Thanksgiving Recipes

What is your menu for Thanksgiving this year? I have some of our favorites recipes posted on my cooking blog if you're looking for something new and different. One is for cranberry relish, one is for a broccoli casserole that is really yummy, and the third one is for cran-raspberry pie which is an AWESOME dessert! I'd love to hear your favorites too!

Our Week in Review

Here are a few highlights of our week last week.

In Bible we read John chapter 13, which talks about the Passover Feast which Jesus and his disciples shared together just before his arrest and crucifixion. This is commonly referred to as the "Last Supper". We talked about how this was Jesus' last chance to tell his disciples the important stuff. His last shot at imparting wisdom and truth to them. So we need to attach that weight of meaning to these words. His "last words" actually span the next 4 chapters, so we are not all the way through them yet, but we noted that one of the major things Jesus seemed to have wanted them to get, was to love one another as He loved us. I have been pondering what that means for me as His follower, and what it means for our family. Here are their Bible Journal pages of the last supper:



(Little Man chose to color a page from an Old Testament coloring book instead. A lovely prerogative of being the youngest child!) ;-)


We love our new schoolroom, but it has been rather chilly down there lately, especially since we still don't have a furnace (more on that in another post), so we have done school upstairs quite a bit this fall. Here Little Man is doing a preschool activity at the kitchen table and C is in the background doing math right in front of one of our borrowed space heaters.

Again, right in front of a space heater!


Son G had to do some correcting this week of 5 digit multiplication problems. Daddy helped check his work. :-)


And son C finished his Math U See Alpha book with a lesson on telling time! He was sooooo excited to learn about time, and when I gave him his new Beta book, his eyes were shining and he said, "I'm so tempted to start this book right away today!" Don't you just love that enthusiasm?


We have been working on writing every day this year, thanks to our wonderful little co-op!


I just wanted to highlight this dandy little writing tool that IEW sells, called a portable wall. It is only $7 on their website, and it is a tri-fold cardstock that visually shows all 9 IEW writing models, has an entire page of -ly adverbs, synonyms for the word "said" (which is a banned word), and loads of other helpful tools for writing. And when it's opened up, it helps cut down on distractions too. We use it almost daily and my children LOVE it! (I need to get a couple more!)


Daughter G worked on another science experiment this week from her Apologia General Science textbook. The purpose of this one was to illustrate the process of experimentation, and it was a wonderful illustration. First she had to gently drop an egg in water and see what happened. As you can see, it immediately sank to the bottom of the glass.


Then she added a tsp of salt, stirred it until it dissolved, and then recorded what happened to the egg. The first several times there was no change, but she continued this process 6 times until.......



......the egg floated! It began to float on the 4th attempt, but she continued adding a tsp at a time until the entire end of the egg was up out of the water. We talked about trial and error, and how important it is to not give up when the first experiment you do to explain a hypothesis, fails. We can learn more from our "failures" than our successes at times! (hmmm, great life lesson couched in science here!)

For this week, we are doing half days today and tomorrow, and Wed will be getting ready for Thanksgiving all day long. The kids are super excited for Thursday, and so am I!

Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes - 2009

Operation Christmas Child is a ministry of the relief organization, Samaritan's Purse. It involves shopping for and packing a shoebox full of goodies that will be sent to a needy child somewhere in the world. I encourage you to visit their website and learn more about this incredible ministry ~ it is always amazing to us to see how the boxes are transported to remote locations. And with what joy they are always received!

Our children love doing this each year, and we look for items all year long that would be appropriate to send. We packed just two boxes this year, one for a girl and one for a boy. It seemed like such a paltry offering compared to the need, but for the two children who will receive these boxes it could be life changing!




This year Samaritan's Purse has added tracking numbers, so we can look online and see where our boxes end up! We are very excited to know what country (and perhaps what city) "our" children are in.

Feeling PMS-y?

Just FYI

If you turn a jar of applesauce upside down in your fridge so that the last little bits will be easier to get out, and it gets pushed to the back of your fridge and you forget about it for several months, and then you discover it and think that it's really gross and open it so you can pour it down the sink and recycle the jar, it may just explode forcefully and send fermented applesauce all over your kitchen.

Just thought you'd like to know.

J is for Jesus

And Jerusalem, Jet Plane, and Jello!

Before splitting up into our two groups, young 5's and the writing class, each week one of the older students reads a Bible story to everyone and leads us in prayer. This has been a great practice for all our older children in reading to a group, including younger siblings, and praying outloud. Here our daughter G is reading about God's promise to Abraham that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars.


After this group devotional time, we split up into our two classes. The older children and I went downstairs for writing and the young 5's read more stories about when Jesus lived on earth. They also read about Jerusalem, and then found it on a map and globe. Our son C was impressed that a city from ancient times is still in existence today! (we have yet to go through Year 1 of Tapestry of Grace, so this was a novel concept to him!)

They arranged chairs into a jet plane shape, and "flew" to Jerusalem.



F.L.I.C. is the name that all the children gave to our co-op. We took nominations, voted the following week, and the winner was "Families Learning In Christ". Isn't that a great name?


While in Jerusalem, they wore head coverings.



Apparently they serve red jello in Jerusalem!?!!?



Meanwhile, the writers each shared their compositions from the preceeding week and learned the ins and outs of writing a topic sentence and a clincher sentence. This is a very important concept in writing which will only become more significant as they get older and write more sophisticated papers for school ~ I think they got it (I'll find out tomorrow!).

I is for Ice Cream

And Indians and ink.

I've gotton behind in posting pics from co-op on Fridays, but here is what we did for the letter "i" over a week ago. The children read books about Indians. Then they got to stamp with ink on their "i" alphabet page.


And the funnest thing of all was making ice cream! Lisa, the young 5's teacher this month, found a recipe which involved putting ingredients into a ziploc bag and rolling the bag around on the floor for awhile. I'm not sure of the exact recipe or procedure, because I was downstairs teaching the writing class and missed this fun activity! (we heard the rolling around on the floor, though!)





All the young 5's had a blast and thought the ice cream was delicious!



It was nice enough weather so they were able to go outside for a long recess,







while the writing students shared their compositions from last week and then learned how to write from pictures (unit 5 of IEW).


It was another fun day at co-op! How thankful we are for this group of like-minded friends!