EOY and Geography Fair!

Tonight was our CC End-of-the-Year (EOY) Celebration and Geography Fair!

Here's a quick glimpse into our evening:

In the picture above is my sweet class. LOVE them! Can you tell which on is my distractible child? Yeah...

Above, the two younger classes combined for their presentation. All the classes had their turns reciting some of the memory work from this cycle, and then they all came on stage to sing the Doxology. It was beautiful.

Congratulations, Memory Masters!

Time to party! This was our third party of the DAY, for real! Anna had a party at her preschool, then we went to a birthday party, which was immediately followed by our EOY Celebration. Don't even ask me what my kids ate all day! ;)

The Geography Fair was so wonderful! I was truly blown away by the amount of time and effort these kids put into their projects!

This was our campus's first year, and it was amazing. I'm so blessed to be a part of such a supportive group of families! Our campus, however, is multiplying (splitting just sounds so ugly), so next year will bring new families and friends to our community. I'm very excited to see what God has planned!

CC Day - Week 17

I updated my tutor tri-fold board the other night before our Week 17 CC day. My friend, Tammi, saw a board like this at her CC Support Manager training recently. When she told me about it, I knew I wanted to do it, too. What an awesome way to remind our students and their parents that God really is at the center of everything!

CC Day: Week 12

One of the benefits of living in Rocket City:  

Rocket scientists!

Art Movement Scramble Game and Update

I had a little light bulb pop on in my head early this morning (like 2 a.m. early - uuuugh!). And this is the result:

CC Day - Week 24!

Really, our last week?! How did that happen?!

For Science these last two weeks, the kids made a car and raced it with their class. Mary really enjoyed decorating hers mostly; she wasn't too worried about construction - ha!

Above, Mary's class is practicing the Orchestra Song. They are the clarinets!

Our first year in CC wouldn't be complete without a pinata! My little girl had no idea what to do with this, and she also apparently has no future in softball, but she sure looks cute holding the baton. ;)

We had a great time and are looking forward to our End-of-the-Year Celebration in a couple of weeks. I've been recruited to put together the slide show, and I think I've found the perfect background music:

Have you heard of The Piano Guys yet? Oh, wow, are they amazing! I've downloaded almost all of their stuff for the slideshow, and I'm so excited! We listen to their music in the car all the time now, too. I found it when Mary requested some cello music one morning, and I'm in love! Apparently, they're a YouTube sensation, so you may already be familiar with them. If not, check them out! Oh, and they're Christians!

Last night was our community's last Moms' Night Out for the year. We had a fun time discussing CC, homeschooling stuff, and life in general. I love these ladies! While we were talking, I thought of an idea, kind of a spin-off from an earlier idea about making a photo book of each of my children for each year of school (Thanks again to Sarah for sharing that idea!). Since Mary starts Kindergarten this coming school year, it's the perfect time to begin this project. Well, here's the twist: I'm going to make the photo book (hardback, probably Shutterfly or something similar), but I'm going to have it completed and printed BEFORE the last day of CC. Then, we can bring it to CC on our last day and have her friends sign it - it's now a yearbook! Aaaahh! I just love it! So, that's my plan for next year. I'm still going to ask her tutor to sign the Dr. Seuss book; we started that tradition this year, and we'll use the book with all of her activities (ballet, music, Sunday School, etc.). But her new yearbook will just be for her school memories, that's what I'm thinking right now. 

Oh, and another fun idea that came out of the MNO was to put magnets on the back of the Timeline Minis so you can rearrange them (and store them) on a magnetic white board. 

Lots and lots of good ideas were discussed with some amazing mamas, but these are the only ones I can remember right now. You see, today is Mary's birthday, and she decided to get up at 4 a.m. to start celebrating. As you can imagine, I'm kind of out of it right now, to say the least. She's napping before Round 2 begins, and I better get some sleep, as well, if I'm to keep up with her tonight.

Have a great weekend, friends!

Week 20 - What We're Really Doing

But first,

a kiss from Anna:

Anna had picture day at her school yesterday. She's practicing her smile before Daddy drops her off. (You can tell it certainly wasn't picture day at home - ha!)

So, I really enjoy planning lots of stuff for each week of CC, but I thought I'd show you what it is we are actually doing for Week 20 this week.

For History, Mary put in order the history cards from Grismar:

file name: History Cards Week 20 b.pdf

user name: grismar

I also just printed off her cards for Week 21, which are awesome, as well. (I really like Grismar's style; we use lots of her stuff at home and in our CC community!)

After I was sure Mary knew the History sentence, we danced around the living room and sang the song a few times with the CC CD. (Creating some good Mexican Revolution memories, for sure. ;)  )

For Science, I read the Science Snippet from C3, and Mary put together the layers of the atmosphere:

 

This is Grismar's brilliant idea, and Mary loved it! Click here to read more about it on Grismar's new blog! All the materials cost me about $2, and it took under 10 minutes to cut the felt. Easy, cheesy!

After that, we danced around the living room to NoGreaterJoy5's Science song for this week from C3:

file name: AJT Cy1 Science W20 Atmosphere Song 2012.mp3

user name: NoGreaterJoy5

(yeah, we try to dance a lot; it makes learning more fun around here, for both of us!)

Then, when Mary could tell me the Science memory work, I let her make her own atmosphere with aquarium rocks:

We got this idea from Sola Gratia Mom. Click here to see her post about the Layers of the Atmosphere craft. Pretty awesome!

