Can you tell I am a visual learner? I love the written word, but I usually "get it" better if I have never seen it by seeing it first! :) So I have a slew of pictures from our school fun last week, and a special video from today! Last week Jake and I were reading Katy-No-Pocket. It is a great book for learning about different animals. This is a picture of Jake the Kangaroo, with his pockets full of animal friends!

Here is Kangaroo Jake hopping around the house, sorry it is sideways, It is just going to have to stay that way!!
Here is a handicraft we did last week together. We made Fleece scarves! Very useful because the boys did not have one and fun because we made them. I got the idea from Me and My Girl, I had to simplify a little bit for our babes, but they LOVED it! Here they are wearing theirs and showing the gigantic one they made for Dad. They also made one for a friend who's birthday was last Fri. and they were quite happy to give him a gift they made even with all the other light it up, making noise kind of toys that he received!
They were Oh so excited to have camo fleece, and I was oh so happy it was on the clearance table!!

Now we have been in this school year for 7 weeks, and every time I told Riley we were going to learn to read he would turn off. If I even touched the book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" he would grone. It was awful!

So I thankfully decided to try another way. And I offered Riley 2 options, learn to read with a few short words and then work on a Little Bear book off my shelf, or learn a few words and read from the Book of Mormon. He choose Little Bear, so we did two of Lindafay's lessons today.. a MIRACLE!!!!! Watch!

Well today we started our Composer Study for the next 6 weeks, The Ballet! Now this was not a foreign concept to my children. The Orchestra was more so. They have been indoctrinated from the beginning, ballet is... life. You see long before I was their Mama, I was a dancer. I breathed dancing, I danced when I was not dancing! So this is great to share with my kids!

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My kids know what the Nutcracker is, I first saw it when my mom took me when I was 5, and that is when I started collecting nutcrackers. But this year I will share it with them. This is the CD we have, it is the COMPLETE Nutcracker, not the "best of" that is most available. I would rather they make their very own best of!

But before we started listening to it this morning I introduced them to ballet the dance by showing them a dancer EVERY little boy should see, Mikhail Baryshnikov! There are no other words to add, all you have to say is Baryshnikov... that is it! I highly suggest going to youtube and watching any of the Baryshnikov clips you can! I could spend hours doing this and still want more.

Then I thought it would be great for them to have an object to hold to better understand, so I pulled out my old toe shoes from my days on pointe. They were so excited and interested, and by the end they had talked me into them, literally! They were impressed I was taller than Daddy when up on toe! :) And Jake has spent the rest of the day asking me to put them back on and dance for him. Maybe I will have my own little Baryshnikov!
Don't look too closely, I did not tie them correctly, and my feet are not as pretty as they were before years of dancing! :) And my back foot is not turned out! But it was a great object lesson and I hope they enjoy it as much as they enjoyed Peter and the Wolf!

Now if you will please excuse me as I Pirouette my way to bed!

Oh my where have I been, well we took a fall break for our trim to Calif. and then we got home and fought the stomach flu for almost a whole week, so finally today we are getting back into the swing of school. I was sad to abruptly stop the nice rhythm we had started and now we are tiring to jump back in!

For Jake we are working on Katy-No-Pocket still, we just never got to start it, let alone finish it! :) We are also doing the letters K and W.

With Riley we are in our 7th week of term 1. We are on lessons 17,18, & 19 in our Abeka Math, Ch. 7 in A Child's History of the World & Ancient World p. 12-13, Ch 5 in This Country of Ours, Ch. 15-16 in Paddle to the Sea, We are reading As You Like It for our Shakespeare study, Our new Artist for this 6 weeks is Rembrandt, our composer study is learning about the ballet, we will be listening to the Nutcracker and I am hoping to find a performance to go to as the holidays approach, plus the various stories, fables, poems, and such. Oh and for our Nature Study we are concentrating on the Heavens for this next 6 weeks.

The scripture we are working on memorizing as a family is Moses7:18 "And the lord called his people Zion,because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them."

Yesterday just for fun we read a book I remembered as a kid, that I found in the library. Stone Soup by Marcia Brown

This of course lead the boys to wanting stone soup for dinner! So we got out our soup stone and made soup. It was a lentil and wild rice soup, but the kids ate 3 bowls each! Riley kept telling me how magical the stone must be to make such good soup. I wonder if I could put the stone in every dinner? Maybe I could put it in Borscht and then Dan would eat it!! (He gages just at the word) So here is our fun read book recommendation for the day!! If you read it with your kids please let us know how you liked it and how your soup turned out!