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We had a really fun week doing school this past week…here’s what we’ve been up to:

Bible: Last week I mentioned that I missed some of the other Bible materials we read last semester since we have been focusing on the take home lessons from 252 basics this semester.  Well, I “got my wish” this week.  I stayed home from church with the boys a week ago Sunday since Erik was sick…and the 252 basics take home lessons never made it into my hands.  So, we read a couple chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God”  and we did some lessons out of “My See, Point, and Learn Bible book“.  This book is more on Erik’s level, but Madeline enjoys it too…so it is fun to do with them together.

Math: We worked on lessons 13-16 in RightStart Math this week.  Besides practicing abacus skills, the main new concept we practiced was even and odd numbers.  While i had briefly mentioned this concept before, it was really fairly new to Madeline. We used math tiles and “dot cards” to help visualize whether each number between one and ten was even or odd:

Madeline also really enjoyed the games in this week’s lesson, including dot card memory, a “comes after” game that was similar to “war”, and dot card bingo.

Reading/Phonics: We continued using Explode the Code (ETC) books 1.5 and 2 this week.  I am still really happy with my choice on these books.  Since starting the explode the code books we covered double letter word endings (words that end in combos like -dd, -ss, and so on) and we’ve started covering some two letter beginning blends.  I’ve also been trying to find simple “easy reader” books from the library for Madeline to read.  She still needs some help here and there, but I can definitely see improvement in her abilities.  Here she is hard at work on one of her ETC pages:

Geography: We completed our study of India this week.  We did all of our planned reading (I linked to the titles in last week’s wrap up post) on Monday, then worked on our lapbook on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Madeline and I decided to do a double lapbook to cover the continent of Asia — with one folder each for China and India.   We got the India section of the lapbook about 95% finished.  We just need to add some pictures of the animals we learned about from India (elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc) and a picture for the title flap.  I didn’t take pictures yet — I’ll post pictures of the whole thing once we do the China section.

Science: We finally started “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” (BFSU)!  I seriously considered skipping lesson A/B-1, since the topic of organizing and classifying sounded so basic.  But, upon further reflection, I thought that it would be a good subject to discuss and be able to refer back to in the future.  Both Madeline and Erik really enjoyed an “observation skills” activity that demonstrated how it was easier to remember the contents of a tray filled with objects when the contents were sorted into various categories, versus when they were scattered on the tray randomly.

We also started discussing lesson A-2, which is on the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas).  This is a review for Madeline to some extent because we covered this topic last fall.   We’ll do a little bit more with lesson A-2 this coming week and possibly start lesson A-3 (on the topic of Air) as well.  Once we get past lesson A-3 I think we will try out the weekly schedule rotation I wrote about in my post introducing BFSU.

“Game Day”: Since we had neither a field trip or our co-op this week, I planned a “game day” for us on Friday.  We worked on educational games like those in our math curriculum and some sight word games, and we played a couple of board games from our game cabinet.  I also gave Madeline and Erik each a chance to make up their own game.  Erik’s game was called crown soccer and involved playing soccer in the playroom and living room with a tiny soft soccer ball:

And Madeline’s game involved some homemade paper dolls playing soccer:

“Game Day” was super fun and I think it’s something we will do again in the future!

I wrote a couple posts earlier about two curriculum changes we’re making for science and phonics.  Here’s what Madeline and I have been up to in general for the past couple of weeks during her Kindergarten studies.

Bible: We’re continuing to work on the memory verses from church and read through the take-home devotionals from the 252 Basics.  Since there are four of those per week and we usually only do 4 days of school per week, this hasn’t left a lot of time for other Bible readings, like “Leading Little Ones to God” (which I have missed the last two weeks when we haven’t read it).  I’m still pondering what to do about this.  The 252 Basics devotionals are short, but Madeline usually seems ready to move on to other subjects after we have finished one.

Math: We’re now through (I think) the first 12 lessons of Right Start Math level A. Madeline is improving at using the Abacus and being able to quickly enter or identify any number from 1-10.  Most of the other material in the lessons is still review for her, so we are able to get through one (or sometimes even a bit more than one) lesson per day.  She is really looking forward to getting past the review section and getting on to something other than just the Abacus being new and challenging.  But since using the abacus and visualizing quantities is so important to this curriculum, I don’t want to skip any lessons.  She’ll just have to be patient a bit longer. 

