Wrapping up 2014

 I'm going to work a little bit backwards and maybe even scattered since all my pictures in a weird order! I know it's been awhile, but once I got behind on posting, it just kept piling up. Now I have a few minutes and can catch up before we begin our second semester. This is Matt and Karen. Matt has been friends with Dax since they were 14 and he is really the best host there is. I'm glad the kids could see so well how one might treat house guests. We were in Knoxville for this part of our Christmas tour of Tennessee. The kids love this couple and last time we were here, Chloe ate some pistachios Matt had in a bowl on his table. Since then, she's loved the nuts and talked about Matt mostly in relation to them.

                                       Dax and his brother loving some stuffed animals.

 Add in some cousins. I think Alex is missing his Stokes beard. Notice how they're all shaped the same.

 Backing up, before we left, the kids participated in a couple of service projects. They performed Christmas pieces on the piano for the nursing home residents.

 The moms and kids of the co-op also put together these little nativity scenes as table decorations for the nearby monestary. They asked for 23 sets! This was quite tedious to put together, but everyone had a great time.

                             Anna monogrammed some Christmas hats we can use every year now.

 The kids are showing off all the hand-sewn Indian outfits- Colin's being a suit I believe he requested. He also got some cowboy boots. He does live in Texas after all.

                                                       I love these kind of pictures best.

                                                     An attempt at all the Santa hats at once.

 Dax was pretty excited to participate in Tuba Christmas this year. They sounded great and the crowd definitely loved it.

 After that, we took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese as a surprise. I had told Colin that when he pronounced it correctly (rather than saying "ch" as "l") I would take them. Chloe is so unconcerned with earning tickets. She uses all her tokens in the portrait booth I found a whole stack of poses at our table. I do think she has the hang of it : )

 Nana gave Hannah some play makeup for Christmas and as usual in this house, you pretty much have to share. The house is too small for much privacy and the girls too close in age to feel like one is old enough or young enough to have something exclusively. I set up the bathroom mirror and they had some salon time.

                                 I'm just posting these two because they make me happy : )

 Every year we go to Bass Pro Shop for pictures with Santa. They have a few activities for kids without being overwhelming and there's almost never a line.

 At one point, our friend John told us he and his wife were pig sitting. He was so nice to bring the pig over for about an hour. Tallulah got along with the kids and Oreo great.

 Chloe talks about the tree lighting all year long. Last year it rained and was close to doing so this year, but turned out clear and relatively warm. I was excited to see a St. Nicholas there!

It especially cracked us up when Chloe sat in on the manger scene. Other kids were doing that and taking a picture, but Chloe just parked herself there and smiled at the family. We walked off a bit to give her some space and after a few minutes she got up and they all called, "Goodbye, Chloe!!"

 

 The girls played beautifully at their piano recital. It was Chloe's first performance ever. Neither girls were nervous and both played with awesome musicality. This is one of those photos I'll cherish forever. Sweet girls.

                                                    With some of the performing students.

 As an extension of the last book we left you with, Cranberry Thanksgiving, we did a few extra activities. One was trying silhouettes. They look so alike in their funny little profiles.

                                                                Here is the book picture.

 

And then ours. 

 

 We read a book called Snowflake Bentley, about the first man to photograph snowflakes. It was a great book and made us realize it wasn't that long ago that people had no idea what a snowflake truly looked like. Since the illustrations were all woodcuts, we tried a few different materials to experiment with printing. First was styrofoam. Although it printed the best, it was a terrible material to use since all the pieces flew everywhere : )

 This one turned out a little better. We also used cardboard- terrible. And play dough- not too bad.

 

We found a terrific online snowflake maker and the kids spent hours cutting virtual paper. I decided we should at least step out of the 21st century and cut our own to hang up.

 

 One day I also set up "stations." This has been recommended to me plenty of times to help the kids play on their own but with a little structure. It only worked somewhat. I had 5 stations. The girls were excited to rotate every 15 minutes, but along with it came "Is it 15 minutes yet??" Yes, I had a timer, and yes, I told them not to ask, but they were so obsessed with the timer, they could barely play! Also, Colin disagreed with the theme of almost all the stations so he was a bit of a troublemaker.

