What a fun Easter we had this year! The Easter Bunny left the kids some little gifts on Saturday morning. There was an Easter egg hunt in the house. The kids loved it.
Sunday morning was great. The best way to celebrate Easter is by going to church! After church we had the missionaries over for dinner. We did our traditional devotional where there are 12 Easter eggs and each one is filled with a scripture and corresponding trinket representing Christ's last moments of mortality.
We love having the missionaries in our home. They bring such a great Spirit with them. They have made my kids more excited to go on missions themselves someday.
Finally, we ended our evening with Peter and Julianna, Tatiana and Grandma. It was so fun! They always spoil the kids. We were fortunate to be able to learn some Russian Easter traditions. They had Russian desserts and taught us a game to play after decorating the eggs. You take your egg and crack it against someone else's egg. It's like WAR for boiled, decorated eggs. One usually cracks and the other one doesn't. The person with the strongest egg is the winner.
It was so funny.
I love Mark Mabry's Reflection of Christ. I heard Mabry speak at a Time Out For Women. He was inspiring, funny and motivating. I'd love to own his prints someday...beautifully framed.
Now a shout out to homeschooling~I love that we have the freedom to learn when and how we want. We always take the week before Easter to study the events surrounding Christ's Atonement. Over the years we've learned about the Passover, ancient traditions and made traditional Easter food. It all comes together to make for a fun, special
time of year.
I believe that Jesus is the Christ. He is my Savior.
As a parent, it's always fun when your kid likes something that you like. Last week I gave Conrad a little organ lesson before Scouts. He did great. He had this simplified hymn memorized. I've decided I'm going to have them bring their simplified hymn book with us so they can start practicing. Conrad thought it was awesome. I let him change the stops around when I was playing. I'm sure one day he won't think this is so cool, so I'll take it while I can get it:)
We just finishing reading The Diary of Mary Jemison, Captured by the Indians. I stumbled upon this book while I was looking for Ohio state history books. It was a great read aloud. It's about a 12 year old girl who was captured by the Seneca Indians. She was 'adopted' to replace a brother who had died. (Mary told her life story to a local doctor when she was in her 80s). She eventually becomes free and has the option of staying with her Indian family or going back to her birth family.
The kids and I enjoyed it. It had a lot of vocabulary words to go over such as tomahawked, squaw, bounty, melancholy, plundering, etc... The kids will journal about it tomorrow and complete some worksheets that I created.
We are using The Story of the World for history and geography. We started with Ancient times and are learning chronologically towards the present day. I enjoy this, but I was troubled when my oldest said that she did not know who Christopher Columbus was. How could this be?? She's had many years of public and homeschooling.
Anyway, I decided to do a unit study on Columbus. It was a lot of fun. We got information from a couple different library books, the internet and watched 2 movies on him. I only remember learning good things about Columbus...
My kids asked me why we honor him when he has done so many awful things.
Positives~material provided vocab words, map work by charting his voyages, a topic for them to journal about so they won't ask ME what they should write about:)
We went back to our normal studies. Knights and Samurai. My kids love history because of the enrichment activities we do. We got a How to Draw Castles and a How to Draw Fighting Figures from the library. They worked really hard on their drawings. I created a test for them to take to let me know if they are retaining information. We usually do oral tests but I've been doing more written tests lately.
This chapter gave us a lot of vocab words such as chivalry, orphan, feudal system, page, squire, ect... Fun stuff. I'd like them to see an edited version of A Knight's Tale:)
