Sunday School Post #9

Okay, it's not quite Sunday, but I have a lot of posts to make up and I don't want to skip them or else it will just keep piling up! The other 8 posts in this series can be found HERE! Is anyone else out there an office supply addict? I can't help it, they suck me in and no matter how many pens and pencils I have, I want more!! Binders are my latest addiction and I love organizing them with tabs and folders and all that good stuff, but what better way to dress one up than with beautiful pictures! Once my kids finish a Seton Homeschool book, we don't throw it away, we recycle!! I cut out the photos and keep them in a file folder for using in binders, laminating and or framing. A great and beautiful way to upcycle! Another thing we collect, are Holy Cards and Prayer cards. Autumn keeps hers in baseball card sheets when they are related to her Little Flowers group, but the others we love to put on book rings to make them portable and easy to keep track of!

This week the Little Flowers studied St. Catherine of Siena and what better way to pay homage to her than to plant sunflowers?! The girls decorated their little 'pots', then we stuck in a biodegradeable planter and put the seeds right in! One week later and LOOK! They are made to be transplanted right into the ground as is, when removed from their 'pot'. 

Our St. Catherine of Siena binder page had a 3D sunflower, quote, picture and Memory Verse #1, I like to keep it simple, so that the girls have a chance to finish it while in the meeting and listening to stories of the Saint we are studying that day.

Autumn completed all 10 tasks and earned her first badge for FAITH! She is so excited and just wants to wear her sash EVERYWHERE! I had her sash embroidered and it looks so cute!

Type of the memory verses, laminate them and place them in a book ring to make it easy for the girls to study on their own and to keep them portable.

A great way for kids to keep track of a saint or subject they are learning about is to have them take notes in their book! Construction paper, index cards and some photos for coloring make it fun to learn!

Books of the Bible bookmarks are a great way to help your kids learn the books and at the same time keep pages marked in their own unique way! I printed them out, they colored them and then I laminated them! Get your own HERE!

It was finally time to upgrade my daughter's Bible! She has had a children's one for so long and has been wanting my wedding day Bible (Shown on the right) but I am not quite ready to pass that on yet...so it was time to look and find! I am so glad I took the time to really make a decision with this, because we fell in LOVE with the same one and we knew that this was it. The Catholic Youth Bible is a GREAT choice for teens, tweens and any kids that have outgrown the children ones. 

We are just about done with the Love Dare, in fact it all ends tomorrow for us and I cannot stress enough how awesome it has been! Have you done it yet?

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Menu Plan Monday!

It's MONDAY and it's time to make up our Menu for the week! 

Monday: Quesadillas with Pinto Beans and Pico de Gallo

Tuesday: Guacamole and Quesadilla Cheese Burgers with Garden Salad

Wednesday: Baked Potato Bar with Spinach Salad

Thursday: Grilled Garden Herb Chicken Gyros on fresh Pita w/Carrots & Cucumber & Hummus

Friday: Sandwich Bar and Pasta Salad Picnic for Movies in the Park

MCW's Southwestern Pico De Gallo

1 large tomato diced

1/2 bunch of cilantro chopped finely

1/3 cup of cooked & cooled corn kernals

1/8 cup of diced red pepper

1 clove garlic pressed (chopped finely if no garlic press)

1/8 cup of green onions chopped finely

1/2 large onion diced

Juice of 1 lime

salt & pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in bowl except for Lime, Salt & Pepper. Once all ingredients is mixed, add salt & pepper to taste and top with lime juice. Toss 1 final time and serve with chips or cucumber slices!

Happy Birthday to Maurice Sendak the author of Where the Wild Things Are! We are reading the story as the kids color today!

Enjoy the day my friends!!

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Outdoor Fun and Learning

Our outdoor patio garden grown from scraps is doing really well. The celery has the most growth and our green onions have been harvested 5 times now!

Keep a garden tray with soil in your kitchen and have your kids drop seeds into the pots as they get a decent grouping together! We have peas and cherries growing so far! Who knows what may happen! Use popsicle sticks to identify what seeds are where.

While transplanting hostas from one part of our yard to another, the littles found these baby ferns! How cute! We transplanted them into a yogurt container for now.

A nature basket is always at the ready for when we head outdoors but it can also be slipped easily into a nylon backpack for a hike! I include homemade nature journals, small flexible ruler, marker, tweezers, sample collection vials and labels.

Enjoy the long weekend my friends!!! Enjoy every minute!

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Garden Science

We've been having so much fun in Science Lately as we study plants and animals and living and non-living things. There is something to be said about hands on learning. I can stand at the front of the classroom and read from a text book all I want, but when they actually get their hands dirty with soil, explore an animal at the zoo or examine parts of a plant under a microscope, it makes all the difference.  

The celery and food coloring was our first introduction into how the stems of plants work. Watching the stem 'drink' the colored water was so much fun for the kids. They each wrote out what they thought would happen and compared it to what actually did happen. After we had colored celery, we sliced off strips and examined them under a microscope. We even had a taste test to see if the colored ones tasted any different from the one that we left in plain water. 

We learned how easy it was to re-grow green onions and have been able to harvest them once a week!! This has been so much fun to see and enjoy for all of us, even daddy was impressed to see this work! We plan on trying celery and carrots next! 

As we tackled today's lesson, they sampled different roots and were so excited to tell Daddy later that night that they ate ROOTS!!! Plan for this lesson ahead of time and it will be so worth it for the kids to learn that they can actually eat roots like carrots, beets and radishes!

I made up this worksheet for the kids to make sure that they truly understood everything we were learning. It's easy to adapt to different learners. I left the words on the bottom on for the younger two and cut them off of the bottom of the page with my oldest.  

It was time to get our garden started and fit it into our lesson as well! I picked up this magnetic watering schedule at Michael's in the dollar spot and the rest of our stuff was from a home improvement store! We were ready to roll!  

With each step we discussed plant parts and what would happen as they grew. We also discussed all the different seeds and how each seed was different. Some were so tiny and some were so big that it was amazing to think of all the things that these would become. 

The kids took turns trying out all the different jobs I created in the planting process and they got along the entire time. The conversation eventually moved on to just them discussing plants and what would happen on their own, without me leading the way. They were truly involved with every step.

I made up these cute little garden markers and printed them on cardstock. They are not that sturdy or waterproof, but they are perfect for while this little garden sprouts indoors! The kids loved writing out the types of seeds they were putting in and even let Roman have a shot at it. 

Enjoy the weekend my friends!

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