Phonics/Reading: As I mentioned in my other entry, Madeline finished Level 1 of Alphabet Island.  Yeah! We’ll be moving on to using Explode the Code books 1 1/2 and 2…and you can read more about that in my recent entry on the subject.

Geography: We started studying the continent of Asia, and specifically the country of India the last two weeks.  I had hoped to spend no more than two weeks per country that we plan to study. But due to only having seven days of school in the past two weeks with Madeline visiting Grandma during week #17 and restarting our co-op this past week (and some other distractions on days we did do school), we didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to. So, we’ll continue to work on India this week as well.  So far for our India study we have read the chapters in Hero Tales about Amy Carmichael (a missionary to India), a folktale and a couple of non-fiction books about what India is like today.  This week we will read another folktale (from this book), a picture book story, and a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in India.  We’ll also make a couple of lapbook pieces for a lapbook about the whole continent of Asia.

Science: Okay, so I slacked and we didn’t get science done.    I had planned to not do science during week #17 since we only did three days of school that week.  Then I held off preparing for science this past week until late in the week, and then by Friday we had other distractions and we just did the basics, skipping the science lesson.  We’ll remedy that this week and start having a block for science planned in earlier in the week!

For fun: Madeline (and Erik) really enjoyed making valentines almost every day this week!:

After our three-and-a-half week break for Christmas, we resumed our regular school schedule the week of January 11th.  I think the break was good for both teacher and student, and now we’re both excited to be doing school again.

Here’s what we’ve been  up to the past two weeks:

Bible: Our church started a new children’s curriculum called “252 Basics“.  The kids get take-home materials each week with 4 additional short lessons to do at home, so we did those and worked on her memory verse.  We also read a couple  chapters out of “leading little ones to God.”

Reading/Phonics/Writing: We resumed our Alphabet Island lessons, working on some of the “U” word families and starting the short “O” families.  Madeline’s handwriting practice was primarily working in her Alphabet Island workbook.  I was very pleased that Madeline retained (and even possibly improved) in her reading skills over our break!

At the end of this past week I looked to see how many lessons we have left in Book 1 of Alphabet Island, and we only have nine left! So, we’ll definitely be starting Book 2a this semester.  I am pondering taking a short break in between books to focus more on sight words for a few weeks, since I don’t think we have been giving them the attention they deserve as Madeline has been eager to study all the short vowel word families.

Math: As I mentioned in my post about our Kindergarten plans for our new “semester”, we decided to switch to RightStart as our new math program.  While waiting for it to arrive, we did a short unit on measuring.  During week #15 we used a small workbook on measuring with non-standard units that I picked up for a buck last year.  Since I don’t have a balance scale, we just did the pages on measuring length and perimeter. Madeline did a great job with this and really enjoyed it.

At the beginning of week #16 we worked on volume measurements, as in the type that are used for cooking:

This was super fun and great practice for Madeline (who wants to be working more independently in the kitchen).  Then on Tuesday we worked a little bit on measuring with “standard” units, a.k.a. inches on a ruler.

Right start arrived mid-week and we were able to work through about five of the lessons.  The early lessons are very basic material, so most of it was review for Madeline — she just needs to get familiar with the terminology, tools and other things unique to this program.  A neat by-product of starting with these very basic lessons is that Erik has been eager to sit in with us and “do math with mommy and Madeline.”  I’m sure it will be over his head soon, but for right now learning how to recognize groups of three or four objects, count out two beads on the abacus, or make a triangle with “tally sticks” is right up his ally.

Social Studies/Science: We’re studying the continents this semester, and we began with a two week study on Antarctica.  This worked out very conveniently since a study of Antarctica is as much as science study as anything else, and at the beginning of week #15 I still hadn’t decided on a science curriculum for this semester. (I did end up picking something — it will either get it’s own blog post or I will write about it next week).

For the literature portion of our study we read “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” This book was thoroughly enjoyed by all, including me.  It’s very funny! We also read a stack of non-fiction books about Antarctica.  Most of our reading was done during the first week of the study, then we worked on our lapbook project during the second week of the study (see my previous post for more on that).

The next stop in our world tour of the continents will be Asia.  We’ll focus for 2-3 weeks each on two different countries — first India, and then China.

