Au revoir, France! ECC week 15 France (Europe)

Book basket books for week 2 in France:
Took a walk last weekend. Loving the fall colors...
*click any picture to enlarge*

She was hoping a leaf would fall down right into her waiting hand =)

Classification activity: hard to do with all the different objects they brought to the table, but we managed!

We only have on more country to learn for our geography game!

Working on making the Eiffel tower. What a challenge!

They got this far and called it good =) Savannah made the background for it. Not exactly geographically correct, but it'll do =)

COOKING DAY!!

I didnt realize, until I looked up french recipes, how complicated alot of them are! I was unaware of the fact that some of the ingredient lists would be longer that my week long grocery shopping receipt. Ok, maybe I am exaggerting a TAD, but wow. I am a 5 ingredients or less kind of gal. Ordering out is even better. =)

But I got a little bit of my Paula Dean mojo going by turning this....

into this!
And this.......
Into this! (baked brie)

The table: We had: casse-croute (basically grilled cheese), baked brie in a pastry crust with honey, apple cake (suppose to be apple tarts but we cheated and made apple cake), strawberries for the crepes, french onion and potato soup (both from cans, cuz I can!), french bread, croissants and crepes.

No one liked the french onion soup, the older 2 liked the potato soup, everyone liked the croissants and french bread, the older 3 liked the casse-croute, everyone (including me) LOOOOOVED the crepes w/ fresh strawberries in them and powered sugar on top-oh.my.word. No one really cared for the brie and crackers or the baked brie. I thought it was quite tasty!

Happy girls awaiting their feast!

Yum.

Tornado boy had set up an audience to watch his 2 trains go 'round and 'round the checker board....

I come back 10min later to to a sold out crowd =)

See you next week in Germany!

Homeschool Park Day

We had a park day today with some moms from one of our local homeschool groups. It was in an area of town I rarely go to, so I was unfamiliar with it, but we really liked it. Not too much playground equipment, but right behind me, as I am taking this photo is a LARGE grassy area (bigger than the inside of a football field) witha nice 10' wide sidewalk all the way around it!!
I figure maybe sometime I can take the girls to play there with my dad (who is retired and is a good watchdog for us) and I can do my runs while the girls play!
It was a beautiful day out, so I had no guilt what so ever about playing hooky from homeschool.
Well, I guess it doesn't really count as hooky when we did the MFW portion of school yesterday with Wednesdays work and will do the 3R's stuff tomorrow =)
Tomorrow is our last day in France!
We went shopping today for some food with which to celebrate. To be quite honest, I had a hard time finding anything I wanted to make. Either there was too much dairy (we have intolerance in our family) or WAY too many ingredients. So I went easy and cheap!
I bought a can each of French Onion Soup and Potato Soup so the girls could try them....French bread (because what's a study of France without some French Bread?)....strawberries to fill the crepes we will hopefully make tomorrow....and we also bought apples. I was going to make an apple tart, but decided to change things and make an Apple Cake-we LOVE apple cake. Oh and I bought some Brie. Apparently, Walmart doesnt carry guyere cheese. Or I just wasn't looking in the right place-quite possible actually.

On a side note, I will be running my next race on Halloween....with my hubby!!
I have wanted him to run a race with me for a long time now (well, I HAVE only been running since July so I guess 'long time' is relative)...it IS an afternoon race so I am a bit concerned about that-all my runs and races have been in the morning thus far...AND its my longest distance yet- a 15K (9.3 miles)! So please pray that I will be able to run it strong and steady.

As long as I dont puke at the end, I'll count it a victory. Actually, in the runner's world, if you DO puke, THAT'S when you count it as a victory. =)

ECC Week 14 France (Europe) and the zoo!

Bonjour!
We just finished our first week in France. Here are our the contents of our book basket for this week. I pre-read them all. Great books!
The girls put their France flag sticker in their passports. WITH a snack of pretzels on the side, of course. We seem to be incapable of doing any 'together' school without a snack.

Our France coloring page....

