Our home school group's last meeting of the "school" year had Cory Mason of the Texas Department of Parks & Wildlife as a guest speaker. This is the second year he has been our speaker. I am told he brought bones of various animals indigenous to our area of Texas last year. I didn't get to make it to that meeting. This year however he caught some wild animals for us to see.

He brought snakes....

Which actually made our group's second snake lecture because we had a lady from the TDPW speak to us last year. She had allowed the kids to hold a corn snake that they have for educational proposes. The is no way to properly express how I feel about snakes. The words Hate or Ick are not strong enough. Still I appreciate that the have their own purpose designed by God and if you can get past the "ICK" of the whole thing they can be seen as pretty in their own way.... I endured it last year because it is very important here in the country for the children to learn how dangerous snakes are and to identify which ones are poisonous. Needless to say, I was not thrilled to have to be around snakes again...and these were wild snakes NOT the program used to being handled kind of snakes. (Note: no one handled these snakes but Mr. Mason)

However, Mr. Mason was a great speaker and I'm sure the kids could do snake a review and reminder with it coming up on summer.....OK Honestly, the kids could see the snakes yearly again and again and not mind a bit......I have issues.

BUT....What I was really excited about was the other animal he caught for us to see! And I DID pet it! I petted it gingerly and not without jerking my hand back a couple of times and holding my breath a little but I DID pet it.


Isn't it cool!? A little alligator! Now this was a new lecture for us and we really did enjoy learning all about the alligators here in Texas! Gee.... I wish my oldest Heather was here. She Loves Alligators!

This was ribbon snake was the one snake I didn't mind so much. It still gave me the ibby-jibbies but I could also admire it's beauty.

Well, our soccer season has come to an end. Now, I'll have to hear my children's constant question, "When does soccer start again?" until next season. Here are Emily's and Brandon's pictures from the awards party. I noticed I made two glaring mistakes with these pictures: 1. I'm in them. 2. I let the kids play before they received their awards.

PS. Note the nifty soccer bead necklace Emily made me especially for the party?

Brandon and I made these copper and bamboo wind chimes a while back. We made them with green bamboo. I've been waiting for the bamboo to age before posting a picture of them. They have a lovely sound. Only the center piece doesn't seem to be quite big enough to make it sound often unless there is high wind. Right now it is a fat piece of bamboo. If I can find a piece of wood that is not too heavy but wide enough to make it clink (can't really say they chime) more often then I'll replace the center piece.

Brandon worked too incredibly hard on this lap book to not at the very least post pictures of it. We downloaded it from CurrClick http://www.currclick.com. This lap book by www.knowledgeboxcentral.com is crammed packed with info and huge by our standards. Three file folders and over 28 little booklets of information! I really appreciated the detailed instructions with pictures on how to assemble it that were included. They also included articles for him to get the information to fill out all his little booklets so he didn't have to scourer the internet. Every thing you needed was right there in the Acrobat file! All in one is a big plus for me. (I believe I've mentioned my lazy streak before, no?) It took a long time for him to complete but if he didn't learn anything else this year I am confident he learned all about Ancient Greece. I downloaded another one from the same site by the same company about Ancient Rome just a couple of days ago. Hopefully, it won't take him as long to complete but if he does as nice a job on it as he did this one it will be worth it!

PS. I confess I colored the cover page. I also colored all the pictures on our Ancient Greece bulletin board. So what? I like to color. Big bonus of having children ... having an excuse to still do things children like to do!

PSS We also made this really cool Medusa mask: http://www.clevelandart.org/Kids/art/mask/index.html

And....

Got the recipe and supplies to make our own Baklava. I'll have to let you know how that turns out.

Emily's room has been over crowded for a while now. The obvious answer would be to purge 1/2 her toys and have her Daddy stop buying them. However, since neither of them seem to agree with me the next best thing was to get rid of her full size bed and replace it with a cute little day bed. I found this one at a garage sale last weekend for a steal! Of course we have no twin size sheets for it but they will come, oh yes they will... Step one in mission redecorate Emily's room complete. I will have my way on this one....Oh, yes I will.

Mom's little "pond" in her back yard has become a breeding ground for frogs! She brought us these tadpoles. A lot of them already had back legs, but it seems we have a few in each stage of development. We even have a couple bigger ones that are obviously completely different kinds of frogs from the others!

When Nannaw brought us the tadpoles she also brought a set of drums for Brandon that she found at a garage sale. They didn't have a bass pedal with them so I've ordered him one along with some drum sticks and a Book/DVD set titled Drums for Absolute Beginners. Pray for me.

Last Saturday the kids and I were blessed to participate in the Relay for Life. It was at a local school track from 7 PM to 7 AM. It was really cold and damp so I didn't feel too incredibly blessed all night long, but it was a blessing. Our family honored cancer survivors Ward Dixon (local home school dad) and Luann Dodd (my mom). We also honored our family members lost to cancer Bobby Parker (my grandfather) and Jerry Dodd (my step-dad). The luminaries were beautiful all lit up around the track and touching to see how much work went into some of them. The luminaries on the bleachers say Cure. Earlier in the night they said Hope but I missed that picture. The night consisted of walking around the track for pledges and bundling up in blankets. Each booth also sold things so they were earning money for the cause all the way to the last moment. They had lots of fun themed laps to keep things going, they also played music, and had other games. My favorite as you can see in the picture was the "Dude Looks Like a Lady" Contest.

This post has been a long time in coming. I post the above picture not because I look particularly good or I want you to know exactly how much junk I keep on top of my fridge, but because the hair in that picture has a story to tell. See, I'm in the throes of bad hair.

