Category Archives: Family

Sounds

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Bible History– Our Bible story today was about Jubal and Tubal-cain, descendants of Cain.  While I read the history lesson, Buckaroo colored the picture for our timeline and Sunshine drew a picture about the story.

To help them get a better understanding of the genealogy, I sketched a quick ‘family tree.’  I know…. I have some mad drawing skills. Not.  😉  And for those of you who are really observant, I mistakenly wrote Jabal instead of Jubal.  Jabal (Jubal’s brother) was a tentmaker.  Not a musician. :/

We discussed the genealogy from Adam to Jubal, Jabal and Tubal-cain.  Then we drew two family trees of our own [not pictured]- one for my side of the family, the other for my husband’s.  We compared how many boys/girls there were on each side and discussed which set of grandparents had the most kids, etc. 

Buckaroo placed his piece on the timeline.

Science– Genesis records that Jubal was a musician.  Since I love for our subjects to correlate, I decided to do the chapter from our Science curriculum on ‘Sounds.’  The boys took turns stretching and plucking a rubber band.  They watched it vibrate and listened for the sounds it made.  

Then Sunshine had to write in the verbs that matched each sound.  We also listened to several different sounds on CD and the boys had to guess what made the sounds.

Language Arts– We added two new words to our vocabulary wall:  sound and vibration.
    Buckaroo practiced writing the letter ‘e.’

Math– Sunshine took his first Math ‘test’ while Buckaroo worked on copying patterns again.  He seemed to do better with this concept today than he did last time.

Music–  The weather was absolutely perfect outside today so we grabbed our instruments and the kids banged away.  This particular set was a gift from one of their Aunties.  That’s how we get a lot of our school supplies/games. 

I heard Sunshine giggling with the egg shaker.  He said, “Hey Mom… Look at me, I’m a RATTLESNAKE.”  I looked up to find him shaking his katooshie in beat with the egg shaker.  Yep…. that’s my boy.  Ahhh the life with little boys.  😉

SEVEN [Simplified]

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For several months I’ve been feeling the need to concentrate more on things of first importance.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of ‘life’ that we forget to ‘live.’  So with that in mind, I’ve been taking small steps toward living a simpler, fuller life.  And then I happened upon this video [below].  It might have made me giddy.  A little.  😉

Although I admire Jen’s determination, I don’t think I could make such drastic changes, so I devised my own version to do what I think will work best for my family.  And the best part?  I ran the idea by my sweet hubby and he’s totally on board.  😉  So here’s my family’s list [simplified].

SEVEN

7 months. 7 areas of focus for simpler living:

  1. POSSESSIONS: Full house purge. Donate excess to charity or individual families. (4 wks= 1 area/week)

  2. NUTRITION: No fast food. No prepackaged/processed meals. Real food as much as possible.

  3. SPENDING: No excess spending. Money saved can be given to families or individuals as the need arises. Cheap/free family entertainment only.

  4. GROWTH: Christian book study. Build character traits and cultivate family relationships with devotions/ family games, etc.

  5. SERVICE: Focus on visitation and acts of service for widows/ orphans, etc. Volunteer at soup kitchen, take groceries to elderly, etc.

  6. MEDIA: Refrain from all technological based entertainment. Game-cube, leapsters, and movies (aside from work/school) are shelved.

  7. RECYCLE: Reduce waste and recycle.

This month [is it September already?] we’ll be focusing on our possessions.  Need vs Wants.  There’s a lot of purging to do around my house so wish me luck!  😉

So what do you think?  If you decided to make small changes to your family core, what would they be?

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
~William Morris