Lapbooking is something I’ve been curious to try out for a while, and I finally decided we would take the plunge and try it out with our Antarctica unit.  I’m not sure I can say it any more clearly myself, so here is a quote from the Cathy Duffy Reviews site explaining what a Lapbook is:

“Lap Books offer creative ways for children to record information they are learning and create attractive presentations of that information, as well as use the information to study. A Lap Book is essentially a creatively folded manila file folder with lots of smaller creatively cut and folded pieces of paper that are attached in different ways. This loose definition reflects the realm of creative options that might be used to create lap books.”

Madeline really enjoys crafty projects and I have to admit that I enjoy it too…so lapbooking seemed like it might be a good fit for us.

There are many free resources out there to download various pieces for making your own lapbooks.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a whole one about Antarctica that encompassed exactly what I was looking for.  I definitely didn’t want to start from scratch on my very first go-around with lapbooking, so I used printables from three different sources:

The Penguin lapbook at Lapbooking Lessons (free registration required to download)

A Penguin Lapbook by Angela Frampton

Various mini-books found on the Polar Animals lapbook page at HomeschoolShare

We also selected from creative-commons licensed photos on flickr to include, and use a map of Antarctica cut out from an old atlas I got for free recently.

And, here’s how it turned out:

We accomplished the entire project this week.  It turned out to be quite an undertaking to do the mini book on Penguins within the larger book on Antarctica. But, all told, we probably spent no more than 4 or 5 hours on the project, including my research and printing time.

Madeline really enjoyed helping with some of the cutting, nearly all of the pasting, some coloring and doing some of the writing.  She also dictated a fictional story to me (a mini-book that pulls out of the yellow pocket in the penguin folder) and helped me decide what to write in several of the flaps where some decision-making was required on our part.

This project was a great way to review what we learned about penguins and Antarctica from all the library books we read over the past two weeks, as well as learning new facts.  Madeline seemed to be retaining quite a bit of information as we discussed what was in each mini-book of our lapbook.

Madeline enjoyed this experience enough that she would like to do lapbooks for the other countries/continents we study this semester.  I would like to think we could do at least one for each continent! Hopefully by making these lapbooks, Madeline will have something to refer back to later and review or remind herself of what we have learned.

I think I can reduce my prep-time for future lapbooks having now done it once, and I can be better organized by being able to work on some of the mini-books as we read our library books (rather than starting the lapbook after reading most of the books, and having to pour back over the books to find answers to some questions we had). Maybe some of the places we study will even have “ready to use” free lapbooks already available…which would definitely decrease my prep time by not having to sort out and keep track of possible printables from a variety of sources.

If you want to learn more about lapbooking, a great place to start is this Squidoo lens on the subject.

We’re only perhaps about 40-45% done with our school year, but the Christmas break makes it feel like the half-way point.   We finally got “back to school” this week after taking about three and a half weeks off for Christmas.

We’re also changing gears at our homeschool co-op for the new semester, swapping main subjects from science to social studies.  Since my plan has been for us to study co-op subjects in more depth at home, we’ll be switching gears in both of those subjects as well.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been doing in the various subject areas, and what direction we’ll take for winter/spring 2010.

Math: We worked through about 75% of the material in Kindermath during our first 14 weeks of school.  I knew this would be a temporary program for us, lasting through the school year at most, and possibly only through the first half of the year.

After a lot of research and discussion with Tony, we decided on RightStart math.  It’s more expensive than a lot of programs, but I think it will be worth the investment (and like our phonics curriculum, most of the items are reusable…so assuming we’ve made a good choice, investments made now will pay off over time as we use the materials for at least three kids).  Since RightStart uses somewhat novel methods of teaching adding, subtracting and so on, I thought it would be best to drop Kindermath before I got too far into teaching Madeline one way of doing math, only to have to unlearn it with RightStart.  I ordered RightStart today, and so hopefully it won’t be long before we start using it!

Phonics/Reading: Alphabet Island is still proving to be a good fit for us (which I am very glad of, since that was my big curriculum investment in 2009).  It’s looking like we may finish Book 1 before the end of the year, in which case we will move on to book 2A.  Madeline is definitely making progress in her reading ability!

