Books and Art Leading Up to Break

This was a beautiful back at the books week! I decided after last week's break that we should get back on our routine for the week leading up to Christmas. We will take off next week between Christmas and New Years. I don't know about your family but mine gets along better when we are in our routines.

We've done our usual math, reading, scriptures, book club reading (Little Women), writing, and so on. I realized this week that Geometry has been a much better experience with Makayla than Algebra 1, which I'm grateful for. She still doesn't love math, but she doesn't loathe it quite so much.

Homeschool Mom Tip: Little Women is a long book, especially when the listeners are ages 1-15. It's also not quite as adventure filled as some of my children prefer. It takes a bit to get to know the characters and really sort them out in your mind and begin to want to follow their stories. Because of that I added in some help to our listening time. Each day we listen for about 30-40 minutes. Halfway through our listening I pull down an old ice cream bucket from a nearby shelf that has been labeled "Read Aloud". Inside are chocolates. The bucket is passed around and 1 or 2 pieces are pulled out by each person. Because they know chocolate is coming they sit and listen to the story. By the time we pass our bucket around they are into the story and willing to sit and keep listening without much prompting.

The 6th grade and under crowd are pretty antsy about January's arrival because we will begin this year's science curriculum (up to now we've focused more on nature study). I have the experiment kit and book, Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics, sitting out where they can be seen. We got to do an experiment with Makayla this week in Biology and several kids watched in fascination. Then they wanted to do their own experiments. Nope, not happening kids. Experiments are special and we'll do tons of them in science this winter.

Wednesday brought art class with our friends. We went with a Christmas tree theme and did two projects. The construction paper trees were a 'Trim a Tree' project from Cutting Tiny Bites. It was interesting to see the different ways kids chose to layer and create trees. The biggest difference between the original project and ours is that I gave each child a full sheet of construction paper for their background, so they could make more than one tree at a time.

Fingerprint Trees was our other project. I found the basic idea for exploring positive and negative space in this way on Rhythms of Play. The original project made cards and used paint. We chose to use ink pads because they make so much less mess when fingerpainting with a crowd of kids, and they dry quickly. We also just cut our cardstock paper in two instead of making cards. The only unusual need to do this project is painter's tape. I had it on hand because we have plans to do some Piet Mondrian inspired tape resist paintings this winter.

Tobias had a milestone this week: he learned to pull out chairs, climb on them, and then climb on top of the table. Yes, we've reached that stage. You would think that after 8 other 13 month olds I would be ready for it but I never am. He is so proud of his physical prowess but has little concept of just how far down he will fall. I prefer when my babies wait until they are solidly into toddler years before discovering this particular skill. We're working on learning to safely back off the table onto a chair, with the reminder that 'we don't climb on the table'. He's pretty sure we should climb on the table though.

Other posts on the blog this week in case you missed them:

•  Our Favorite Books Read in 2016 - In this post I interview each of my children and myself to list our favorite books read any time in 2016. I also share the complete list of books we read for Book Club this year.
• Our Library Book Shelf, or how I get my kids to try new books regularly - Yesterday I shared about my favorite book shelf and how it encourages my entire family to try new books. I even share the list of every single book currently on that shelf, most of which are winter themed.

It is Friday morning and we have plans to make potato candy and play dominoes with Grandma. Hooray for family time!  I pray that your family will have a peaceful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior.

                                                        Merry Christmas - Jesus is born!
(Linking here and here.)