Back to School

As I mentioned in my last post, today was Mara Kate's first day of Kindergarten...at home! We are excited about homeschooling again this year and we've already had lots of fun and it's only the first day!

This morning, before Kane left for work we gave Mara Kate a new back-pack with several new school supplies inside to help make today, her first day of official school a little more special and fun. Even though she is doing her school work at home we wanted her to have a new back pack to put her current school books and work in.

Here are some pictures of some of our morning school activities.

With Daddy before he left for work

Excited about her first day.

Looking to see what was in her new back-pack...she loved the princess notebook we'll be using for spelling words.

My BIG girl....growing up entirely too quickly!

All ready to begin. :)

During story time we are reading a biography together (About Benjamin West, an American artist), so today we learned what a biography was by having Mara Kate gather 5 items that would tell something about HER, just like the book we are reading tells true things about Benjamin West. Her 5 items were: A book, because she LOVES to look at books, A bag of yellow rice, because it's one of her favorite foods, a sheet of paper, because she loves to draw pictures, an ice cream cone (cut out of paper), because she loves ice cream and a game because she loves to play games!

Math time...matching numbers to the corresponding number word.

Writing her spelling words for this week. She did great!

Hard at work...practicing her handwriting.

We also did an activity to learn a bit about geography (and the 7 continents), phonics--reviewed in the book we began last year, history and the first pilgrims to come to America, poetry--we read a poem and talked about it and the Bible verse this week is Psalm 4:6 so we are working on memorizing that as well.

It was a wonderful first day of school and at lunch we talked a little bit about what she learned, what she had fun doing and what was a challenge for her....loving spending this focused time with my girl. :)

Oh, and little sister Evelyn went down for her morning nap about 15 minutes after we started school and slept until 11am, which worked out perfectly. I'm sure naps won't always go that smoothly, but I'm thankful on our first day we had lots of time to work together uninterrupted.

Thank you Lord for the opportunity to teach Mara Kate and watch her discover and learn many new things this year!

Backyard Schooling

One of the things I love about homeschooling is how often learning happens along the way as we are just living life.

In History we recently learned a little about the city of Pompeii and how fast flowing hot lava from a nearby volcano burned and buried the city so quickly that it preserved a lot of the city's artifacts as it flowed---which apparently is rare when it comes to erupting volcanoes.

Of course Mara Kate wanted to know more about volcanoes so Kane told her they could build a pretend volcano outside in the backyard so she could better understand the way the lava flowed down the mountain and into the city of Pompeii back in 79 AD.

 Building their mountain.
As I was taking this picture I reminded her that God is the one who builds REAL volcanoes!

 They used a small glass vase in the center of their mountain

to hold the chemicals needed to cause the eruption.

 Flowing "lava"

The mountain was build at a bit of an angle so the lava ended up only flowing down one side. Oh well.

Poor Mara Kate wasn't fully satisfied though, as she was wanting to build a city at the base, 

but we didn't take the illustration quite that far.

Praying for Missionaries

As part of our daily school routine Mara Kate and I have been praying through the list of Mission to the World missionaries, which is online at mtw.org.

 We usually find the country where they live on the globe and then pray specifically for each family member. Mara Kate always wants to pray for the kids if there are any and the wife if it's a husband and wife team. :) We also look to see if they have an email address and if so we always send a short email letting them know that we prayed for them that day. Sometimes the email addresses listed are not up to date, but we've also gotten several responses from missionaries and have learned some interesting things about the places where they live. One lady sent Mara Kate a copy of the Bulgarian alphabet to compare with our alphabet. One lady told us that she doesn't have a car in the city where she is lives and that she rides her bike pretty much everywhere she goes---and she really enjoys her life there!

It's been great having interaction with some of the missionaries we have prayed for and to show Mara Kate that they sent us an email back all the way from across the ocean or from a different continent. 

This week we prayed for a family that previously served in Mexico but are actually living in the US currently to raise support to go to Columbia soon.  

We emailed them and I mentioned that Mara Kate prayed specifically for their 2 children. Their prayer card said they homeschool as well so I let them know that's what we were doing as well and that Mara Kate thought it was neat that they do it too. 

  

Just a little while later we received an email with the following picture:

So cool, right?! Mara Kate is learning to read so she figured out what this said (with a little help) and definitely thought it was cool to see them holding a sign with HER name on it! :) I love this age of email and technology and I love the fellowship in God's kingdom!

School Stuff

One of the things we have been doing with Mara Kate as part of her weekly school routine is memorization.

Each week we work with her on memorizing different bits of information or facts in several different subjects. The idea behind memorizing at this young age (when her brain is very much like a little sponge, ready to soak up lots of stuff) is that it will hopefully give her intellectual "pegs" to hang other related information on later on as she continues to learn. It should also help her to retain what she learns when she is a bit older and is studying on a deeper level, as some of it will already be vaguely familiar to her due to being exposed to the information at a young age.

Here is a video of her reciting some of her memory from our first week of school. :)

Them Bones, them bones, them dry bones...

In school for science Mara Kate has been learning about the different parts of her body. Kane's mom knew that this was one of the things we were working on and found these fun pj's to save and give to her when we got to the part of the book that talks about her bones and skeleton.

Well, today was the day! She learned about bones and we cut out leg, foot & toe bones to paste on her body outline. Then this evening we gave her the little package of new pj's and she thought they were the coolest thing!!

Here she is in her new bone pj's. Even though it's still feels like Summer here in Georgia she insisted on wearing them to bed tonight. Another cool thing about them is---the bones glow in the dark!! Ha!

P.S. I've been told that I haven't been posted nearly enough pictures of Evelyn lately----I'll try to remedy that soon---so stay tuned!!

First Day of School

Kane and I have worked hard over the past couple of months looking at and researching different school curriculum and we've finally gotten everything we want to use for this year together. We took Labor Day off and officially started "school" today with Mara Kate.

She was so excited and I was too! I think it will be so fun watching her learn new things this Fall and into the months to follow.

Here is our little "school corner" where we'll be doing school
(and also where I do my work from home part-time job).

Mara Kate's little table with all her school supplies.

For those who love stories about great deals....I found this little caddy in teh as-is section of IKEA probably about 2 years ago. It was super cute and I had no idea what I would do with it, but I knew it might come in handy at some day, so I just bought it. It has been in our attic for awhile and when I was thinking about a way to keep her books on her desk, but organized Kane reminded me of this little caddy. I ended up painting it white (it was regular wood) to match our other furniture. Kane may eventually hang it on the wall right above her table so her work space would be a little bigger. Either way, it's working great!

For part of Science this year we are going through a book called My Body. You trace an outline of your child then they color (like a coloring book) all the different organs in their body. You learn about each organ, what it's job is in your body and where it resides! The first organ we learned about this morning was our BRAIN!

Mara Kate did really well this morning during our school time and Evelyn napped while we studied...but I don't want to leave Evelyn out completely...

We'll just say she was busy learning home economics.
She was sitting here happily learning how to grate cheese! ha!