Reading!

I enjoy reading, but I do not take the time to do it often. It's always been a challenge for me, if the book isn't really good. My beautiful sister is taking part in 52 Books in 52 Weeks. It convicted me in my reading habits. I'm not sure I will be able to accomplish 52, but I'm going to read as much as I can! If I only read 10 books then it's 10 more than I would have read!

In case you're wondering...I read aloud to my kids everyday. I'm talking about "just for me" reading time!



The first book I read is one I started probably a year and a half ago. I enjoyed it, but with life I just didn't make it a priority to finish. I'm very glad I finished it. It's a soldiers retelling of his experiences in World War II. (he's a local man, that my parents know) I've always felt strongly about our military. I don't love war, but I do think sometimes it is needed. This book was very humbling to me. What soldiers went through...WOW. He describes things that I can't imagine, I can't imagine coming home and living a "normal" life after what he saw.
I believe that without military fighting for our freedom, we wouldn't have the country we have. We may not have the freedoms that we have. I think most Americans take for granted our freedoms, but after a book like this it's hard to do. If you know a veteran, thank them for the comforts they gave up for us, the life they lived for our chance at freedom, the service they gave. I know you're no longer living, but thank you Hobert for your compelling story and your service.

Spanish book list

Before I get to my book list, couple of thoughts!

~I know I've been posting a lot about homeschooling. Those of you who don't homeschool, I'm sorry.

~ I firmly believe that schooling is a choice. Homeschooling IS NOT right for everyone. You have to decide what works for you. Homeschooling is right for our family. Will it always be, I don't know, only God does.

~I am in no way trying to tell anyone what to do, or say homeschooling is the only way, or that I'm better than someone because I homeschool. I'm simply sharing what we do, and how we do it. Some days are beautiful, some days are not. I believe that is life!

Now on to my book list!

We read only bits and pieces of this book. We also watched a Ponce DE Leon movie from Netflix.

We really enjoyed this book. I personally didn't know anything about Balboa, so it was nice to learn about him.

This book was a hard read for my 1st and 3rd grader. A lot of facts, so we only read parts of it.

Great book. It's about a boy who traveled along with Christopher Columbus.

This book led us to watch some bull fighters!

Wonderful read, we all enjoyed it! It's about a girl who gets a special gift and her family gives her some ideas how to use it. Lot's of great recipes in it too!

After this book we worked on Salsa dancing. Hearing Salsa made me think about dancing so we had to look into it! Brie and Zeke learned a few salsa steps and danced and danced, too cute!

I will be honest right now I don't remember this book!

This book is an alphabet book. It's in Spanish and English! I read the English part, and when Daddy got home from work he read the Spanish part!

I thought this was a cute book. A bug (i think) is asked by several creatures for her hand in marriage. She falls in love with a mouse and agrees to marry him. I won't tell you anymore, I recommend you read it and find out what happens!

This book had lots of good stories in it.

We also colored the Mexican flag and some maps. I hope you enjoyed looking into our Spanish Unit! (We have separate math, bible, spelling, and Grammar.)

Gabriela

My beautiful angel... I can't believe you're 9 years old today! Thank you sweet girl for being who you are. You are such a generous girl who thinks of others before herself. We love you Brie, may the Lord continue to bless and guide you!
Happy Birthday!

More on Unit Studies

I'm going to start by saying that it was a lot bigger job than I thought it was going to be. I spent a lot of time, I mean a lot of time formulating a plan. Starting was easy, we each picked some topics that we wanted to learn more about. We have to have 180 days of school, so we had 8 topics that we studied for 4 weeks, we then had 4 character studies.

I'm going to give you just one of our topics and try to show you how I went about it.

~Spanish Language~

- defined language.

-found locations that have Spanish as their native language

- found as many books about Spanish culture as I could

-looked up Spanish explorers

This is the first unit we studied. On our first day of school we read the definition of language. We looked at languages, and listened to some different languages being spoken on the Internet. Talked about people we knew that spoke different languages, and named as many different languages as we could. We then went to a map (I had already labeled it) and looked at the different Continent's and the countries within those continents that spoke Spanish. We have this Spanish Curriculum, and we started to watch the first disc.

The books we read will be coming in a later post.

Unit Studies

I've been interested in unit studies for as long as I can remember! They have always seemed like a lot of fun, you could do so many things with them. I've used "unit study" curriculum where you study one subject for a week, but I always wanted it to be more. After some reading and some thought we decided we would try unit studies this year. My sil mentioned a lady named Valerie Bendt, she is a homeschooler and author. She specializes in unit studies.

She has a lot of good information. While I was reading her book (I've only read the one pictured here, she has several others) it all seemed so clear to me. It was what I had been wanting to do for a long time. It didn't give a lot of examples of her plans, more just some of her experiences, advice on books/schedules. She talks about how they would read a book; Heidi. They would then study the Switzerland area. They would read an autobiography about Johanna Spyri, the author. They would read about someone or something from the time the book was written. Sometimes they would create plays and do costumes and video them.

I will be sharing soon on how I planned our unit studies.

Busy,Busy,Busy!

I've had so many things I've wanted to share here. I enjoy blogging, but I have this little problem....



I know he looks really cute, and don't get me wrong he is, but he gives the word busy a whole new take!


I started a post about unit studies, he shut down my computer! I restarted it and sat down to keep working on it, had to get up to clean up a mess, he published it, but it wasn't done, so I deleted it. (because I didn't know how to remove it without deleting it!)


The mess I had to clean up...some people have mice, I have a boy named Reuben!

(I know it's hard to see the hole.)



I could tell that he was in my lazy Susan. I should have gotten up right away, but I didn't. After a few minutes he had bitten a hole in the bag of sugar and had some on the rug. I cleaned it up, shook my rug out and put the bags high up on the counter. I still had a bag of brown sugar under the lazy Susan, well after I sat back down it wasn't 5 more minutes and he had the brown sugar bitten into, all over himself and the rug! (I had forgotten it was down there)

(sorry it's a bad picture!)


He also really likes light switches. He drags any chair he can get a hold of to the nearest light switch. I'm considering bolting the furniture to the floor! =)
He sure is keeping me on my toes! I'm hoping that I will be able to get back to some regular postings soon!