Hey There Pretty Mama

Dear God,

I don't know how to pray by myself

very well,

but will You please

protect my little nest from wind and rain?

Put a great deal of dew on the flowers,

many seeds in my way.

Make Your blue very high,

Your branches lissom;

let Your kind light stay late in the sky

and set my heart brimming with such music

that I must sing, sing, sing...

Please, Lord.

Prayers from the Ark, Carmen Bernos De Gasztold

Isn't she beautiful, so elegant and peaceful in her nest. Last week while we were outside observing the birds in our backyard we went over to a tree in our neighbors yard to look for some bird nests and to our surprise found this pretty mama Mourning Dove. I am assuming it is the mama here. I read that the female and male actually alternate sitting on the nest. We check on here daily.

Our Little Visitors

Hurt no living thing:

Ladybird, nor butterfly,

Nor moth with dusty wing,

Nor cricket chirping cheerily,

Nor grasshopper so light of leap,

Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,

Nor harmless worms that creep.

Christina Rossetti

Our memory poem for the week above, lovely little thing I think. We have a rule in our house, that we are to respect all of life ugly, disgusting and even annoying because they are God's creatures, with exceptions of course. If it is in the house it is usually fair game unless someone is feeling particularly merciful one day. If it is outside and not potentially dangerous to us then we are to let it be and observe, moving it is an option if we are to disturbed by it's presence.

Now, I want to share a few friends that we have met in our backyard this week. I would like you to meet Mr. Garter, the snake. We actually found 4 of them in 2 days. Very exciting. We all enjoyed some time visiting with them and getting to know them a little better. They were quiet joyful little guests. We then let them go where we found them, T-Rex had a hard time saying good-bye.

T-Rex enjoying some one on one time.

Superman taking his turn

Here is the third guest that I found in the grass.

And here was one of our guest rooms, I hope they enjoyed their stay as much as we did. :0)

*I am hoping to begin a little lapbook on our backyard, some time soon.

Let's sign and learn

I have decided to begin signing with all of my littles. I feel that this will be a good way for us to communicate with eachother in quiet places and it will help my little Butterfly express to us what she is wanting when she can't yet say it, such as Momma. She can not say Momma yet. She says many other words, dog, duck, dinosaur, bird, baby, ba-ba, da-da and diaper and thank you, there it is, that and others but she is unable to pronounce certain sounds. I found the perfect site, Born to Sign, a few years ago that I enjoyed and began doing some of it with Superman then 4 and he just revealed to me some of the signs that he remembered from then.

I am really excited about doing this. Also, I am going to really try to encourage T-Rex to enjoy some kind of learning. I do not want to push him but I really want to do some things with him. He refuses to do anything with me! Even fun things, all he wants to do is play. Thinking of the CM method I know not to push him and that it is not all that important to be formally teaching him at this point, he is only 3 nearly 4 (3 months). I have been trying to read with him and creatively disguise learning into games. He calls me out sometimes and escapes. One thing I did with him that he really loved was put 5 little orange squares on his desk each numbered 1-5 and then had 5 more bigger squares numbered 1-5 for him to match and then count. He loved it and did it over and over again. Another thing I did was play cars with him and snuck in some counting, he didn't seem to notice. I think I am going to pick up some from Letter of the Week until the end of the semester to releave some of my guilt of not doing anything with him, that is if he will entertain me with it.

Green Hour Challenge #8

Our Sweet Gum

We set out in our front yard to examine nature and find some real treasures to bring in a study more about. I told them to go look around our yard and find 3 things that you think look interesting and would like to learn more about. They came back with a Sweet Sum ball in our front yard, another little thing from the Sweet Gum tree and a little wild flower. We anxiously went inside to learn more about the little nature treasures.

We found out that the Sweet Gum balls that are so fun to play with in the front yard but not so much when you step on one were actually the fruit of the tree. From it come little winged seeds. We immediately ran outside to find these little winged seeds and sure enough they were everywhere. We took a few inside and compared it with a huge one we found a few days ago outside.

They then found that these little winged seeds made good "spinners". When they are thrown into the air on their way down they spin making them "spinners" They had a blast.

We enjoyed learning about our Sweet Gum tree. This week we have had many wonderful encounters with nature that have been very exciting. I hope to share all of these later. We did not make a journal entry this time unfortunitly. Last week I made a little nature shelf to display our collections from nature, I am glad to say it is growing quickly. Find more Green Hour Challenges at Heart of Harmony.

A Weekly Report

We had a wonderful week! A wonderful few weeks actually. Superman has been on a reading spree, I am so proud of him. He read 6 books this week. We finished all of our math sheets and Superman anwsered his test 100% correctly, :0). In history we are in Greece and loving it and all other learning that fills our life. Here are some pics from our week of learning:

A Beautiful Collection

Whenever it is possible, the pupils should themselves bring the material, as the collecting of it is an important part of the lesson.

~Handbook of Nature Study, pg 8.

I have a passionate treasure hunter that whenever he sees something that captivates him he must not exceptions bring it home. We started filling mason jars years ago and have many of them displayed in his room full of "treasures". When we started our nature walks we experienced the same thing only this time they were real treasures that we all wanted to keep. For weeks we have been collecting these little treasures from nature but sadly they all seem to meet some sort of doom because they can not find a home, well we have finally found a home for them. It is a small home that I know we be overtaken soon but the good thing about shelves is that you can add more! I am anxious to see our little collection grow as we venture more in nature. There is nothing like bringing the outside in :0).

I also found a nice little spot for our nature journals, Handbook of Nature Study and colored pencils.

2 Week Family Excursion :0)

Today was our first day back from a 2-week long Spring break! Did you hear that... 2 weeks! This was not really in my plans, I had us set out to go full speed through the end of our year but life presented the opportunity to just enjoy time and so we accepted. I have been researching so many curriculums that I feel would fit us this next year. I have decided to kind of slide Superman into the "third grade" according to curriculum, I feel he is able to very easily go right into it and in some areas he is already there so it will be a very smooth transition. We will continue to use God's Design for Science along with Nature Study and Horizons for Math along with more living math books.

We jumped back into our typical day give or take a few things here and there. It is always such a struggle to get back into our habits when we have neglected them for so long. Some habits I had just started to inforce around here and now must start all over again. It was a really good day! We enjoyed ourselves dispite the obstacles we were forced to climb over and we actually accomplished everything that was set out in my mind to accomplish. I am about to visit Barb to see about our Green Hour Challenge for this week and hope that the rain will stop so that we can venture outside to enjoy His creation.

I do have a lot of pictures to share of some Nature walks we were blessed to take and some observations from Maw Maw and Be Be's houses.