We made it to Christmas Break!!

Whew!!  We made it to Christmas break.  We're halfway through the year.  Wow!  Part of me feels like saying, "What? It's only December?" and part of me wonders how it is already December.  We are taking the next week off - I think I'm as excited as the kids! - so here are some highlights of the past month.

We spent a week talking about insects, then wrapped up the unit with an ant craft.  Braxton didn't seem to understand he was to cut out pictures of *food* to put on his plate.  Guess his ants were hungry enough to eat anything!  haha

Adeline worked on sorting words according to their vowel.

In math, we spent a good portion of the month with addition to 5.  Adeline loved this mouse game.  She had to "feed" each mouse the correct amount of cheese cubes, then find the total amount of cheese the mice ate.  By the end of the month, she was writing addition sentences from word problems I read to her.  

And since it was December, we had Cookie Day!!  Great Grandma D and Grammy H came for the weekend.  Grammy H provided childcare while Great Grandma and I baked - with the assistance of some little helpers, of course!

Dipping Gingersnaps

Putting the chocolate chips in the poppyseed cookies.

Learning to use a cookie press.

Look!  There are cookies in there!!

 Sadie's favorite hang out...

...until she discovered a bowl of hardened almond bark and a spatula!  She sat with this stuff for a solid 15 minutes.  She'd scrape a little and eat a little, scrape a little, eat a little.  She was in Heaven!

Ta Da!  Eleven hours later, we were done!  So pretty!  

If we look tired, we were!  We made 14 tins of cookies that I delivered to friends and family the next day - plus some extra for the kids' Christmas program on Sunday.

Giving Grandpa N a hug after the Christmas program.

And Grandma N gets one, too!  Somehow these are the only pictures I managed.  I'm sorry to everyone else who was there!

Our lessons in Animal Science continue on a daily basis.  We've watched Mama Cat bring her kittens a mouse and a bird.  They loved both!  On a nice day, she took her kittens out on a bird adventure.  They came back covered in feathers and exhausted!  How tired must one be to sleep in a bike helmet?

These are the two kittens we are keeping.  Tuffy is in the helmet and Midnight is in my arms.  Midnight LOVES people and being held.  She would happily be a house cat.  Nathan says no.

Adeline received her very own glockenspiel a couple weeks ago.  She is doing an excellent job with her music lessons (or so Jessica tells me!).  Right now we're continuing to work on rhythm with her sticks, reading quarter notes, eighth notes and rests, and accuracy and using proper form when playing the glockenspiel.

Adeline apparently decided to try her hand at composition.  I found this in a pile of papers yesterday.  

We wrapped up December talking about animal footprints.  We had a fun day making prints with plastic animals and dinosaurs, then we took a walk and looked for real animal prints in the mud.  We found bird, dog and cat footprints.

Sadie enjoyed the play-doh.

Adeline thought she'd try making some tail prints from the dinosaurs.  She discovered they made neat textures in the play-doh.

Of course we had to look at our own footprints!

During Sadie's nap time, the kids and I made 6 sets of these cute ornaments for gifts.  Adeline made the girls and Braxton and I made the boys.

Adeline is making big leaps in reading!  She has two readers to share with grandparents this weekend.

 Today we played a memory game.  I put the letters in a line, then the kids closed their eyes while I switched two letters.  Then they had to figure out which ones I switched.  They did better than I expected!

And here is wild-haired Sadie saying, "Give me the camera!!"

Now with tomorrow being Christmas Eve, I better get busy.  I still have presents to wrap, Chex Mix to make and a house that is sorely neglected.  I think next year we'll take TWO weeks off at Christmas!  :)