Geography game. We only have 3 more countries on here to learn! I may add more of the ones that My Father's World didnt include (Denmark, Netherlands, Belguim etc...)

Vocab cards for the week....

We have enjoyed reading more of Kingdom Tales this week and cant WAIT to get to the 'Tales of Restoration' part of it. We are also really liking George Muller and reading about Menno Simons in Hero Tales. What courage!

The girls were a little grossed out to learn that one of the main sources of nutrients in a cave for the animals that reside there is bat guano! YUCK!

We also really liked listening to the Irish and Scottish music on our 'Wee Sing' CD so I may try to find some more of the same online later this upcoming week.

THE ZOO!

My parents called me Monday morning OUT OF THE BLUE and said 'Hey, you guys wanna go to the zoo?' !!!!
I knew they had planned on going this week sometime, but I expected a least a 24 hour notice. We didn't plan on going AND I had school all laid out for the day, but I figured, this is one of the beauties of homeschooling-doing fun stuff on a whim!

So the school stuff got pushed aside for the day (we did end up making it up, as we squished Thursdays work in with Fridays).

The weather was PERFECT on this day, NO wind, a little cloud cover. Probably around 70. Prefection.

The girls, myself and my parents on what I like to call the 'photo op lions', at the front of the zoo.

The aquarium. I think the girls could spend an entire day in here. We never get tired of it.

Running has been going really well. You can check out my fitness blog to read more about my journey to fit!! FITGIRLWANNABE

ECC Week 13 Days 3-5 Norway (Europe) and other stuff

We have been LOVING these cooler temps! As is probably evident by my absence here. We have been outside a lot and going on walks.
ECC Week 12 Days 3-5

Here are our vocab cards of this week....
and our 'pretty verses'....

We enjoyed Norway!

On the 8th, we were invited by another homeschooling family to go to a Pumpkin Patch. I haven't been to a pumpkin patch since before kids, and the girls have NEVER gone, so they were quite excited. This line up here was about 22 kids, from about 7 mommas. And this didnt show all the kids 2 and under. We were a big group!

Took a hayrack ride out to the patch of pumpkins. Each paying child got to have 1 free pumpkin...

Then it was back up to the main part of the farm to enjoy the animals....

The girls had a BLAST and can't wait to go back!

ECC Week 13 Days 1-2 Norway + other stuff

Hello folks! I am still in bit of shock that we are in OCTOBER!! Where did the summer go? In our area, our first snow fall last year was on the 10th of October, only 5 days from now! I am hoping it holds off for at least another 2 or 12 weeks =)

Ok, non-school stuff first...my race on Sunday was AWESOME!!!! I have started an exercise journal on wordpress, so that's where I will be posting my workouts from now on, so you can check out that full race report there... FITGIRLWANNABE scroll down to the bottom for my race report.
In short, I OBLITERATED my previous 5K personal best, which was 32:19 (well, race personal best) from my race on August 28th. I was hoping to beat it by at least 30 seconds which would have been a really good improvement over 5-6 weeks, but I ran it in 29:00!!!!! I sprinted hard the last 50 yards and thought I was going to puke at the end, which apparently is how you are suppose to feel if you give it your all, so I guess I did my part. =)

I went biking yesterday morning and this morning at Lake Z close to my house. Yesterday I saw 6 deer, a couple huge flocks of geese and a few cranes. This morning, I saw 4 deer, more flocks of geese, some cranes and about 6 turkey!
The highlight yesterday was that one of the 6 deer I saw was SO close off the side of the trail that I could have reached out and touched him. Literally, he was 2 feet off my right side. How cool is that. I dont know WHERE his mind was, or if I all of a sudden tapped into my inner super power and became invisible but he acted like I wasnt even there, that I wasnt just whipping by him at 10 miles an hour, quite weird. OR maybe he thought HE had tapped into his inner invisi-deer and I couldn't see HIM...who knows....?
Todays highlight...as I was huffing and puffing around the west side of the lake (always the hardest for me) I heard something rustle off to my left so I stopped and 6 huge turkey (ok, maybe more, didnt count them) crossed the trail, about 10 feet behind my bike!
And a bit of weirdness, there were a LOT of dead mice on the trail...is the cold getting to them? Are they starving? Am I scaring them to death with my super speed? Don't know. All I know is its like playing Mario Kart and trying to avoid the bananas....yuck.

