End of the Season Soccer Parties 2012

Ethan's team.  He the one on the far left with his arms up.

Hannah's team. She's the 2nd from left in the front. 

The 2012 fall soccer season is officially finished.  Whew!  We are beat.  Three soccer practices and three  games every Saturday since Labor Day combined with Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and AHG has made this fall fly by.

The kids all enjoyed their end of the season parties and this year their certificates were received with joy.  At the church where we play soccer, they don't pass out trophies but certificates at the end of the season.  Andrew received the "Best Teammate" award.  Ethan received the "Love of the Game" award.  Lastly, Hannah received the "TNT" award. Her coaches explained that was because of her tiny stature yet ability to throw the ball back into play with such force that it surprises you.  They were right.  She looks too little to throw the ball far yet surprises you with her hard kicks and great throws.  I even heard parents from the other teams commenting on the little number 8 player.

The funniest thing happened during Hannah's party. She lost her front tooth in her cupcake.  She didn't even know she did until she turned around to talk to me and I noticed.  She found it later and proceeded to bring it to me all covered in blue cupcake icing.  Yuk!  It stopped the coaches' awards presentation for all of the parents to giggle at her.  She is an official snaggle tooth now.  She's been singing the song, "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth."  I should get it on video to post because she looks so funny.

Hannah's before picture

Snaggletooth Hannah

Caleb's 1st text message

All the kids have learned how to text Jason recently.  It started as a way to say a quick hello to him while he's at work.  Caleb ask to send him a message too one day.  Being 4 years old, he does not know how to read, write or spell.  He has a few sight words that he does know how to spell.  They are not your normal ones like cat, dad or mom.  They are names to computer games like Minecraft and Roblox.  Yes, these are the first two words he learned how to spell!  He's definitely part of a generation that is tech savvy.

Here is what he typed. I was shocked that he knew how to use the shift key to capitalize and that he knew how to spell our names. It was my eye opener. He went on to type lots of other words to Jason that I had no clue he knew how to spell.  He doesn't officially start kindergarten until Fall 2013 but seeing this changed my mind. He is now doing a 'little school"  with me daily.  I have planned a daily group of school activities for him to do and am starting to teach him how to read and write a little earlier since obviously he is ready.

Hill Academy Rewards

On occasion, I will let the kids break up their school day with something super special. Today, the kids and I worked out a deal that after they complete two subjects, they were allowed to dance to one song on the Wii's Just Dance 3 game. They loved it! They were even getting their morning exercise between subjects done and didn't even know it.

   

1st day pictures for Hill Academy 2012-2103

Hannah Claire, the 2nd grader

Ethan Reed, the 4th grader

Andrew McAuley, the 6th grader

Caleb Trent, the preschooler

Hannah's new school desk

Every year my school room changes. This coming August, we will start doing school with Hannah at her own school desk instead of the "community table". I normally transition the kids away from the group table when they start 3rd grade but I am now out of room on my school bookshelves. I am not able to sell them yet either since I plan on using them for Caleb. So my solution was to store Hannah's school books in her own desk just I do with Ethan and Andrew's books.

Of course I searched high and low for a cute white desk for her and found one on Craigslist. It was a great deal for this antique desk, $75.00 and solid wood. Jason will probably do a complete overhaul paint job on it sometime this summer but it still looks pretty cute right now.

School's Out for Summer

Whoohoo! School's out. Well, technically, Ethan has a few math lessons to finish but his siblings are all finished for the year. First week of May to be done is a record for us. I guess I didn't take as many vacation days as normal this year. We normally finish the middle of May. Next on the calendar, play time for all! School finished so quickly that I haven't made my list of things to do this summer yet. If you know me well, that's HUGE! I have running lists in my house ALWAYS. The last week of school was celebrated with a Field Day at our Deane Hill Homeschool Co-op group. Here are a few pictures of the kids before and after the last activity, water gun fight.

