Snow!

When Phil said snow was in the forcast, I pictured a typical "first snow" where it snows a bit, doesn't stick but melts as it touched the ground. Instead we got this:

LOTS of snow!

Enough to go for a sled ride.

Enough to build a snow-leaf man

And plenty of fun for everyone.  Also, the craziest driving conditions I have ever driven in!  Thankfully the snow should all melt away next week - it's too early to have so much snow!

Prayer, Pledge and CalendarTime

Here is a more detailed description of our "typical" homeschool day.  Look for more posts soon!

Our Homeschooling day begins with a prayer.  Right now we say a prayer, the Consecration to Our Blessed Mother,  that the children would say at the Dominican Sister's of Mary's Spiritus Sanctus Academies each day - where I worked while in Ann Arbor, MI.   I love this prayer because who better for little ones to entrust themselves to each day than their heavenly Mother who will bring them closer to Jesus and because its short, beautiful and has clear imagery for the children to understand.  As the children memorize prayers we'll add or alternate prayers so they can memorize new ones.

When I was in kindergarten, my favorite"job" was to hold the flag for the pledge of allegiance and I loved to sing  "You're a Grand Ol' Flag."  So each morning we sing and march to "You're a Grand Ol' Flag." followed by saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag held by one of the kids.  All three children love this part of the day. 

One of my favorite parts of the kindergarten day while I was teaching at St. Joseph's Academy was "Calendar Time" and it's a useful time to teach certain skills that need to be practiced daily in a fun way.  Each day we sing (in English and Spanish) the "Months of the Year Song" while pointing to the names of the months and when we get to this month, they jump up and down or put their arms in the air.

Then we add the day's date to our calendar and a Popsicle stick to our "place value" envelopes.  Though I haven't explained "ones" and "tens" formally yet, when we do learn about them they'll have had experience through Calendar time. ( I may make envelope's to help count out days of school as well to help with numbers above 31 but I haven't yet.)  After counting to today's date, we sing the days of the week song (in English & Spanish) and finally we construct our sentence for today's date and read it together:

We also check out the weather outside and record it on a graph and count to 20 by ones, 100 by 10's and mark how many days of school with a star using our number chart.

And so begins our day - this little routine takes about 10 minutes or so and it's fun for everyone.

Happy Birthday Grandma from William, Miriam & Luke

 Happy Birthday Grandma (Lawson) !

May you be blessed with many more birthdays!  We hope to see you soon!

Fall Fun

Phil informs me that the forecast has snow for tomorrow so as the beautiful fall weather fades away, I just wanted to share some of our family's fall fun:

Fun in a leaf pile!

William and Miriam made a scarecrow

The scarecrow greets anyone who comes to our door.

We made a trip to our pumpkin patch:-)

Enjoyed "Tractor Rides" with friends

Here's the harvest from our Pumpkin patch

Miriam's Rosary - we prayed a decade of the Rosary each week for the month of the Rosary and added a bead for each prayer to make a "crown for Mary"  Here's a link to the book I copied the Rosary page from; it is a great coloring book on the Rosary and has a coloring page for each mystery that we'll be using when we learn about the mysteries of the Rosary in the religion text we are using. 

William's Rosary

William was St. Michael the Archangel at our All Saints Party

 Miriam was Saint Jeanne de Valois for All Saint's Day

 William wanted to carve a blue Dinosaur Pumpkin for the All Saint's Day Pumpkin contest - he won 1st place!

Trick-or-Treating with the Hagen Family

Miriam's ABCs

Miriam is excited to announce that she has learned her ABC's.  Luke likes to dance to her singing.  We hope you'll enjoy her ABC's and sing along :-)

Phil turns 35

On October 19th, Phil celebrated his 35th birthday.  The kids had fun making the day special for him.  

Decorating the cake - it was a chocolate cake with ice cream in the middle

 He had to work all day and we had planned to celebrate on Thursday but we got everything ready on Wednesday.

We decorated with m&m's - Dad's favorite

  



The cards, cake and gifts were ready when he got home Wednesday



The kids got to stay up a bit later to wish him a happy birthday

He got to open his presents too

Then of course we had to try the cake and sing Happy Birthday!

In case you are wondering - it's Michael D. Obrien's latest book - "A Father's Tale"

We got to celebrate on Thursday, too:-) 

A "Typical" Day at Sancta Familia Academy

As any homeschooling family will quickly point out - no two days are the same.  Yet there is a rhythm to our days so I'll just give you a quick summary of what we do each day using future posts to flesh out the details.

