Catching up...what happened to October?

I can't believe it has been over a month since I posted anything! Well, October was a busy full month with Samuel's birthday at the beginning and Halloween at the end and tons of fun in between! It just flew by too fast for us. The first week of November is already almost over, so I'll just put up a few highlights and share briefly some favorite moments of our last month. :)

The weather has been changing and getting colder and we even had a few rainy days. The kids love watching the rain out our HUGE window wall in the living room. So on one of our rainy days Faith wanted to make a picture of the rain. She glued some big raindrops on her page, then drew some with marker and finally, moved on to watercolor and finger painted more 'raindrops' on her page. It turned out really pretty and she was quite proud of this one and it hung up on the kitchen cabinets (our art gallery!) for the whole month. 

We haven't been able to go outside as often or for as long as we have been because it's gotten so windy and cool. So we've started getting out some of our old games to play again indoors and the kids have LOVED it! It's nice that we can put things away for a few months and bring them out again and their interest and excitement is fresh again. 

 Everyone getting in on the games!

 Joy and Joshua have played many games of WAR with some new cards we picked up at the Osan BX. She is very excited when she wins!!

We are living in the city so there are not as many fields of trees and rolling hills of fall colors like other places we've lived. Still, we've been able to find the signs of fall in our little neighborhood over the past few weeks. One day, we went out and collected some 'signs of fall' and the kids made some creations with them.

 Joshua really enjoyed this one. He loved building in his playdoh with twigs and colored leaves, different pine cones, nuts and rocks he found.

We didn't bring any of our holiday decorations for the house with us to South Korea so we decided to make some of our own. You can tell this picture is from early in the month because Samuel doesn't have his hair cut yet. I let the kids all make a huge mess of glue and tissue and they created these beautiful fall colored jars that we put candles in to decorate and glow around the house.

They turned out so pretty and the kids were really proud of them.

Behind them on the window you can see we covered it in leaves! This happened because one day the kids were REALLY into water coloring (I think we had just opened up a new pack of them) and they made TONS of water colored pages....I mean, probably 15 or 20 between them all. Well, I just don't have the space to hang EVERY single picture they make. So I convinced them we could do something else fun with their beautiful water color pages. Together we cut out leaf shapes after their pages dried and decorated our big window wall with our own fall flurry of leaves...it's wonderful! The kids thought it was a great idea to turn their paintings into something new. It was a fun way to enjoy them instead of the whole pile going in the trash right away, because there just isn't enough room to save everything.

Here are some more fall decorations they made, hanging over the table. Joy recently learned how to curl paper using the side of the scissors so she went curling crazy on hers! Joshua and Faith rolled their paper streamers with a pencil so they were not as curly, but still turned out great!

Joy has some really great books that we've been reading in her curriculum and we always do some sort of project related to the book. The favorite one this month was Charlotte's web and it's all because of these adorable pig cookies! They really enjoyed the story too, but the Wilbur cookies were a hit!

We made several and shared them with friends and ate too many ourselves! I let the kids frost one to eat themselves first, before we did any others and Joy and Joshua made 'o' shape mouths and said their Wilbur cookies were 'oinking!' It was a very yummy point in our school day.  :)

One of the books Joshua picked out at the library in October was 'Speed Racer'. It was a chapter book, as he was proud to tell everyone and I read it to him over a couple of weeks. But during that time, EVERYTHING was SPEED RACER! He played with all of his cars more that I've ever seen him play with them. They were racing everywhere and he was really enjoying our hard wood floor!

There is a pretty big gap underneath the couch so of course it became the tunnel for all the cars to race under.

Even Faith got in on the racing action...

Since Joshua was SO into speed racer, I had to take advantage of this and sneak in any learning I could that involved all things 'Speed Racer'.  Thanks to a quick Google Search I was able to find some Speed Racer graphics to print off and we used them for making patters, counting and math problems, sorting and graphing. 

He made race flags and used chairs, blocks and any other toys he could find that would serve as bridges or tunnels for the race track. We made guesses as to which car would go the fastest or the slowest and tested them to see if we were right. I was surprised at how fast some of those Hot Wheels will go when thrust across the floor by an excited four year old boy! Thankfully, no walls or furniture were dented in the process, but he sure had a lot of fun and was crushed when we were finished reading the book and we had to take it back to the library.

Faith Elaina has been learning about the Creation Story this month. We've been spending a week on each day, reading about it, making projects and learning our creation poem. I've been hanging up her projects really low so that she can see them and enjoy them easily. Here she is standing next to her pretty pictures and when we are done with all the days then we'll turn them into a book for her.

So far in our poem we've learned, "God made the light and the day and the night!" and the second day, "God made the sky! He rules on high!" She loves sticking the next fun pictures up that represent each day. I find her singing the poem often when she walks by her projects hanging up. And of course, now the rest of us are singing it too because it's so catchy! :)

One of the kids favorite projects Faith made when learning about the creation story was this little cloud blower.

It turned out really cute and the kids played with them all week till they fell apart from all of the spit they were blowing in breaking down the paper! :) It was too exciting, so Joy and Joshua had to each make one also.

I started doing some letter activities with Faith this last month too. She kept asking me "What letter is this Mommy?" and when I answered back, "You know that letter, what letter is that?" She would say "buh" or whatever the letter sound was, but very few letters would she be able to tell me the name. I realized that was what she kept asking me when she'd point to different letters and ask me what letter it was. SO....I figured since she's interested, we'll go with it as long as she's into it. I'm certainly not going to push it on her, but it would be nice if she new the names of her letters and wasn't constantly asking what each one was! We learned that Faith knows ALL her letter sounds, but very few letter names. The letters in her name she knows the best. She can sing her ABC song, but somehow missed connecting the two! A couple of weeks ago the big kids helped me build a 'Chicka Boom Boom Coconut Tree' from one of our favorite alphabet books, 'Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom!' Faith has been putting a new letter on it each week and thinks it is so funny that we have this tree on our wall.

I've been pulling out all my letter of the week activities I've done with Joy and Joshua in the past and Faith has been so sweet....she keeps saying, "It's my turn now!?" I didn't realize she was so looking forward to it being 'her turn' to do these things.  :)

This one cracks me up!...It was the moment she realized the 'b's looked different and said to me, "Mama, this 'b' is missing a bump!" So we briefly talked about capital and lowercase and finished sorting them all. (You can find these great printables and so many more here at:
http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com)

We did SO many crafts and projects with it being the beginning of fall and also Halloween. But here are just a few of them that Faith is showing off.... her funny skeleton and handprint bat she made, and we found a great use for all the tiny circle stickers we have, she's been using them on letter pages each week!

I love Samuel's face in this one! He is so happy to be at the table with all of us while we're working so he plays really well right there in his seat while he listens and watches us. He's such a sweet boy!

We got a fun packages from our sweet friends the Sanguedolce's in Illinois and one of the treats inside was a package of those capsules you put in water and watch 'grow' into fun foam shapes. The kids were so excited about it, I had to snap a few pics of the process!

Daddy had them all making guesses about what it was going to turn into...

This one was a car and they were so excited about it, you would have thought it was a real one! After we made others and dried them all out, they played with them for days until the foam just couldn't hold up to all the kids any longer.

One week Joshua was insisting it was 'Button's birthday' coming up. So I surprised him one night and made a cake for Button the frog and the kids made him a birthday hat for the celebration. :)

October was a busy, full month and I have about 300 more pictures from all the fun we had, but it's a new month so I'm going to end the highlights here and try harder to post more frequently so I don't have a whole month to try and remember what we did and choose favorites from!