Disclaimer: Hannah's new shirt was NOT that tight on her when it was dry. It must have shrunk a ton. Either that or she ate too much food at lunch. lol

Spring Science Experiment

Our spring science experiment for the kids is to track and grow sunflowers from seeds.  Here they are on their first day of planting.   When the seedlings get big enough, we'll transplant them to the backyard.  We planted 27 seeds.  Can you imagine seeing 27 individual sunflower plants growing in my backyard?!  Crazy! The kids will just love them. 

Happy President's Day! Thanks to Pinterest, I found a ton of crafts to do this week to supplement my lessons about Lincoln and Washington. Here is day 1 of 5 crafts, Abraham Lincoln.

Ethan's Abe is on the right and Hannah's Abe is the left one.

Ethan and Abe.

The best writing lesson, EVER!

I bought the kids their own mailboxes from Target's dollar section. We decorated them with their names and stickers of their choice. Then I asked them to write letters to each other. They loved it! They eat wrote multiple notes to their siblings and had fun reading them too. Hannah wrote a note to Ethan encouraging him on how she like his decorated mailbox. Here was the note she wrote. I didn't even know that she knew the word epic!

Hannah's fantastic note

Caleb coloring pictures for his siblings.

January School Crafts

I found this idea on Pinterest. It ended up being a lot of fun for the kids. They learned how to draw stars with chalk on black craft paper. They worked on getting better at cutting out paper squares since this craft required lots of it. Then lastly, they were able to work on their writing skills since it required them writing a story about their snowman.

The kids' snowman crafts

Library Fun

One of the joys of homeschooling is to be able to head out with the kids to Chick-Fil-A for breakfast then the library afterwards. We normally like to go on off preschool story time days to avoid the chaos but this week we decided to join in the fun.

The kids made fans, masks, had their faces painted, and even got some school "reading" time in.

1st Day of School

The 2011-2012 school year started today at Hill Academy. Grades being taught are 5th, 3rd, and 1st. 3 students and 1 teacher, not too shabby ratios, huh?

The newest thing around here is Ethan's desk. We finally finished it. Remember this was the free desk from craigslist that was 30+ years old and in desperate need of a makeover. Jason and I even made the hutch from scratch for him. Looks pretty good if I say so. Ethan loves it and it fits him well, makes him think he's big stuff like Andrew with his own desk. Also, everything is in red, Ethan's favorite color.

All students received their 1st day of school presents, new school supplies. The newness had definitely worn off for Andrew. He was NOT excited in the least like in years' past. He'd much rather get a new toy instead.

The most excited student award would be given to Hannah Claire, my new 1st grader. My oh my, where has the time gone?

So my request today for all you reading this blog still, is to ask for prayer. Would you please pray for us and we start our 6th year of Hill Academy. We so covet your prayers. THANKS!

Bird Drawings

Thanks to Ed Emberley's book called How to Draw Animals, we took our science bird lessons this week to "art class." First we made another kind of nest with a brown paper bag, real sticks glued on, and plastic eggs. We read some more books on migration, and then drew our own birds.

Birds' Nest

This week we are studying birds and their nests so I pulled out this craft for the kids to do. Then I found this great book (on my bookshelf almost forgotten) to read along with it. It is called Birds, Nests and Eggs by Mel Boring. Today's lesson was on the American Robin. After learning that the American Robin eats 14 feet of earthworms a day, I made Hannah and Ethan measure that out. It was eye opening for them to see how many worms they'd eat. We also took out quarters to visualize the size of the 4 eggs that the female robins lay every spring. It was fun to put them in the nest and see how cramped it would be for them. It was one of our "fun" moments in homeschooling. Science combined with Art is always fun at Hill Academy though. One day I should teach my own Science and Art class combined at our church's Homeschool Co-Op church. I'd love that! I'd been in about 2 years when Caleb's in kindergarten. Caleb in kindergarten, now that's a thought to bring me gray hairs.

