We are doing these again, and will be offering a FREE downloadable packet on my new website watch for more news

My children’s grandparents (on hubby’s side) are in Australia serving a mission to the aboriginals, teaching them about the Lord.

We decided to do a unit study on Australia, and the aboriginals.  I think you’ll like what we did.

Here is my 6yos getting the canvas ready for our aboriginal paintings.  You have to paint it all black the night before.

Here is our lapbook.  This is the front:

This is the inside of it.  Many things to do, and we learned so much!

Here is the back with our aboriginal art book:

Here is inside the book, and all the symbols they use for their artwork.  Also some samples of the artwork on a canvas and on boomerangs.

Here we are the next day painting on our canvases.

This is my 6yos painting:

This is my 8yos painting:

and here is mine:

I know they are rough, but hey…it was our first time!  LOL

Each painting tells a story.  My 6yos is about a camping trip we took.  My 8yos is about a camping trip we took in the desert, and he even remembered catching the “goanna’s” (lizards), and incorporated that into the painting.

Mine is about a camping trip we took in the mountains this summer.  My in-laws had come back from Australia for a bit, because my mother-in-law’s mother was dying.  I put them around the campfire with us on the bottom right, they are the one’s with headresses.  On the right and left of the painting you can see a man and a woman in white…I used those to represent my mother-in-law’s parents who are both passed on now.

We learned so much about Australia with this.  Even learned that they have a queen instead of a president…guess who it is?  Queen Elizibeth II of England.  She rules (by proxy… the Prime Minister of Australia actually rules in her stead) Australia as well.

I still think the most fun part was trying to do the aboriginal paintings.

Happy Learning!

LadyPoet33

Well Fellow Homeschoolers,

We finally lost our marbles and left the city.  We are living on a 20 acre farm with 2 cats and a cute border collie.  I love it here.  The house needs some fixing up, but the land is awesome.  We are on a well, septic tank, propane…if we got a windmill, we would be completely off grid.  lol  We have a fireplace, but hubby has a stove to put in it, he just needs the time to put it in.  It will put out much more heat than the fireplace.

This is the view from our front porch...no neighbors...no neighbors

20 acres is pretty big.  Picture a football field…now picture 15.15 of them…that is how big our property is.  It’s large…and the kids love it. 

Here is my dining room

The 2 younger boys in front of the corral where we hop to have a calf soon.

This is my little guy Josh, with one of the many lizards he caught.

My husband and my boys found some coyote bones on our property.

I'm going to be a grandma!!!

This is my oldest, my daughter.  She is huge and she knows it!  It’s all baby.  My little granddaughter.  My grandaughter’s name is Lorna.  My daughter’s name is Je-Ve’.  She is due to give birth on June 9th.  This will be my first grandchild.  In my daughter’s typical nerd fashion she has on a shirt that has a computer sign that tells you the computer is loading a file and it says: “Loading…please wait.”  lol  This was taken at her baby shower on Saturday. 

I’m having a busy time of it.  It’s a good busy though.  How has everyone’s year gone so far?

LadyPoet33

I feel like I’ve learned English and now I’m told I have to speak in German.  Finding out just how to post a blog all over again; is crazy.  I don’t even know how to find my friends anymore.  I am VERY dissapointed with this new layout.

If I can figure this out, I have some great nature notebook posts and photographs to post.

LadyPoet33

It’s that time of year again…I get SPRING FEVER!!!  But it’s still cold here.  So we decided to go on a Nature walk/drive.  lol  That way, mom can climb in and warm up when she needs to.

We were driving down by our local lake and came across these guys.  We watch them and photographed them for about a half hour before they took off.  There were about 20-25 of them.

We also saw some geese that had stopped to rest:

And a little robin in the tree with little buds on it:

We also stopped at the frozen lake to throw rocks on the ice to see if we could break through…we did. 

Here is Corbin wearing big brothers jacket because he forgot his.  lol

And mom didn’t want to be outdone, so I got into the fray!  lol

And this last one is my favorite.  My two boys who are most alike.  Jacob (17) and Joshua (9).  I took this from the car.  Jacob is teaching Josh about the rocks and they were rock hounding.  I can just hear Jacob…"is this igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary?"  lol 

I love homeschooling when you see the older kids teaching the younger kids.  It’s so precious.

Happy Learning!

LadyPoet33

Let’s try this for the 3rd time and see if it works.  This is why I sometimes go long periods without blogging, sometimes you’ll have the whole thing done and it will get lost somewhere.  UGH!

We have a Valentine party for the homeschoolers every year at our local skating rink.

Here is my son with his best friend:

Here are my 2 youngest boys Corbin 11 and Josh 9:

Here are 2 tables of food.  The skating rink lets us bring in our own treats to share with everyone. 

And table 2:

Here are the kids getting ready for the valentine exchange.  They get in an oval and put their boxes on the floor and then they each have 30 valentines to put in others boxes.  The kids really love this.

This looks like a pretty impressive group huh?  Just wait until the next picture. 

This is as much of the oval as I could squeeze in.  The party was 4 times the usual size.  Our numbers are growing like crazy.  I hope you can see all the kids I could fit into this picture.  You have to realize that I only got about half of them.  Wow!

And last but not least the pile of rented skates:

Now this is after they put away about a third of the skates.  This does not include skooters and many moms come and rent skates; bringing their babies strollers and they’ll put on a pair of skates and just skate their hearts out even though they may have one or two who are too small to skate or skooter. 

We are so spoiled to live in such a homeschool friendly area.  I love the family atmosphere, and the way people work with homeschoolers.  Even our music.  We don’t like the skating rink music, so some of the moms (me included) have a list on our ipod for get togethers like this with clean music.  We can have fun and not worry about lyrics that we may not want our kids to hear.  We have games and prizes and such fun.

I encourage you, if you have enough homeschoolers in your area, to try organizing something like this.  It’s awesome!

Happy Learning!

LadyPoet33