 This little play store was most popular, but overall, I'm not going to do it again, at least the way I tried it, anytime soon.

 Just for fun, I'm sharing this picture Chloe drew of "Two Swans Wearing Red Shoes."

 Colin surprised me with quite a detailed play dough dinosaur. He's never created anything this clear before. He's not excited about writing or drawing, so maybe he'll be a sculptor instead : )

 Due to his very sweet but also very stubborn personality in the last few months- okay maybe so far in his life- we weren't sure if Colin would actually perform at his Christmas program. He only downplayed it whenever we brought it up, so I thought he might be one of those kids who just stands there pouting, which is always funny if you aren't the parent haha. He got right up there and sang every song proudly and did all the hand motions. I think he cooperates best when you just hang back a little and let him do it. After 4 years, that was our very last pre-school Christmas program. I can't believe it.

I'm sure I'm missing tons of pictures and most of the ones of my family are already on Facebook.
After Christmas we realized we didn't even get pictures with many people! I wish we had since it will be so long before we see them again.

During the break I tried to get some school planning done and am working on getting the preparation more streamlined. So far, that has equaled more preparation. We are continuing with Five in a Row for at least a few more months- probably until we run out of material, but I'm also adding in some books from Charlotte Mason's curriculum. They are quite a bit more advanced than picture books, but the girls have caught on quickly. Eventually we'll be switching to that and a mixture of classical methods to go through the historical periods. Till next time, which hopefully won't take as long!

Tightrope Walk

 This week we read the book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,

the story of Phillipe Petit who walked between the twin towers.

 

Chloe's drawing is above and this is Hannah's. This topic was not in our original plans, but it all started with a question I asked in rehearsal. I turned to a fellow horn player and said, "We should have a horn dinner." He agreed, but we couldn't do it that night because his father was coming into town for the concert. The next day, I politely asked how his father's visit was and he said they had a watched documentaries. I love documentaries too, so we agreed we would exchange e-mails and give each other a list of recommended movies. On his list was Man on Wire. I watched it and was definitely intrigued. We had fun discussing it through messages and then I realized I thought I had seen a children's book about Petit and it had won a Caldecott medal. I looked it up and also found many people had made home school lessons for it. I wasn't super fond of the upcoming topic I had already planned so I scratched it and started this one. The kids absolutely loved the book right away and the story was so unbelievable to them, they were shocked to see the real photos. 

 The girls wrote a newspaper article as if they were at the event. Those first pictures were their "newspaper photos." We reviewed non-fiction and fiction

and talked about characteristics of Petit's personality. They were also fascinated that what he did was actually against the law. So is doing something amazing worth it even if it's against the law? What if he had never attempted the incredible feat for that reason? There would be no relationships with his "partners in crime,"  no eye-witnesses, no photos or documentary, no stories, no children's book, no home school lessons. His punishment certainly wasn't too harsh (sentenced to performing in parks for children) so it was debatable that breaking the law worked out pretty well for Petit and a whole lot of other people.

Above, the kids painted and collaged this simple art project to depict him walking in the early morning light.

Of course we had to try a bit of it ourselves.

 We also charted some measurements given in the book and went outside to see the distances for ourselves.This first one, if you can see the kids that far away, is the distance between the two towers.
Yikes! In an interview I read, Petit said the walk wasn't the scary part, it was properly setting up the cables. The fact that the main cable slipped and dropped a few hundred feet meant it took his partners 3 hours just to pull it back up sounds like an ominous beginning, but it was a great lesson in not giving up when obstacles are in your way. I need to learn that lesson better for sure.

 To get the wires from one tower to the other, they shot a bow and arrow. The documentary shows them practicing this in a field. In this photo, I am in Petit's position and Hannah is in the position of where the arrow landed, just on a ledge about 15 feet away and below Petit. He had to crawl to get it. 

