Week 31 - BOB Books, Rearranging Furniture, Squanto, and Games

This week was pretty normal.  The girls had a scout meeting on Monday.  They enjoyed playing games with all their friends.  They LOVE playing Apples to Apples.

We played games and had some fun.

We also shot a little archery while the weather was still warm outside.

 Caty found dandelions growing in December!!

 She got a good picture of them also.

We have had our TV a month now and I decided to move the living room around so we could see it from all angles.  We use it for school projects, so I wanted to make better use of the space.  I did that on a whim one morning.

Our state this week was Louisiana.  It was fun seeing some of the places we saw when we drove through there last year.

Our President was James Polk.  For our lunch one day this week, Lydia made biscuits and I made gravy.  James Polk enjoyed simple meals like this.  So it worked out.  Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the full meal.  But here are Lydia's biscuits.  They were part of her Quick Breads cooking program.

In History we learned about Squanto and the Pilgrims.  We learned about the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  For our Colonial America project this week, we used quill pens.  I found these on one of our trips.  I have been collecting Colonial crafts/items for a couple years.  I keep them separated in a bin so that I can bring them out as we continue to cycle through history.  We watched the Disney movie Squanto and the kids read this chapter book on Squanto.  We watched a video on the Salem Witch Trials that took place in this colony also.  We had a nice discussion about the extremeness of religious thinking and fear of the unknown.  The girls also watched the Dear America episode on Pilgrims.  I also bought a few of these episodes for Colonial Life of Children.

 Lydia went full-pilgrim for this project.

Caty finished up her first set of BOB books.  This is a huge accomplishment for her.  So I decided to surprise her.  She was asking for chocolate cake, and so I made her one.

She was so surprised by this.  Now I need to come up with the next reward for reading Set 2.

She got frustrated this week with double digit subtraction with borrowing.  She can't grasp why you can add numbers almost anyway you want, but you can't subtract that way.  She also wants to do the places in her own order.  So we'll just keep practicing.  Lots of reminders.  She caught up in her geography book to where she should be for a "typical" 2nd grader.  So we can slow off the pace on that subject.

Lydia did several projects in her Quick Breads book.  She also was working on her Purrfect Pals project.  I don't think she thought it was going to be this much work.  But we'll wait and see.  She might surprise me.  Hopefully next week she'll finish Quick Breads.

This was my seat while she was cooking.  I literally ran the oven.  But my OCDs got the best of me toward the end and I started wiping up counters, etc.  It was too much for me.

Lydia read all the American Girl Marie-Grace and Cecile books last week.  She loved them.

Joey is struggling under the workload of a 9th grader, so I am going to be working on adjusting his amount of work to avoid frustration.  But still need to find the balance for him to graduate on time.
He is chugging along on his reading.

Brayden is all over the board. He is showing a love of cooking still.  He HATES all book work and learning period.  So we are struggling there.  He is a typical teenager in that regards.  Finding the happy medium with him is going to be hard.  He just plain hates anything that requires him to work outside of a video game.

We had a pretty standard week.  Grandpa and Grandma came over for dinner and a movie.  It was fun.  We made grilled pizzas.  Caty loves chopping stuff in the kitchen.  She was so proud to have chopped up the olives for Grandma's pizza.  We also had company come over for New Year's Eve.  My sister-in-law and her family spent the night.  The kids loved playing with their cousins.  It was a lot of fun.   We also got to spend a little more time with Grandpa and Grandma.  They came over on Saturday afternoon for snacks and games.  We played Sequence and UNO.  It was great!

Brayden found a recipe for ice-cream cake over the summer.  It's really easy to make, but extremely sweet. So I have only let him make it once.  He asked to do it again for our family dinner on Sunday.  I gave in....but this time told him he couldn't use Cool Whip, but had to make whipped cream.  He likes using the hand mixer.

Adding the layers....

The finished cake.  It's 2 layers of ice cream sandwiches.  Between the layers is whipped cream, ground up Golden Oreos, chocolate syrup and sprinkles.  You add the same on top.  Throw back in the freezer and viola...you have an ice cream cake.

Hope everyone had a wonderful week!!  See everyone in Week 32!!