Flying bats and pancakes

Tonight, while reading a bedtime book to Liam about animal sounds, he asked me how many other animals-- other than birds--flew. I said "Well, some insects and bats.." and he piped up and said, with those expressive, grinning eyes shining "...and pancakes." He makes me laugh. I suppose that just a plausible to fly a (baseball) bat as anything else would be.

Science Fun: Edible Cells

This year Cailin will be studying biology, namely, anatomy and physiology.

Her first lesson was about cell structure.

She made (baking lesson included) a brownie edible cell.
Using, frosting, marshmallows, sprinkles, nuts and a few other things she created all the components of a human cell.

Ever the writer, she loves to journal about her readings and discoveries in her pre -made journal. I almost didn't buy this book, as it wasn't necessary, but it sure has been a great addition to her schooling. There's just something more enticing and fun about writing and illustrating in this book as apposed to a plain sheet of paper.

A picture drawn by her of cell anatomy

The books contain many hands on activities for her to further imprint to her mind what she's been reading about.

Here she filled in a pie chart about about the purposes of each part of the cells.

The book authors compared each function to various functions of a town....police, grocery store etc. This definitely helped her better visualize how it all works together.

Another Published Author

Cailin, too, has been busy brainstorming and writing a book of her own.
She loves to write and has written many stories. I guess this one inspired her enough to make it into a novel and self publish it.

By sharing this talent with her friends she has inspired them to want to write and publish their own books too. She's been asked to give a presentation on the how-to's of self publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace website at her CC class.

Now, she's in the midst of proof reading (and correcting) her book, plus she's busy writing her second book.

Letter of the Week: F

For 'preschool' this year, I'm taking the 'Letter of the Week' approach to teaching Liam. What's been wonderful, is that once I realized I don't have to take the alphabet from A to Z, but that I can jump around, I can easily find ways to combine Delaney's schooling with Liam's.

This has been wonderful. At first, I wasn't really planning on doing 'school' with Liam, but I've found that if I want to accomplish anything, he needs to be included. Plus, I'm finding that Delaney is learning quite well with Liam there too. Her aptitude to learning new word families and reading skills is increasing and I'm getting her to write more than before. (She's quite the kinetic learner. Typically they need to move to learn and don't like to do sit down type work.)

Pictured above are preprinted books I found on a fun website called DLTK's letter of the week, and they recreated one of their own about the food they like to eat. You can't see Delaney's title but it says 'Mi fod buk'. Actually that's quite good, phonetically sound writing. I'm interested to see how much she'll grow during the year.

Making a Freddy Frog

Making faces with Connor. Connor's favorite two faces are the ones to the left.

A food mobile. We also brought out the scriptures and talked about the Word of Wisdom and what it means for us.

Next week: S for stars and stripes. Delaney's social studies I Love America has us learning about the flag (which is why we started with F) we read some books on flags but will do more with the flag this week....and with stars, sun, & stripes.

I Love M&M's!

I absolutely love M&M's. Not for their delectable chocolaty goodness and not for how they quiet rambuncious kids....
I love M&M's because they clean my house! Yep! They clean my house.
Through this wonderful confection from the Marz Company, I am able to inspire my otherwise unwilling children to pick up the endless supply of "stuff" that seems to loom over the entire house. Of course, they don't seem to notice it when I ask them to pick up after themselves. They'll go into a room and pick up a token piece of paper here and there, or throw a pair of shoes towards the shoe basket (mind you, it rarely actually makes it into the basket), and call the job complete.
I ask them to take a second look---but they just don't see any of the stuff lying around that is driving my crazy.

Ah, but when I give the incentive of M&M's--I prefer to call it incentive (motivation could work too), and not bribery. Bribery give the illusion that I'm a weak wimpy mom....maybe I am, but I now have a clean picked up home!

I'm happy, they are happy -- I can tell my quest of obtaining a food storage is rubbing off on them, they are collecting their m&m....to be eaten at a later time.

AND, I now am satisfied that their eyes work just fine and we can stave off the visit to the optometrist!

How it works--We bargained that 7 items picked up and put away will earn 1 m&m.

We did this about 4-6 months ago, and it worked beautifully...but it became expensive to maintain this with our messy house--that was at a 1 to 1 ratio. Maybe I should buy stock in chocolate companies, because I really, really, really, like having a clean, picked up house (and the 7 to 1 ratio seems to be working well for now.)

Rain, Rain, Rain

Last year, we had such a dry summer, a drought really. By the end of June the grass throughout the area looked brown. By August, the ground was parched with many lawn full of patches of dead grass. Obviously this didn't bode well for the boy's mowing business.

However, this year, there has been so much rain that it was often hard to plan when to mow. Maneuvering between Barry's schedule and church/scout activities, made if difficult to get the mowing done,but when mother nature decided to let the rain come forth...well that just added to the joy of scheduling. The boy's learned to hurry and get the yard mowed before the rain comes by afternoon or how to give up a play date or other activity because it's a dry day and the mowing must be done. There were time's when they even had to mow with out Dad around. They may have grumbled a bit, but they did the work and did it well.

The kids had a grand time going outside to play in the rain....and create many mud pies!

We DID It!!

When President Monson challenged all of the church members to read the Book of Mormon from August to the end of December, cover to cover ~5 years ago, we accepted the challenge with gusto and tried to follow our prophet's counsel. We didn't get it finished but, we didn't stop and 3 years later we finally finished it.
Well done, good job...we did finish it, but as we started the book again we had a goal to finish it all within one year. Well, second time around we took less time than 3 years, but we didn't complete the whole book in one year...and that is our goal.
This year started and again we had hopes of finishing it...by June it wasn't looking so good. We were only in 2 Nephi. It was then at the end of June that Dad instituted a goal with a prize.
If we read every single day by September 1st we would go out for pizza as a family to Cici's. (We allowed ourselves to miss only 5 times.) Well WE DID IT...and tonight we went out for pizza.

There were a few really late nights of scripture reading....once we cracked open the book at 10:30pm to meet our goal. Sometimes we weren't all present, but we did it!! We read every single day and made it through Alma. Our next short term goal is to go to Denny's for a grand slam if we keep reading every day till November 1. If we keep at it we just might make our ultimate goal of reading the Book of Mormon from cover to cover as a family in one year!