Handwriting: We’ve done a mish-mash of things, from name-writing practice to short copywork to a few lessons of “Draw, Write, Now” and various “real life” writing activities like writing notes and cards to send.  Between these things and the handwriting practice contained within Alphabet Island, I haven’t felt the need for any other formal handwriting programs.  I think we’ll continue along this same path in 2010.

Science: We spent our fall semester in co-op exploring science topics inspired by the days of creation in the Bible.  At home, we read along in a corresponding text book, as well as reading some library books and doing a handful of projects and experiments.   I was disappointed by the textbook component of our study.  It just wasn’t very “science-y”.   While I had at first liked the idea of linking in the study of the Biblical creation account directly with science, I think the textbook we used was too heavy on describing what the Bible talks about, and too light on teaching scientific principles.

Despite the fact that we are “back to school”, I don’t have a firm plan for our science studies for the rest of our school year.  I am intriguied by R.E.A.L. science.   Today I discovered “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2“.  And Tony has been talking about just writing his own elementary science lessons for us to use.  It should be an interesting adventure no matter which route we choose!

Madeline also received a microscope and a telescope for Christmas, so we may wing it a bit and try and incorporate using those two tools into our science study this semester.   Madeline loves experiments and we didn’t do nearly as many as I hoped we would in the fall, so doing more experiments would certainly be a winner with my student.

Social Studies: As we move to geography studies in our co-op, we will also move to studying geography at home. This fall we our focus was on history (mostly early US history).  We used parts of  “History For Little Pilgrims” and also read fiction and non-fiction from the library.  Using that textbook cemented in my mind the idea that using literature to teach history is a much better idea than using a dull textbook.  Madeline really enjoyed listening to me read historical fiction or biographies written by the D’Aulaire’s, while she got bored of me reading from the textbook after a very short period of time.  I think more literature-based history study is in our future!

This winter/spring, our co-op will study the seven continents, focusing on one or two countries on each continent and learning a bit about those countries as well as missionaries that traveled there.  I purchased Galloping the Globe to use as a tool to further our study of each continent at home.  We’ll plan to read books from the library, try cooking various foods from around the world, and maybe do some other hands-on projects to help Madeline learn about world geography and culture.  We may do some kind of semester-long project like making a notebook or binder with maps and other pages about the various countries we study. I think the trick for me will be to not let us get overwhelmed by too much detail and activity.  I’m sure we’ll revisit world geography and cultures various times through elementary school, so I need to remind myself to save some of my great ideas for when Madeline is a bit older. 

Bible: We’ll continue reading “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as doing the take-home lessons/activities from the new Sunday School curriculum our church started this month called “252 Basics”.

I’m excited to see what our semester holds as we continue with Madeline’s Kindergarten year!

The two weeks prior to this one we did do some school, so for the sake of posterity I thought I would do a quick overview of what did…or at least attempted to do.  My plan from the outset was for December to be a light school month, but the past two weeks were very light.   I think we had a total of about five school days during the two weeks.

First up, Tot School with Erik:

We attempted to do Tot School at the beginning of our school day, and the days we did it, it was great.   Madeline was happy to help Erik with his activities (or do something similar along side) and Erik was more content to play or do activities on his own after having had Tot School time with me.

I did find it a little bit difficult to chose to put Tot School time at the beginning of our day.  A couple of days we just got started with Madeline’s school, hoping to do Tot School later…and it didn’t happen.  After our Christmas break, I am going to continue the experiment of having focused Tot School time with Erik first and really make an effort to get started with our day early enough to make that a reality most of the time.

The days we did do Tot School, we mostly did Preschool Activity Bags, and old favorites from our game cabinet, and activities like stacking pegs and lacing beads.

Kindergarten with Madeline:

Bible/Character: We continued with our focus on Christmas, some days reading the verses from our Advent paper chain (other days we read them at dinner) or reading Christmas related books

Math: We worked on money — specifically counting coins.  We covered this topic last year, but I don’t think Madeline retained a whole lot.  Pennies and nickles are easy to remember, but she still has a hard time remembering about the dime and quarter and how much they are worth\

Reading/Phonics/Handwriting: We continued to practice the  short “i” word families and did just a bit on the short “u” families in Alphabet Island. Most if Madeline’s handwriting practice was doing her Alphabet Island workbook pages.

History: We read about the Revolutionary War time period, reading biographies about George Washington and Benjamin Franklin by the D’Aulaires and starting a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in that time period.

