Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, Friends!

I thought I'd share some of our Easter projects with you tonight. We've been doing a Grapevine Bible study on The Last Supper and found this adorable craft to go with it:

The bowls hold some of the results of a wonderful tradition of getting together with our friends to color eggs every year. We've been doing it since our oldest God-daughter, Sarah, was 4 or 5 years old. This year, her new husband joined us!

And yes, we do blow out the eggs so that we can save them. A drill and a bicycle pump make that job a little easier!

Of course, we had to look at Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper. This link will take you to a page where you can view it pre- and post-restoration. And here is a short video that discusses the painting.

Since we studied the artist Benjamin West last year, we took a look at his version of the Last Supper as well. It's very different, but you can see that he was influenced by DaVinci's painting.

This evening after dinner, we made these little empty tombs for tomorrow. The directions can be found here. They were so simple but the boys absolutely loved making them! Tomorrow, they will all have little "He is Risen!" banners. Before bed, we read a book that we just discovered and absolutely LOVE about a rooster that witnesses the crucifixion but rejoices in new life 3 days later.

Have a blessed Easter!

Mrs. Katz and the Passover

Last week, we learned all about Passover with a sweet Five in a Row book, Mrs. Katz and Tush. In the book, an elderly Jewish lady is befriended by a neighbor family and eventually adopted as their "Bubee." She tells the boy the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt as they share the Passover Seder together.

We covered many of the FIAR lessons, including:

• "Love your neighbor as yourself." - we memorized Luke 10:27 and used it as copywork and cursive practice.
• We read the story of the Exodus and made really cute (I know that just seems wrong, but they really are cute) little books of the 10 plagues that I found at Homeschoolshare.com
• A yeast experiment - mix yeast and sugar in a bottle of warm water and put a balloon over the top. That worked so well that we had to secure our balloon with electrical tape.
• We talked about patterns, tried drawing our own and looked at these National Geographic patterns in nature.
• We learned all about Passover with The Matzah That Papa Brought Home.
• We learned about Warsaw, Poland during WWII and why Mrs. Katz left in The Cats in Krasinski Square.
• We learned quite a few yiddish words, ate bagels and attempted to polka. :)

I like to have a picture of the books to show you. However, Amazon apparently no longer supports just the picture of the books without the purchase information. I am not trying to sell anything here. Of course, I'm not against anyone using these links, because I will get a commission, but that isn't my reason for putting them there.

We've got you covered Jesus

I thought the nativity looked a little different when I walked by today...

"Stable has been secured!"

"Repeat, the stable is secure. Over."

Christmas plans

As we do each year, we're changing our homeschool focus a bit during the Christmas season. We do a little less seat-work, a little more reading and a little more crafting.

Doing dot to dots with the beloved football pen

In past years, we've done Christmas unit studies like the 12 Days of Christmas and the names of Jesus. This year, we're just doing a bunch of different "Christmasy" things:

• Reading the prophecies of Christ's birth and the verses that show their fulfillment, and hopefully making a chart of everything
• Completing a timeline of the events of the nativity using classic artwork and looking at another from the Met here.
• Learning some beautiful Christmas carols
• Reading LOTS of Christmas books - some are listed below.
• Memorizing Matthew 1:21 and Isaiah 9:6
• Going to a local "walk through Bethlehem"
• Visiting the Festival of trees
• Making gifts and ornaments

Check out this really cute nativity set to color and wrap around toilet paper tubes.

Little Man doing some nature study from inside the nice, warm house. We could actually examine individual snowflakes on the window sill!

Christmas books we love:

Bright Christmas: An Angel Remembers by Andrew Clements

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

The Christmas Tapestry by Patricia Polacco

And some new Christmas books we'll be reading this year to go along with our American history studies:

Christmas in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

An Early American Christmas by Tomie DePaola

Miracle in the Wilderness: A Christmas Story of Colonial America by Paul Gallico

Enjoy your Christmas season!

Our Thanksgiving ABCs book

We've been working on a Thanksgiving ABCs lapbook this past week and I have to tell you about it because it has actually worked out even better than I hoped! I LOVE that! I found it here. You do need to join her Yahoo group in order to download the file.

The cover

At first, I thought that just Little Man and I would work on it. He's been having a grand time cutting out the little booklets, tracing the letters and pasting in pictures from google images* and stickers from my scrapbook stash.

Then Z-Man showed some interest and I realized that this is a great narration tool! The booklets are quite small and he hasn't exactly mastered the art of teeny tiny writing yet so he narrates and I write. I'm always amazed at what he remembers (and I'm sometimes amazed at what he doesn't, but we're staying positive here.) For instance, for one of the booklets on the Mayflower, he told me, "A guy named John Howland fell overboard and was miraculously saved when he grabbed a rope that just happened to be hanging out of the ship." Seriously? After all the people we've read about (a LOT of whom seem to be named John) you remember the name of the guy who fell overboard? Love that!

The first page.

The first page opened up.

Happy Thanksgiving, All!

*I don't look them up with my kids though! I'm always astounded at the nasty images that even the most innocent google images search can turn up.