Happy Birthday, Shiloh!!

From Grammy and Papa

(Daniel, the package is in the mail)

Thomas' Birthday

Happy Birthday, Thomas.  I can't believe you're 12! 

To see more photos, visit The Parsons' Daughters

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

For my friend, Kay.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup peanut butter (cheap brand works best)

Mix all ingredients together. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased baking sheet. Bake at 350 F. for about eight minutes. 

Note: this recipe makes a small amount. 

(Picture taken from Google images)

Chocolate Unit Study

We've just been to stay a week at a lake house so my husband could have some rest.  I wanted to keep Thomas and Abby's noise levels down to a dull roar, so I took along some things for them to do: needlework, toys, plenty of books to read aloud and independently, drawing, cards, and the chocolate unit study from homeschoolshare.com.  Now I have to tell you that we like chocolate the BEST, so this was perfect for our family.  

I gathered my supplies and resources: brownie mix, our favorite truffles loving sent by my daughter-in-law, chocolate bars, M&Ms, plus some I found on sale after Valentines, chocolate chips to make fondue, with pretzels, marshmallows, and apples, chocolate chips to make playdough, and my personal stash of dark chocolate.  Oh, and library books: The Chocolate Touch, books about the history of chocolate, books about the rain forest.  

We did chocolate math, we watched the I Love Lucy episode where she and Ethel get jobs in the chocolate factory, we read books, we did word puzzles, we played, we baked, we partied!

To tell you the truth, we had so much fun, we forgot to take pictures every day!

A week at the lake...

everyone enjoyed the pool table

we all took plenty to read and enjoyed sitting in the warm sun every day

the water level was way down so Thomas and Abby had a great time wading across the narrow end of the lake to explore and bring back treasures

I read The Lonesome Gods aloud every night and we had good discussions

blue sky, pear trees just starting to bloom.....

vacation!

This week, we played around with some art - not so much Arts Week, because we had to finish up some writing and math, but we had an art lesson every day.  I used to subscribe to Homeschooling Today and had pulled out all the art lessons by Barry Stebbing.  I chose 3 artists: Italian artist, Correggio, and American artists, Winslow Homer and Norman Rockwell.

We read about Correggio first and studied a painting of Christ.  Then using colored pencils, Abby and Thomas copied the painting.  

We also studied Winslow Homer's paintings of one-room schoolhouses and drew our own.

Thomas' favorite artist is Norman Rockwell, so he loved reading about him! Thomas and Abby practiced drawing three faces: one from memory, one from a photo, and one from a model, and had to decide which was hardest (they decided that drawing a live person is tough!).  

We are not serious artists, nor serious art students, but reading about various artists and practicing art has definitely helped us look at God's world with different eyes.

Carrie is leading nature study using this blog, Handbook of Nature Study.  It's easy for Carrie and fun for the kids.  On this day, they were studying winter trees, doing bark rubbings, drawing branches, and looking for buds and leaves.

Thought I'd catch you up on what we've been up to for school lately.

A couple of weeks ago, we had Beyond Five in a Row Camp!  We read Homer Price and learned all kinds of things and did a few activities, too.  I simply took the manual and picked out the topics we were most interested in, gathered my materials and we started off on our adventure.

I have a pretty good collection of Reminisce magazines, so I was able to find a few articles about early radio, television, and telephones.  Since Thomas likes to listen to old radio shows, he heard a lot of names in the old stories that he recognized.  He spent the week writing a melodrama, which he, Abby, and Katie performed as a finale to our study.  Thomas and Abby made sandwich boards one day and proudly marched around the yard, he read Whatever Happened to Penny Candy (I thought it might be over his head, but he really enjoyed it and seemed to get the gist of it), we read "Rip Van Winkle", and made some pretty yummy donuts.

We've had our noses to the grindstone ever since the first of January and have made great progress, and this week we're being rewarded for our hard work with some interesting read alouds.  If you've never read The Great Turkey Walk, you should see if your library has it. It's a very entertaining book!

Next week, we're planning to do a bit of art and music appreciation, and then we're going to do a unit study on chocolate!  We're really looking forward to that!

Every year we make a Valentine's Day gingerbread house.  We worked on it last week and had a wonderful time together!  If you look closely, you can see where I dropped the entire kit and Rachel had to glue it all back together with icing before we could begin.  Oh, well, it turned out nice anyway!