School Fun with Pumpkins! Day 1

We LOVE this time of year and we are so excited to be set enough in our school schedule that we can allow some time for fun seasonal activities rather than rushing through the bare minimum!

As you know, we use (and love) Calvert.  Our first graders we on Lesson 14 today and for our Games & Activities lesson we had "Five Little Birds".  We decided to change it to "Five Little Pumpkins" instead!  We printed off mini books from DLTK's website.  You can print it here.  

Emu and Duckling enjoyed coloring the pages and reading their new book. 

As our "game" we printed a cute little rhyming activity.  You can print it here.  We glued the pumpkins on popcicle sticks and cut a slit in each fence post.  All the pumpkins sat nicely on the fence.  They enjoyed acting out the rhyme with their little puppets.  Each of them took a turn reading a line and they got to take out a pumpkin for the line they each read.  It was a great activity to work out some silliness before our math lesson! 

We are looking forward to lots of other fun with pumpkins in the upcoming weeks!  Check out these other awesome pumpkin activities that we look forward to doing! and don't miss all these awesome ideas for fall or these, whew, and we haven't even checked out pinterest yet!  Better get started!! What kinds of things are you planning on doing? 

WOW!

Where does the time go?

Life has a way of just slipping by.  There never seems to be enough time in the day.  I can't believe how much time can go by without blogging.  I always miss it and always vow to make more time to do it, I always have many topics sitting just waiting for me to have time to write about.  Things that people often ask about such as schooling, our schedule, organizing, different parenting topics, natural remedies....but, still...here I am looking back and see that my last post was in April!!!

So much has happened since the first of the year.  My mom passed away in February and my world has just spun out of control since then.  I spent some time in my own little funk just getting by day to day and letting so many things go and now that I'm trying to get things back in order I am paying the price for letting them go in the first place.  Things have gotten so far out of hand around here, it's been quite overwhelming trying to get back to life as we always knew it.  I started an in home day care (then lost all my kids after summer), the kids all became involved in different sports, school started....it's just all been such a whirlwind.  Now, here we are trying to find a way to settle into a new routine that works.  

Currently, I have no daycare kids.  School and sports are in full swing.  Our sports schedule keeps us going from 3:30-9:00 pm Monday-Thursday.  Gymnastics and Football games on Saturdays and Soccer games on Sundays.  It's been a crazy ride.  The biggest challenge with it all has been managing our school days.  We are so accustomed to working day and night, so having to be done by 3pm is NOT easy (and sometimes impossible).  Then there was dinner.  Dinner was often a fail, which ended up with us grabbing food on the way home after 8pm so that we weren't eating dinner at 10pm.  Sigh.....then by the time everyone was settled, bathed and in bed....it was 11.  Sometimes 12am.  Which wrecked havoc on the next day.  At some point, you have to admit to yourself that something isn't working.  I finally got to that point, after countless sleepless nights, an empty savings account among other things.  So, last week, things changed around here and I think we've finally got things "right".  

So...once again, hopefully, I'm back to blogging. 

;)