Cuteness!

Way too often, I forget to write down the cute things that my girls say. So here are a few recent ones!

Valerie as we are driving in the car: "Mommy, I saw Daddy's car!"
Me as I also see his car: "How do you know that is Daddy's car?"
Valerie: "Look, it says 'Jason' on it!"
Me laughing as I realize that she think the Oxifresh sign on his car is his name! How cute!

Jason and I cuddling on the couch as we watch a movie. Valerie come up to us.
Valerie: "Can I marry you Mommy and Daddy?"
Us: laughing
Valerie: "You may now kiss the bride Daddy!"
I love that she sees us cuddling and relates it to being married and that being a wonderful thing! :)

Lily was watching Nester the Long Eared Donkey. I look over at her and she was crying. She looked so pretty as she delicately cried and tried to hold back the tears. I turned to her and said, "why are you crying?" She said, "I'm crying because I am happy. This is the part where he carried Mary to the stable so Jesus could be born! " It was such a beautiful moment to see her sweet heart!

October

 I am a little unorganized with my blog about October homeschooling. Valerie's lessons were pretty much the same as last month. We are just focusing on letters, numbers, drawing, tracing, etc.

 Lily worked on a social studies unit about Kansas and farming! She wrote a paper about it. She needs to still edit her work and then do a final copy!  Above is a picture she drew of herself! She does not really like art, but she is getting better and better at it!

 Valerie loves to draw and color. She always has. This is a picture she drew of herself! She also wrote her whole first name! She thought the letter "e" was pretty hard, but otherwise did great!

Lily also has been doing great at math. We started doing fractions this month and addition with carrying. I have been very impressed with her work!

Valerie at school

Valerie had her first day in class at New Life Co-op. She learned about the letter A and she learned the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper. She did crafts and sang The Ants Go Marching! She can't wait until next week!

Second grade and preschool

Yay! I love the beginning of a new school year! I love the structure in our routine! I have just a few pictures from their first week back to school. Valerie is ready for preschool so I am going to tell you what she is working on right now. She loves her ABC chart that is in her room. We sing the abc's, we practice recognizing letters, and we work on the letter sounds!

We are also working on journal writing with Valerie. She is only 3 1/2 so she can write Val independently, but she is tracing all of her other words or we are doing hand over hand! After a week and a half, I am already seeing improvement!

Valerie also has a number chart that she works on for counting to 20 and recognizing numbers!

So onto Lily! At six years old, she is ready for second grade and doing so great!! We love our new lifepack social studies curriculum. It is actually suppose to be 3rd grade level, but has been very good for Lily. We are learning about different states and then what is unique about it. Right now we are studying Maine and lobster fishing! It has been so engaging and Lily is learning new words. She really struggled on her first test, but we corrected and learned from it. Hopefully she will do better on the next test!

I got Lily a new dictionary this year and it has already been getting lots of use.

This was just a little update on what the girls are doing in school. They go to their back to school co-op picnic on the 30th so I will post more pictures then!

Starting to log hours!

Homeschooling is so much fun!

We are starting out the homeschool year. Technically we don't need to log hours for another year, but I really want to practice at it before we are mandated to do it. So this year, I will be trying to manage how many hours Lily does in each subject.

July already started out with a science camp at the Orion Science Center and Dinospace Adventure Fun Park. Lily was there for three hours and did 20 hours of instructional time. On the first day, they learned about archaeologists, paleontologists, and dinosaurs. They worked on digging for bones in a dig pit, working on getting bones out of a hard block, making molds to send off to museums, dissecting owl pellets to study the bones, and much more.

On the second day, she learned about space. She made a sun with space facts in it, shot off water rockets and paper rockets to learn about arodynamics, played with a hot air balloon, and much more.

On the third day, they learned about erosion and volcanoes. They also did lots of fun science experiments and talked about the scientific process! What a great time of learning!

Also as a part of social studies/geography, Lily has been sending Flat Lily to other areas. My friend Lori and her kids took Flat Lily around Monroe, Louisiana! We just love learning about different areas of our country!

Lily's first book report

This week we started our summer school program. We are doing the library reading program through the library and it has wonderful incentives to keep Lily interested in reading! Lily also just completed her first ever book report. She did it all by herself and turned it in to me!

Valerie has also been doing school work. Here she is tracing her numbers and counting and coloring the objects!
I love the face she made! Oh and I helped her with making the twos. Those were hard!
Lily is also learning spanish as a part of her summer school and she is picking up on it quickly. After the first two days, she is easily counting to 10 in spanish. Now we are working on numbers 11-20!

We love doing school together!

What we have been up to!

The last month has been crazy busy so I thought I would write an update. In May we were busy with Lily's kindergarten graduation ceremony with her co-op friends. We were also finishing up the school work. Lily was very ready for a break so we took three weeks off from school work!

The weather has been beautiful so we have been at the pool everyday for the past three weeks. Lily even took swim lessons at the community center! She fell in love with jumping off of the diving board and improved greatly on her swimming. We might have her back in lessons at the end of July if we can find time!

We have also been swimming in the river and going to the Jordan Valley Fountains. We love this busy time of the year.

An extra challenge we have had is foster care. Lately we have had a bunch of calls. I think there are more this time of the year due to vacations and the fact that neighbors pick up on what their neighbors are doing. In the winter we all get a little closed off by staying inside.

We had two little girls who stayed with us for a week. They were similar ages to Lily and Valerie so it was great fun! Right now we have had a little baby girl for 2 weeks and it is a definite challenge. Sometimes I am so impressed with myself that I can take four kids, with two of those being babies, out and about everywhere. Other times, I am tired...especially waking up all through the night again. I must admit that although we want to adopt at some point, right now is probably not the right time for another baby!

Something else exciting is that Jason is finally done with his newspaper route! YAY! We learned a lot through that experience. Jason was delivering papers in the middle of the night and then trying to work his regular job so that we could make extra money. We learned that sometimes you need to know when God is opening the door to an opportunity and that you have to listen to God when it is the right time to close the opportunity. Jason kept that job longer than was beneficial to us and caused our family so much stress. Him being tired all the time was not worth it at all. God has always provided for our needs so we don't need to worry so much and keeping a job that hurts the family is not a good idea!