Physical Education

We always seem to just "wing it" for physical education in our homeschool. I find I can teach them about good nutrition when we make meals at home. We live in an area with a large yard and have been blessed to live in areas which were close to playgrounds which all provide room for free play. All thee of my baby goats love (or loved in the case of our oldest) to climb: trees, old swingsets, basketball poles...Perhaps I have a trio of monkeys instead! But when an opportunity for other activities arises, I do my best to take advantage of it. While there is a martial arts dojo in our local town and both girls are very interested in learning a martial art, our budget does not allow for it at this time.

So, since martial arts is not an option, we are, instead, learning about horses and horseback riding from one of my dad's good friends. I think this is a good skill for anyone to learn and an excellent form of exercise. We are also creating a lapbook (We're using the lapbook available through 'A Journey Through Learning'.) which will help us remember safety tips and information about the care and keeping of horses. We'll even be able to learn a little bit about the different kinds of horses and donkeys. (We are beginning our riding lessons by riding donkeys because they are smaller and a bit less skittish.) Because the lapbook is specific to horses, we'll use books and online resources to learn more about donkeys.

I took a few photos at our first lesson and edited them a bit with my phone. I think the photos came out pretty well and I had fun playing with the textures, actions and frames. I hope you enjoy them, too!

 The above photo shows the girls listening to my dad's friend talk about some horse safety rules.

 Above and below shows each of the girls getting the feel of the donkey's movements while he is being led.

Art and Science

As I mentioned in my last post, we've started a unit study on stars and stargazing. Today we studied a little more about galaxies. I thought it might be fun to let the girls use wire and beads to create an artsy model of a galaxy. This is what we ended up with. Now you can criticize if that makes you happy but we're pretty happy with the end results. :D Hope you enjoy the photos!

Spiral Galaxy and Irregular Galaxy, respectively

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Lazy Autumn Evening?

Do you see the question mark? Here's the story behind it.

Today was such a gorgeous day! I could almost forget the fact that today was a Monday. The sun was shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky while a soft, cool breeze tossed the leaves around in the trees and stirred up my hair. I went in to my part time job, not sure what to expect. (I work with some interesting and generally happy folks. I count myself pretty blessed to know them.) Work went on without a hitch and I'm keeping a close eye on myself so that tomorrow is the same. I came home to find most of my dishes washed and my baby goats ready to work on schoolwork. (Well, OK. School is school and if they have to write anything of length, they're generally not too happy about it but they did their work without complaining too much. Kudos to them!) It just so happens we're starting a unit study on Stars and Stargazing this week. We created Sky Journals and they had a blast filling out the first entry while John took some star trail photos. (Speaking of which, if you'd like to see John's photography and talk to him about it, you can find him at J.D. Kittles Wordpress and J.D. Kittles Photography on facebook.) While the girls wrote about what they observed and drew a photo of the observations, I heated up milk for their hot cocoa and prepped my supplies for working on my next project. I managed to get my to do list all checked off and I still don't feel any more tired than on any other day. This is the reason for the question mark. Today really felt like a lazy day but so many tasks were completed! I'm seriously feeling good about that. :) Just wanted to share it with y'all. I haven't been able to post for quite some time. I blog for our business at Kittles Family Artworks 2012 at Wordpress if you think you might be interested in reading those posts. We post at least one a day on that blog. I hope all the links work. Please let me know if they are not. I hope you've enjoyed this post and that you are enjoying the autumn weather (or current seasonal weather) wherever you are.

Laugh a lot! Remember to breathe...