Science: Hmmm…not much! This is one subject that definitely got shortchanged with  our light school schedule.

We’ll be on Christmas break for at least the next two weeks…and we may take the week of January 4th off as well.  I have my quarterly editing deadline that week, and after a week of traveling and other excitement, I have a feeling that we may need another unstructured/fun week before we return to the routine.  (And I may need another week to get ready as I retool a few of our subjects).

After taking a week off for Thanksgiving, we were back to our regular school routine this week, for the most part.  We still had a bit of a light week compared to our workload in previous weeks, and I would anticipate that continuing until we begin our Christmas break.

My current plan is for us to do two more weeks of a lightened load of regular subjects, then do mostly Christmas-related school activities (books, crafts, printables, etc) during the few days leading up to Christmas eve.   We’ll take a break from Christmas eve through January 3rd, then start up again on January 4th — though I would anticipate we’ll have a light week again as we begin the new year since I will have my quarterly Faithwalkers Journal editing to complete that week.

Here’s what we did this week:

Bible/Character: We read from “Leading Little Ones to God” on Monday, then began our advent paper chain devotional, reading and discussing a Bible passage each day:

Reading/Phonics/Handwriting: We began the “short i sound” word families and covered several of them this week.  Madeline was eager to make progress and learn new words! I think we are going to breeze through these word families in Alphabet Island, then spend a few days playing games and doing supplemental or review materials to make sure she’s really “got it.”  Since we did several pages in her Alphabet Island workbook, we didn’t do any additional handwriting practice this week.

Math: We continued to practice the skill of adding one to any number, as well as reviewing greater than/less than and counting by fives.

Science: Our topic was the rest of the land animals we had not already covered — reptiles, insects, arachnids, amphibians and other creepy crawly things.  As a part of keeping things simple, we just read and discussed our textbook and didn’t supplement with any other materials.  I’m sure we’ll cover these topics again soon, so this was just a first exposure for Madeline.

History: We read about Native Americans this week, with a biography of Pocahontas by the D’Aulaires and “Meet Kaya”, an American Girl book about a Nez Perce girl from the mid-18th century.

Fun stuff and preparing for Christmas: Part of the reason we are doing a light school schedule the next few weeks is to allow more time for fun Christmas preparations (well, and a few “not so fun” ones like cleaning the house for hosting friends and family!).  Here the kids are helping me make desserts for a family gathering we had this past weekend:

This coming week we’ll be baking lots of Christmas cookies, and hopefully stuffing our Christmas cards and maybe doing some Christmas shopping together too!

This past week we had a blast with our Thanksgiving unit study. While we didn’t quite get all our subjects wrapped into it, a lot of our week revolved around it.

Of course, we made some great Turkey crafts.  Here’s our cereal box Turkeys:

And here’s Madeline working on her Thankful Turkey, followed by the finished product (I helped Erik make one too):

We read a couple of Thanksgiving-themed fiction books (“Thanksgiving on Thursday” from the Magic Treehouse series, and “Kit Learns a Lesson” from the American Girl series).  We also read a few non-fiction books about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  I think my favorite of the ones we read was “The Thanksgiving Story” by Alice Dagliesh.   Unfortunately I realized after I started reading it that our copy is missing the first couple of pages.  I like it so much though I think I might buy another copy to have one that is complete! (mine came from a garage sale).

While we were reading some of our Thanksgiving books, Madeline colored some Thanksgiving-themed coloring sheets.  We did a few other Thanksgiving printable sheets of various types as well, and we’ll be assembling them all into a book sometime in the next day or two!

Here’s where I found some of the resources and inspiration for our Thanksgiving study:

Free Activities from Creative Teaching Press (November/Thanksgiving download)

ABC Teach Thanksgiving Theme Unit

The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving unit at Hubbard’s Cupboard

Thanksgiving Printables at Itty Bitty Bookworms

Thanksgiving Unit Study at Ecclectic Homeschool Online

Pilgrims/Thanksgiving Unit Study by Cindy Downes

Besides our Thanksgiving study, here are a few other things we did this week:

Bible/Character: We read out of “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as covering our fruit of the Spirit, which was Gentleness.  I think we’ll focus on Christmas related topics during our Bible time in December, though we will also finish up our last fruit of the Spirit too.  Then we’ll start a new series of Character topics in January.

