How Does Your Garden Grow?

After the April showers that carried into May finally ceased, we were able to plant our garden last week. Let me just say that planting a garden with three kids is not easy. To anwer the title's question....I do not know how our garden will grow because there were seeds being shoved everywhere!!

But we did manage to get the job done and now, one week later, there are little sprouts coming up all over. Who knows what they are, but they are sprout of something or another.

Here's the gardeners...all done planting. Don't you dig the cowboy boots? :)
Here's the crazy woman! She was soooo excited about planting seeds, she just planting and planting!

Me :)

Here we are trying to come up with some sort of a system. They did pretty well.

We found a friendly earthworm.

All in all we had a great time together. Planting a garden has become such a tradition at our house, I can't imagine ever planting it by myself!

Here's what we planted this year:

• Sunflowers
• Zuchinni
• Watermelon
• Pumpkins
• Beans
• Peas
• Tomatoes (several varieties)
• Lots of herbs
• Onions
• Eggplant
• Squash
• Birdhouse gourds

You can click here to see our garden from last year! And our harvest!

Happy Gardening!!

Our Busy Spring!

You may have noticed my blogging has been quite sporadic lately. (my husband, or number 1 fan, just so sweetly reminded me of this) Well along with the rest of the world, we've been super busy!! So here's what we've been up to.....

Piano Recital...Noah's right in the front and center. He's so cute to watch...really nervous, but trying not to be :) He did a great job!

Track and Field day with our homeschool group

Graduation parties, dance recitals, art show....
and we have found some time to enjoy the weather.

Spring baseball....this was Noah's first year of baseball and he really liked it. So now we're signed up for summer baseball :)

I hope all your Spring's have been good too...busy, but not too crazy! I have to keep reminding myself to live in the moment and not get crabby just because we're busy. Now we've got a couple weeks of total downtime before summer activities begin. I've tried to plan our summer schedule so we've got lots of swim-time, reading-time, and lazy summer-time!
Enjoy the rest of your Spring!

Our Art Show

Last Thursday at The Hutchinson School for Boys, we had our 2nd annual Art Show.

Homeschool moms, if you think this is too much work or that your kids won't like doing something like this...please reconsider. This has been such a fun thing for my kids to do. All we do is set out all our projects from the year...art projects, pocketbooks, lapbooks, history projects, the whole shebang. This year, we hung all our artist study projects going up the staircase, but you can arrange it however it best fits your house.

We just invited a few family friends and family members, like grandmas and grandpas. Before our guests arrived, I briefed them in how to take care of your guests...offering them drinks, taking their coats and so on. We had made a few desserts earlier that day and we served those. Then they practiced on me giving the "tour."

So when the guests arrived, they were all ready. And boy, did they do a great job! They were so excited that they were the hosts and had to be responsible for everything. They met guests at the door, got them a snack and a drink (we served lemonade in wine glasses ;)), and then began the tour. They lead everyone around as a group and explained all the projects they did over the year. I was so impressed at how much they remembered! Then they properly asked if there were any questions at the end of the presentation :)

I highly recommend doing this with your kiddos sometime....they LOVE showing off what they've done!

Dioramas Featured!

My sweet bloggy friend, Cindy, over at Shining Dawn Books did a great post featuring the dioramas we made in Earth science this year. She and another homeschool mom write fabulous nature study guides on a wide array of subjects.

So....go check out the post on our dioramas and check out her nature study book while you're at it :)

Treasure Island

We finished reading Treasure Island last week and, O MY GOSH! did my boys love it! I guess anything with guns, treasure, and pirates boys are going to like it.

A few weeks ago, I posted about an article I found about doing projects with literature and I definately wanted to do a project with this book. I gave the boys a few choices of projects and they chose to do a map to tell about the story. (very fitting)

I gave Noah a list of things he needed to include on his map and then we distressed them so they looked more authentic. (I let Jack just draw it anyway he wanted.)

Jack's map
Noah's map. We distressed by painting over it with coffee, then baking it. I, not the boys, also burned some of the corners. As you can see, one corner got a little out of hand :)

Very fun project. Arrrgh!!

School Year Highlights 2009-2010

Not saying this school year has been free of challenges...(click here to clarify comment) but all in all we've had a great year! Just clicking around in my computer picture files reminds me of all the fantastic projects, trips, and activities we've done. While I'm looking at all these pictures, it's hard to believe only about two years ago, I was begging my hubby to let me homeschool. (Since then he has totally come around and loves it right along with me...maybe just not to the same extent. In the words of a fellow "annoying" homeschool mom, "I'm passionately annoying" about homeschooling my kids :))

So...here's a quick recap of this year. One pic for each month (I could have added 40,000!).

September-field trip to Wildlife Resort

October-Art Projects

November- earth land form dioramas (these were Noah's favorite projects this year)

December-day trip to Ft. Sisseton...Christmas at the Fort

January-Preschool with Jack...he loved making his own lapbooks this year

February-Free Time Projects! (I think he's trying to make something explode)

March-Artist Study

April-nature study

May-field trip to fire station

Today we're finishing up our final projects, that I'll share next week and we're DONE with school year '09-'10!

Now we're on to.....

more baseball....

tennis....

planning VBS....

graduations....

So excited for summer! Hope your school went great too, and if you're still at it for the summer...happy homeschooling :)

Last Week of School!

(first day of school September 2009)

Where does the time go?! I can't say I'm not excited for the end of the school year, but when I look at this picture it feels like it was just a few weeks ago!

I'm really pleased with all we've covered this year and all we've learned. I just received Noah's results from the standardized test we're required to take in SD and he scored really well, so that's always encouraging :)

So for the last week of school, we're are tying up all our loose ends and finishing everything (or most everything) we started. We're on our last continent for our World Culture study, then Noah will complete his lapbook for that. Also, we're finishing our plant unit this week along with a pocketbook.
I'm using the May Theme Pocketbook for our spine for this unit because there's a good section on plants in it.

I was not able to do all the things I had planned for our plant unit because of some very soggy weather around here...like plant our garden on Mother's Day, but there's plenty of time for that.

Hope all you homeschool mamas are having a good end to your school year and are getting ready for a nice break :) Have a great day!

Gardening Book Review

Since I'm a total Charlotte Mason fan, I'm always on the lookout for great books that inspire and make me (oh, ya and the kids) want to dig deeper into a subject. What's the subject right now? Gardens! Plants! Dirt!! We are so ready to plant our garden at our house and we've done lots of reading to get us ready.

Over at Curriculum Choice, I've reviewed a couple of books about gardening with kids that I love. To get some inspiration or to just read my review, click here.