Crafty Friday

After we finished our school work, it was time for "Crafty Friday." Today, I planned for the kids to make an ice skating scene. We painted a ice pond blue and sprinkled salt on it to make it shimmer like ice. Then we added cotton balls for the snow and even made some snowmen. We colored the ice skating kids and even added trees to the scene. I love school days that end like this with something fun to do. The kids had fun and even added little animals to the scene.


Andrew didn't want to participate being a big 4th grader and all so he worked on his Alabama project. He's been assigned a Geography/History project on Alabama due next week. He is to learn all that he can about Alabama and proceed by making a poster size map of it. He's also to fill the poster with info he learned from the internet and library books. He loves that kind of stuff. He loves to make maps. He would have been a good traveling companion for Lewis and Clark.

Andrew's Alabama map (part 1)

Ethan's "melting" snowman

Hannah's winter scene

Caleb's "Littlest Pet Shop" toy winter scene

Homeschool Video

This is a funny homeschool video by Tim Hawkins. He's a Christian comedian. Check him out on YouTube. His Chick-fil-a song is a hoot.

Thankfully, I do not have 10 kids, drive a conversion van, and "never leave my dwelling." I do know that probably "people think we're goofy, and neighbors think we're cooky" but that's all right by me.

Fun School Day

I love school days like these. They are the ones where we get all our main subjects done first then have time for FUN stuff.  Today,  we grabbed some of our library books on the Pilgrims and Colonial life to read that went along with our Thanksgiving theme for the week.  I picked up an extra book from the library shelf that was on display about pumpkins for Hannah and Caleb to read.  Little did I know that it would turn in to a school day project for us and we'd greatly enjoy it. We researched pumpkins online and even saw pictures of the last five years of world record holders.  This year's largest pumpkin weighed 1810.5 pounds when it was brought to the Stillwater Harvest Festival in Wisconsin.

This book was such a surprise to me. It must have been written by a teacher. It not only had good science info about pumpkins but math too. The book was called "How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?" by Margaret McNamara.

Mr. Tiffin is the school teacher in the book and he's teaching his class about pumpkins. He got his class to guess how many seeds were in three pumpkins. He had a large, medium, and small one. Some guesses were crazy big like a million, then others were in the hundreds and even one down to fifteen. After topping the pumpkins, the class set out to empty the pumpkins of the pulp and seeds to count. But Mr. Tiffin made them wait until the following day after he dried the seeds. Their homework was to think about how to count them. The following day, some kids decided to count by twos, others thought of fives and the last group by tens. He even explained to the kids that darker colored orange pumpkins with more lines on the outsides were ones with more seeds because the pulp and seeds grew on the lines. That was new to me. Sad to say, that I didn't know that.

At the end of the book, there's a page with pumpkin facts and a note from Mr. Tiffin for the readers to learn even more. Just reading this book encouraged me to take one of my baby pumpkins from my front door and carve in to it to determine how many seeds were there.

We all took guesses. Andrew guessed 315, Ethan 110, and Hannah 48. Andrew was the closest with 314! I was shocked that he was so close, only one away. Who does that? He might have guessed the right amount too because I probably lost one down the sink. You know where I should be going right now with him?  Yea, that's right, to the gas station to buy a lottery ticket.  I should make him pick out the numbers for it too. 

Apple Farm Field Trip

Last week we headed up to our favorite farm, The Fruit and Berry Patch in Halls, TN with a HUGE group of homeschoolers for an Apple Picking Field Trip. We heard a short speech about growing apples, which I heard none of due to Caleb Trent of course. I was chasing him around the parking lot. Then, we rode took a hay ride back to feed the sheep, made our way through a corn maze which popped us out by the apple orchard. Each child received a bag to put their freshly picked apples in, a coloring book, and even an apple cup filled with apple cider, of course. The kids had a great time. Jason was even happy about the field trip. He was at work and couldn't make it but he thoroughly enjoyed the homemade apple pie with vanilla ice cream. The best thing about these apples is that they will last over a month and taste GREAT!

Knoxville Zoo