To Organize our day, I use my version of "Workboxes" the rainbow boxes you see above.  I haven't read Sue Patrick's book yet but read what other homeschoolers were doing and adapted the system to meet our needs.  I printed some nifty tags here which I laminated and at the beginning of the day the tags start on the Workboxes and at the end of the day they end up on our "look what we did" schedule (we use sticky tack or Velcro to make them stick). 

I love that I always know what we've done and what we have to do to finish our school day in case I'm interrupted while teaching a lesson.

Since Miriam and William are too young to work independently for a long period of time - we do the lessons together and I use learning videos and books on tape for the times I'm attending to Luke. 

Or they have play time which is an important part of learning :-) 

Generally each day we

"Get ready for school"

and either go to Mass (Tuesdays and Thursday when it works out) or begin with a Prayer

Next we have "Calendar Time"

sing "Your A Grand Old Flag" and say the Pledge of Allegiance

Circle Time and Religion - Saint of the Day, Religion Lesson, Bible Story

Phonics and Writing

Math

The stressful part of the day ;-)

Music/Art/Language (Sign language, Latin and Spanish Vocabulary words)

Science

Physical Education

Reading Story Time

Clean-up

We also go for a walk/bike ride or play outside,

have a snack, eat lunch and have nap time to break up the day as needed.

On Wednesday we like to go to our Library for Story Hour

We can finish the planned learning in about 2 hours or so each day.   Most subjects last about 15 minutes but can take anywhere from 10-30 minutes depending on the attention span of the children and what I have planned.  That's our "typical day" and the kids love it so far. 

A Princess' Tale

Last night instead of watching a movie we made our own!  We hope you enjoy this Epic tale. 

September in Review

We had a busy September here.  We began homeschooling, Phil entered formation for becoming a deacon with the Diocese of La Crosse and we took a family trip to San Diego for my brother's wedding (which entailed my flying alone with the three kids).  All three were major (and some even life changing) events for our family and required a lot of preparation and time.  Of course every day with three little ones goes by quickly;  I feel like I blinked and September was gone!  Before any more time gets away from me - here's an update from our family:

Major Event #1: We officially began our homeschooling!

Getting ready to go to Mass on our First day of school

William and Miriam began kindergarten and preschool respectively at Sancta Familia Academy (our homeschool) on September 6th.  We began our day with Mass at St. James Catholic Church which is the closest church to our house. I feel like I've been preparing for this day since before William was born so it was so exciting to actually officially begin formal homeschooling though of course the learning never ends.

Miriam in front of the work boxes that help organize our school day.

Look for a post soon that describes a "typical" home school day for us.

Major Event #2: Phil begins formation for the Diaconate for the Diocese of La Crosse

Car packed and ready to go

This one is going to require a separate blog post to explain the discernment journey up to this point but in the mean time you can go here for more details. Technically, Phil began his formation as a deacon aspirant in August.  However, in September we packed the whole family up, including the dog, and went on an overnight trip to La Crosse to participate in a retreat at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe for men in formation to become a deacon and their wives.  It was an exhausting but grace-filled trip for our family and God took care of all the details for us, including helping us find someone to house all of us including the dog and a babysitter to care for the children for part of the retreat.  If God is truly calling Phil to the diaconate now at this stage in our lives-and it sure does seem that way- this is definitely a life changing journey and we are learning to surrender to God's plan for our lives as we walk this path.  

Major Event #3: A Family Trip to San Diego for Uncle Steve's Marriage to Aunt Rosie

Luke traveling in style through the airport

This is Phil's busiest time of the year at work but since my brother was getting married it was time to head to San Diego.  Since I wanted to spend at least a week with my family - who knows when we'll be back again - it meant traveling alone on an airplane with three little kids (ages, 5, 3 and 1).

William puts car stickers on his tray race track

 Thanks to many people's prayers and a little bit of preparation the traveling went very well.  The only major mishap was I lost my drivers license on one of the flights.  We had an amazing time in San Diego.

The kids enjoying Uncle Steve's Pool

  The wedding was beautiful,

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Gomez

and we have some amazing memories from our time with my family.

A huge blessing was spending time with my 101 year old grandfather.

I am so grateful that my children could get to know all their family in San Diego and I hope we'll be able to go back again soon. We miss everyone already!

All the Grand-kids together