Ok.

ECC Week 13 Days 1-2 Norway

Not too many pictures for the past few days...
Here is one of the coloring pictures the girls did while I do our read alouds...
World Geography pages that Savannah and Ariel did (quite challenging for them actually)

Living World Encyclopedia illustration

We STILL havent finished our rosemaling boxes, hopefully we will do that at SOME point this week. I am kind of slacking the art department, its just not my 'gift' or 'forte' if you will. If you want to see a really awesome My Father's World blog, check out Miranda at a moment in My Father's World

Yeah. She's all kinds of awesome.

ECC Week 12 Days 3-5 Norway, and other stuff =)

Wow! I feel so special!! My first award =)
A big thank you to Miranda at A Moment in My Father's World for this super lovely 'One Lovely Blog' award.
The Rules: Share 3 things I think are Lovely
1: My God
2: My Family
3: Homeschooling

Now, I need to pass on the loveliness to 3-5 blogs that I find wonderfully lovely....
A New Day in My Father's World

Farming Wisconsin

Life the Way we Do it

The rules, should you choose to accept it: =)
1: Put the one Lovely Blog award logo on your blog
2: in a new post, share 3 things that you think are lovely
3: pass the award on to 3-5 other bloggers
4: link the nominees in your post
5: let the nominees know they have won the award by commenting on their blog
6: share the love and link to the person from whom you received the award

Disclaimer: No need to pass the award on if you dont want to or dont have time to. I'll still love ya =)




We went to the zoo on Thursday. We figured we better enjoy it as much as we can before the cold weather really hits!

This gorilla was HILARIOUS! His expressions were so funny. He liked to making 'hooting' noises at people who came to his window, then when they left, he would look down the hall to see who was coming next. I caught this picture a millisecond too late, right before this is TRULY looked like he was grinning!

This gorilla kept giving everyone the evil eye. Recession is getting EVERYONE down apparently =)

Yesterday I went to pick up my race packet for my race on Sunday, here it all is! I am SO excited.

ECC Week 12 Day 3-5 NORWAY

Vocab cards for this week....

Memory verse for this week....

Coloring page....

These are the countries that we have worked with this week on our Europe map. We have 8 more to learn this upcoming week and then I hope to add in a few that MFW didnt include....

Savannah doing her World Geography page...

Non-school stuff:

Went biking this morning for the first time in a few weeks. It was so great to get back in the saddle! However, I was unprepared for the temp (low 40s) and I think I lost one of my ears. BRRR. Lesson learned: next time, bring ear muffs!

I am excited and nervous for my race tomorrow. The temp is suppose to be 41 at start time. The coldest I have run in is 49 and I wore a long sleeve shirt with a tank top underneath and shorts, 5 minutes into that run, I ended up having to take the LS shirt off...SO I was going to wear that same set up tomorrow when I was checking the temps earlier this week (when it was saying race morning would be between 46-49) but it keeps getting lower and lower, and NOW its saying we have a frost advisory tonight! Yikes! So I am thinking I may have to bust out the running tights tomorrow even though I havent worn them yet to run in-I'm a bit nervous about that.

I just don't want to be too warm because I know I will warm up quite a bit once I get going...

Apparently what some people do is wear 'throw away clothes' over their race clothes at the beginning of the race and they strip them at the start or right after the start when they warm up. And then they throw them on the side of the road!

Apparently, the race 'people' pick these up after the race and donate them to charity-so that's an option....I'll just have to see what it feels like tomorrow. The last thing I want to do is overdress.

Wish me luck! I'll give you a full report Monday or Tuesday!