 Here they're demonstrating the length of the balancing pole Petit held as he danced and reclined on the wire. Chloe is Petit this time : ) We had a great time with this lesson. I highly recommend watching Man on Wire. Know that it is not geared toward children, so I didn't watch it with the kids. We watched YouTube clips of Petit instead. The children's book also mentions that the towers are no longer there and leaves it at that. So it gives the story an accurate and poignant ending, while leaving it to the parents to explain further if they want. We did talk briefly about what happened because of course they asked what happened to the towers, but it was painful to explain to such innocent little children how terribly humans can act. I could sense how far to go with the explanation but I felt so disappointed there was even something to explain. I don't know how I will deal with future history lessons since so much of human history has been formed by evildoings.
The highlight, though, was that I had a photo of me on a visit to New York and the twin towers are in the background. They thought that was amazing.

At church the kids did some turkey hand painting.

 I saw something on Pinterest about giving kids some foil and other odds and ends to sculpt with. This seemed like a great way to give the kids some "busy work." Hannah came up with this contraption.

 Colin created some kind of planetary object.

 As a precursor to an upcoming week on instruments, we took the kids to the UNT instrument repair shops. Ann has repaired mine and Dax's instruments several times over the years and she was so nice  to host us for an afternoon.

 She banged a few dents into an old trumpet bell and showed how she used the vice to roll the dents out. She showed us several tools and the chemical and degreasing baths she gives the instruments. A jazz trombone student came into the shop so the kids got to see how quickly her horn was repaired and heard her play.

 Then we walked next door to see Ann's brother, Joel, who runs the string repair shop. He showed us the inside of a bass he was working on, we saw a buffer machine, and he made each kid a tail of horse hair he uses for bows. They thought that was pretty cool.

 Ann also took us to the piano repair shop where Hannah was interested in the inner workings and we saw how thick the low note strings are. Finally we quickly saw the reed making room where a bassoonist showed the kids her reed in progress. It was a great trip and the kids had some great questions, most of which were understandably, "what's that??"

This week and it's looking like next, we're reading a book called Cranberry Thanksgiving. It sounds pretty ho-hum but it's actually quite a funny tale and opens up lots of learning opportunities. The kids especially love the artwork and one page makes me laugh every time I see it. So the explanation for Chloe's face above is that they were very excited to try cranberries! I said I'd only eaten them dried, cooked, and in juice, but they could try a raw one. You can see it went over really well. Haha. She made this face for 5 solid minutes and at each meal has requested I do NOT put cranberries on her plate! At first I felt a little bad she was so excited and then disappointed in the taste, but that was actually more of an experience to remember, right? : )

 I'm trying to give the kids more time to explore rather than have every moment dictated. Being homeschooled comes with the stigma of not being independent sometimes, and although these kids are certainly independent when it comes to certain things, they rely far too much on me to give instructions for every moment of their day. I'm constantly pushing them to work without waiting for me to answer questions to think out problems on their own. It's a long road ahead, but more activities like this will help- along with my being consistent. I'm finding I expect a little too much on the front end and could stand to give more thorough explanations in general, which would likely result in less needy questions as they do the work. It's a learning process. Anyway, I gave them a tray of tools and they spent awhile doing whatever they liked to explore the cranberries. They discovered they floated! They discovered the seeds on the inside and that when boiled, they give off a red dye.

 They wrote down adjectives to describe the berries as they played. We watched a couple of videos about cranberry bogs, and they were surprisingly beautifully done. I've seen the bogs on Ocean Spray commercials like everyone else, but the whole process is so neat to watch. One of the videos had some pretty background music and the kids literally oohed and aahed over the helicopter sweeps of the floating cranberries. Hannah thought it kind of sad they were picked at all.

 They returned to foil activities by each "designing" a boat to hold cranberries. They got so excited about this one, they all wanted to get in with the cranberries. Old me would have been a spoil-sport as I am with way too many things, but I'm trying to improve so I said "sure," as long as they actually cleaned themselves in the process : )

We're hoping to make cranberry bread tomorrow and to move on to the more historical aspects of Thanksgiving.