(Okay, quick story. See the little make-up puff in Mary's hand? Yeah, well, after she poured in the rocks - the fun part - she just had to go give her babies a make-over. What?! This is insane to me, because, y'all, I don't even wear make-up! She did some kind of impressive acrobatic trick to reach the make-up box in the top of her closet - which is used only for ballet recitals - and came back with this puff. And is that even what it's called? A puff? How can a mother and daughter be so alike, yet soooo different?! Good times...)

Then we had a snack and watched Felix Baumgartner's amazing free fall from the stratosphere. Mary really enjoyed that.

For Fine Arts, we've been listening to this music:

It tells the story of Handel's Water Music; we find it pretty entertaining and educational at the same time.

Also, I was asked to teach the first two weeks of Orchestra at our community. While doing some research, I found this little chant, which I put to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star:

I made some visuals to use while I was in front of the group, and Mary's been using them at home to help her remember the five time periods of Classical music:

I mix them up, and then she sings the little song and puts them in order.

We also purchased the Musical Instrument Toob from Hobby Lobby ($5 with the 40% off coupon!), and she sorts them into the four families of the orchestra. Surprisingly, there were no percussion instruments included, so we had to make some. I keep these in a little bag near our calendar, and she does it as part of Calendar Time.

And that's it so far for our Week 20!

Honestly, we won't do anything else for CC this week, except review the memory work by listening to the CD in the car. Mary likes to listen to Review (as we call the CD), because it helps her get ready for The Challenge on Funday Monday, which is still a big deal to her (woot!). 

I was thinking this morning, y'know, Mary is four-years-old. She's going to do all of this again when she's seven, and then again when she's ten (because the cycles repeat in Classical Conversations - one of reasons why I love, love, love CC). I'm not going to push it right now. If she shows a special interest in a subject, we go with it, and focus on that for the week. If not, no worries.

Before I go, I want to show you a couple great pictures from this week at our CC campus:

Can you guess what they're cheering for?

The Science experiment! How great! We talked about the layers of the atmosphere and pressure this week in class. Mary's tutor lit a piece of cardboard and stuck it down inside a glass jar with a very narrow neck. Then she placed a hard-boiled egg on top, and we watched the egg get sucked down into the bottle. Oh, the kids went wild! Awesome!

And then for presentations, Mary read a story that she wrote. Yes, her very first story! She dictated it to me earlier in the week, and I typed exactly what she said:

Here's Mary at home with her story. So sweet!

Well, that's it. That's what we've really been doing for CC this week. Not too much, but enough for us. :)

Happy Pi Day (3/14!), by the way! 

CC Day - Week 18

CC Day!

We just started Week 18 in our CC community, and since I love taking pictures of my big girl, I thought I'd share them with you (again... I know, are you tired of Mary pictures yet?) ;)

Above, Mary's class wears their 'triangle ninja' hats. Apparently, the area of a triangle equals one-half base times hi-ya (big kick and semi-scream here). Pretty cool ninja moves from these kiddos! These hats are from C3:

file name: area of a triangle hats.pdf

user name: grismar

UPDATE: Grismar has a blog! You can go straight to the source and download from her new site. Woot!

(Grismar also has an awesome Ocean Zones Bottle Project for Week 19 on C3, too, that we'll do next week! Or you can go see it on her new blog! Thanks for all your hard work, Grismar!)

Mary did her presentation on Lambie, which was adorable.

One of the parts in Science was looking at different sand under a microscope. I wish I could go into more detail, but when I saw that microscope, y'all, I was insane in the membrane. Do you see it in the picture above? It's hooked up to the laptop! It takes pictures! It. is. awesome. And, it's under $40 on Amazon right now! It's definitely on my wish list. :)

We also helped the kids make a model of the ocean floor with play-doh. One of Mary and Anna's favorite movies is Finding Nemo, and Mary kept saying, "Nice trench," when we made the mountains. Ha! I love how the boys kept their triangle ninja hats on. ;)

Okay, this needs some 'splaining (as Ricky would say). At the very, very beginning of this year, I tried to teach Mary writing using Handwriting Without Tears. I love the program, but she was just not ready for it; she cried the whole time. So, I decided to chill out; she's ready when she's ready. We have not done ANY more writing lessons - at all! I'd encourage coloring and drawing, but I didn't dare tell her how to write any more letters. One day during the break, she started writing 'ho' like in Santa's ho, ho, ho. She wrote it all over her paper. Awesome! I was so proud of her for writing on her own. A few days later, I told her that if she added the letter 't' she would have a whole new word. Well, she liked that idea, so she started writing 'hot ho' all over the place.

Yeah. . . um. . . 

So, I then told her that we should just put 't's on all the 'ho's and make lots of 'hot's instead. She liked that (whew!). So, now Mary writes 'hot' on everything, and I'm just thrilled because she's doing it all on her own. It was a little awkward, though, when she signed her name as Hot Mary on a friend's get well card recently. Pretty sure her kids won't be allowed to play with my kids ever again.

Anyway, that's why Mary has a hot Mona Lisa in the picture above.

Modern art? Why not?!

By the time we're ready for a class picture, Mary's already wadded up her masterpiece. Nice, sweetie. Glad I got a picture when I did.

Review time at the end of CC is always Mary's favorite part. They played Twister and answered a question that was written on the floor mat. I thought it was brilliant and hilarious; I really need to take more videos!

Well, that was our CC Day this week. Totally awesome, as always!

Have a good one!