Reading/Phonics: We did a review lesson in Alphabet Island, and covered a special lesson about “Goofy G”.   I guess I had totally forgotten or perhaps never learned that there is a somewhat complex set of rules as to when “Goofy G” should say which of his sounds.  I had a bit of a hard time getting my mind wrapped around all of it first, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is hard for Madeline to remember.  I bet there will be many phonics rules that will catch me by surprise as we are going through all the Alphabet Island lessons — perhaps not so much in our current book, but definitely in books 2 and 3.

Science: The next topic in our science book was Mammals, so we read several library books on the subject.  This was also the topic at our co-op this past week. We took a field trip to the zoo today, and we had fun discussing different animals and whether they were a mammal, bird, reptile or fish.

Math: We started working on some simple addition — adding “+1″ to a variety of numbers, as well as reviewing counting by 5’s and having fun with the Tangrams.

We’re pretty much taking this week off from school for a Thanksgiving Break (Today was a trip to the zoo, tomorrow is new tires for the car and formal Christmas portraits for the kids, Wednesday is our day to cook and clean, then it’s Thanksgiving Day with my family at our house, followed by a trip to see Tony’s family)…we’ll be back to our regular school schedule on Monday, 11/30!

Here’s what Madeline did for school this past week:

Bible/Character: We did a couple days of reading in Leading Little Ones to God. We skipped character this week (whoops!), though on one day when I couldn’t find the Leading Little Ones to God book we took out a book we enjoyed last year, “Big thoughts for little people”

Reading/Phonics: We studied the -ap family in Alphabet Island this week.  I made Madeline a phonics flip chart (I got the file to make it here.  Thanks to Homeschool Highway for the inspiration!), and this seemed like a helpful tool to be able to make lots of words quickly and easily for her to sound out.  Here she shows that she knows the word she made is “tap”:

Math: We did a several review pages in her workbook about number sequencing (such as “what number comes between these two numbers”), and greater than/less than.  I tried to touch on counting by fives again, but that was just a no-go for her, at least at the time I tried.  I think we’ll let that topic rest for a few more weeks before we try it again! We also got out a book with lots of Tangram shape puzzles, and did those on several days this week.  Madeline seems very visually oriented, and she really enjoyed them.  There’s a picture in my tot school post of her working on them.

Handwriting: We combined handwriting with Alphabet Island and used the dollar store dry-erase handwriting book again this week. The late in the week, on her own (not even during school time) Madeline got out the “Draw, Write, Now” book I purchased at the beginning of the school year.  She was really intimidated by the “write” portion of the book initially, though she liked the idea of the drawing lessons. Then this week, she both drew the picture and copied the paragraph of writing for one of the pages all of her own choosing! I’m excited about this development and we’ll probably include this book now in our regular rotation of handwriting materials.

History: We read about the discovery of the Americas.  Our textbook had a short section about Christopher Columbus and then we read a library book that covered several explorers.  I’m excited to continue this topic as we read a couple of explorer biographies!

Science: Our topic was trees and leaves, appropriately enough, as we spent several hours outside in the leaves on Monday and Tuesday afternoons. We read some basic information about trees in our science textbook, as well as a page I printed off from the internet about tree/leaf identification.    And we had lots and lots of discussion about leaves as we spent time outside enjoying them.

Read-alouds: We typically do read-alouds in the afternoon, and since we spent a lot of time outside early in the week, then cleaned our house in the middle of the week, then made cookies later in the week, and packed and left for our overnight trip at the end of the week…not much “serious” read-aloud time happened.    We still did lots of the light fluffy stuff (like fairy books) here and there during the week.

Fun stuff: One of Madeline’s favorite fun boxes this week involved making a Halloween card, which she decided to give to her friend Josie:

For our fun outing this week we went to an indoor play area called “Eagles Nest.”  It was a blast and I got pictures of the boys, but didn’t get any pictures of Madeline.  Maybe next time!

As you may recall from my post last week, we had an unseasonably early snowfall two Mondays ago.  Then last Monday, we had a beautiful, warm fall day.  Here’s what the front yard looked like that day:

Here’s the front yard today, one week later:

And then after we did some raking:

Fall color has arrived in all its beauty, at least in our yard!