paving rocks.

By leaving a fourth of each layer exposed, we could see all the elements used to create our road I'm amazed that today, roads built over 2,000 years ago can still be used.

Celebration Day!

We've come to the end of our first year with Classical Conversations. This program has been a fantastic addition to our homeschooling adventures. The kids have grown socially, emotionally and of course, academically. For celebration day, each of the classes put together a creative way to share with family and friends some of the memory work, fine arts and science that they have learned through the year.

Connor and Cailin's class put together a 20 minute skit that displayed various talents and memory work.

Cailin played a flute piece from Dvorak, a 1800s composer from Czechoslovakia. She practiced beautifully and was quite good with her piece, however, during the performance her hair fell into her face and got in the way of her mouth piece and she didn't do it perfectly. I was quite proud of how well she kept her composure and continued on with grace. Well done.

She also portrayed Claude Monet. She wrote a brief bio of him, dressed up and acted it out for the audience.

Connor, along with Elijah and Blake, quoted memory work-- Latin, history sentences and timeline cards in a dialog form. Blake is also an excellent violinist, he performed quick lively music from the baroque era of Vivaldi They had many 'guest appearances'. Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis's on the door again, William Shakespeare quoted from his Julius Caesar play, Beethoven performed on the piano, Benjamin Franklin (shown above), rediscovered electricity and gave us sage advice from his 'Poor Richard's Almanac. Artist, Rembrandt, Morisot, and Monet also shared events and artwork from their lives. Greta tied the information together as the narrator. At the beginning of our school year with CC, Delaney was quite apprehensive about joining in this group--alone. She did quite well when I was there, but without me, well, that's another story. For the first half of the year, during Essentials class, she chose to stay with me in the classroom, quietly coloring and reading books....and being quite bored! After a few months, I had her sit in the hallway, so as not to disrupt the grammar lessons. She saw the kids in the gym playing and having fun. Still, it took her a few months to overcome fears, but she now gladly joins the younger kids having fun playing in the gym, watching videos or play outside while the older kids are writing and learning grammar. She's come quite a ways in emotionally being strong. Way to go Delaney!

Here's one of her class mates, Emma. Emma is sharing the flag of Ireland.

For celebration day, their class took the word 'CELEBRATION' and each kid picked out a favorite bit of memory work that they learned and shared it with the audience.

Emma had fun learning about Ireland at home--in geography they learned the countries, cities, and features of Europe, Asia and parts of Central America and Africa.

Delaney's letter was 'C'....for the Cold War. All of the history sentences were put to music. Some weeks the music was fun and upbeat....these became a favorite sentence for all to sing. The song of the cold war was one of these. It had a definite 1980's theme to the beat--it brought me back to my teen years.

'In the 1980's....Oooooo, British Prime Minister Ma (aaaa)rgre(eeee) t Thatcher, and the US President Ro(oooo)anld Re(eee)agan, fought together to end the cold war, lessen big government, strengthen the conservative mo(ooooo)vement." She also shared her favorite way to learn memory work. When the weather is nice I will go out with them and sit in the middle of the trampoline as they jump around me in circles shouting their memory work.....weird, but it works!

Delaney's Class--(on floor) Emma, Jake Ansley , (above) Ansley's brother, Emma , Kayla , Meredith , Jackson

Giving Mrs East a great big HUG!!

It's not a celebration day with out goodies....Yummy!

L to R(on floor) Emma, Celia, Asia, Cailin, Greta.

Essentials class was two hours of intense learning and FUN!! Mrs. Jacobs was an incredible tutor who helped the kids unlock the mystery of grammar (and for me too) and the structure and style of good writing. Some of their favorite times with grammar were the diagramming races, playing charades with vocabulary words and Cailin's favorite racing the tutor with mastery work.

Cailin's award for the year was "Most Subtle Spitfire." She was rather quiet, but occasionally her charming fighting spirit came out and--Watch Out!

Connor was presented with the "Most Witty Writer" award. He is quiet clever with words and Mrs Jacobs always look forward to reading his witty charm.

She told me how remarkable each of them had done, being their first year with CC, they kept pace with their classmates and surpassed all expectations. Well Done!

A Great 'High Five' for a super year!!