I did go in March for my nephew's wedding and get a fairly expensive hair cut. When the stylist fixed it I looked sassy and sheik. However, I haven't been able to do a darn thing with it since. That makes the second cut I've gotten that doesn't take me back to that one perfect cut I got about 2 years ago where my hair almost fixed itself into a nice trendy look simply by blow drying it.

By nature I am a lazy person. A lazy person with the desire to have hair that looks like I've spent hours on it when in truth I'm slightly hair retarded and it wouldn't matter how long I spent on it, it would still look bad. So, I've been tossing around the thought of getting a body wave to release me of my hair won't style woes. (Even though I've sworn to myself to never ever expose my hair to such harsh treatment again.) In this line of thought I decided I'd see what my current hair cut would look like curly.

Yes, I came upon the perfect plan. See, along with being lazy I'm also chronically late (due to being lazy) therefore I would speed up my Sunday morning routine by bathing at night, rolling my hair in foam rollers, then popping up in the morning, letting my hair down to a fabulous do and skipping off to church looking like a million bucks. No fuss, No muss, no stress! Perfect plan.

Now I've never been good at rolling but this time my hair almost jumped on the rollers themselves. I've never slept in rollers but made it through the night with out being too uncomfortable. I worried that my hair would still be damp and the curls would fall out when I took the curlers off, but as I sat at my desk reading my emails (due to all the spare time I had since I didn't have to wash, dry and style my hair) I could feel as I pulled the rolls out that each piece of hair seemed nice and dry with a curl. So, I get all the rollers out, start running my fingers through to loosen the curl and go into the bathroom to see how it turned out.

OH MY WORD! NO words can describe this do!

I tried spritzing it with water to see if the curls would loosen... I brushed... I combed... I pulled out the straightening iron...I was late to church. Yes, the above picture of a plain simple hair do has a story, a story that began that morning like this:

Caution the coming picture has been known to frighten small children. You might want to ask the kiddies to leave the room...




Moral of this hair's story...If the cut don't fit, go back to the stylist again and again but whatever you do, don't try to do your own do!

I started to explain to a friend my lack of posting and she summed it up nicely with one sentence. "So, it is Spring in a Homeschooling family." Yep, I've been trying to swing group events, friendships, housework, and most of all FINISHING UP THE SCHOOL YEAR. So, far here's Brandon's school year is wrapping up like this:

Math: Completed Saxon 65 math, have been doing 76 math drills to stay sharp, thinking of starting the actual book and just doing odd numbered problems through all the easy part of the book as long as he keeps a B average for about 3 days a week through out the summer. If his grades drop then we'll slow down and make him do all the problems.

Reading: Just Finished The Pilgrim's Progress Curriculum. I was worried when I first got this that it was too complicated for him but he says he really enjoyed it. He even said he'd like to go back and read it with out having to stop after each chapter and do a worksheet. LOL I think this one grew him up a bit.

Science: Just Finished Apologia's Zoology 1- Flying Creatures. He is dying to start Zoology 2 - Swimming Creatures. However, right now I'm holding him off to get through the other subjects for this actual "school" year before we start getting into Next year's curriculum. However, asap I'll let him start it and do it through the summer if it is his wish. Who am I to stop a child from learning? I also just bought him Zoology 3- Land Creatures which he is really pumped about.

Spelling: We have been hit and miss in actually doing spelling this year. And although he has improved he is still not a great speller. I have noticed that if he misspells a word in a paper that if I ask him how the word is spelled, he can spell it correctly. He just doesn't seem to bother to think about the correct spelling when writing. Then again he still has handwriting that is nearly unreadable so I guess he has bigger issues with expressing himself on paper than he does any other problem. Any way back on topic we've been cramming in about 4 to 6 lessons a day when we do work on spelling only stopping and slowing down on lists he has problems with. Right now he has about 20 more lessons in Sequential Spelling 2 and then we'll do crash courses all the way through Sequential Spelling 3 through out the summer. If he still needs helps I'll order the next two Sequential Spellings.

History: This year's history curriculum (Ancient History and the Bible) expected a lot out of us. It was researched based. We have a small local library, and a small budget. So, finding and buying books were just not an option. OK, I confess I'm also too lazy to hunt extra books. I highly recommend it to anyone with more time, money and energy than me. However none of those previous qualities allude to me. So, we have done this very slowly with a lot of online research. It really has required me to be hands on. Which I like but also put off on busy days. So, starting with Creation we have only made it to the Ancient Greeks. We are wrapping them up. This curriculum goes all the way through to the Resurrection of Christ. Then we we'll be through with it. For next year I bought The Mystery of History. This works because it does pick up where this last one left off. More of the meat you need is there so there is no hunting for more resources, it has actual quizzes and tests and it has the hands on stuff I like to do when we have time.

We ditched grammar again this year. I just don't get it. He reads good literature on a regular basis and writes in a journal. There are just more important things to learn than diagramming sentences. I think I'll ignore it until right before his SAT's and teach him to the test. Is that awful?

OK, I've already mentioned most of his curriculum line up for next year let's see it will be journaling daily, Saxon 76, Sequential Spelling 3, Apologia Zoology, The Mystery of History, and I've ordered a Lifepac for British Literature. The Lifepacs are a new step for me. I hope they work out. If so after British Lit. we'll do American Lit. in them.

How is Emily's school year wrapping up? It is not. She will school all through the summer. She will still use Explode the Code (which I've come to realize I haven't really been making the most of), Saxon Math 1 and other various workbooks for other skills. A friend loaned me BJU First Grade Heritage Studies and a couple of other books for history. I always read her all kinds of little books that have science. We have a plethora of animal books and stuff like that for her. She is progressing but needs more one on one time with me to really excel. Hopefully the school through the summer program will give her that.