October Was Just Plain Scary!

Okay, so maybe not scary but it was a bit of a crazy month for us.  We were finally in a good grove with school and we had a trip planned to Colorado to see our family there.  Then we got a call from a great friend saying that his mother-in-law was looking to rent out her house in the town we lived in and that he had thought of us.  In case anybody noticed from the pictures of our school room I posted at the beginning of the year we were renting a tiny single wide trailer due to issues with selling our house before we moved to Texas.  While I have nothing against living in a trailer, it was small for three kids, two parents and a home school classroom, not to mention all of our pets!  We didn't have a whole lot of choice though because there was literally NOTHING to rent in our area.  When we heard about our this new possibility we RAN to go see it.  It was awesome!  A nice brick home with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big sun room to use as the school room, a huge shop, two other storage sheds and 40 fenced in acres for the horses!  Needless to say we signed a lease right away to move the end of the month.

While we were thrilled to be moving, it also meant we needed to get packing right away.  We didn't want to cancel our trip to Colorado either so we had less packing time then we would have had and it was a bit crazy and stressful but so worth it.  We are loving having so much more space and we have settled in nicely here.  God truly dropped this opportunity in our laps and we are so thankful to have more space to live, more space to learn and more space to play.  You will have to forgive he mess in the pictures but here is the new school room!

It is probably 3 or 4 times bigger then the last one and we love having it.

We were working on a unit on history and how we can learn from the past and how important the past is to us.  We obviously were studying a lot about important events and figures from history such as the Revolutionary War, George Washington, Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, the Pilgrims, etc., as well as a lot of Biblical History including things about Noah and his line.  Our major project though for the unit was about family history and we made a Memory Book.  This was a wonderful project but very time intensive for us as well as for the family members who did participate.  We used a set of questions provided in our curriculum and sent it out to each Grandparent, Aunt and Uncle of the kids.  We were also able to get a lot of information about their Great Grandparents as well.  We made sections in the Memory Book for each family and then for each person in our immediate family and included all sorts of things.  We are still hoping in time to get even more of the surveys back  as we have really enjoyed reading them and learning our family history.

Alright, on to our trip to Colorado in October.  We had so much fun!!!!!!!  The timing of the trip was perfect with our Memory Book being assembled as we were able to directly ask many of the questions to one set of Grandparents and hear their stories first hand and we were able to visit the only remaining Great Grandmother of the kids and here some wonderful stories from her as well.  Those are memories the kids will always cherish.  We also were able to visit two museums while we were there.  We went to the Denver Children's Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  We had a wonderful time at each of them.  At the Children's Museum we were able to play on a real Denver Fire Truck, paint pictures, build with recycled materials, explore simple machines with balls and play in a fake vet's office.  I do think they were three of the cutest firemen I have ever seen and I have seen a lot!  At the Science Museum we were able to explore rocks and minerals to complete our study from Unit 1, explore lots about Native Americans to complete our study of different dwellings, learn about space and of course see the dinosaur bones.  There is so much at the museum that we in no way had time to explore it all and will definitely go back at a later date.

This post is already really long(I told you it was a busy month!) so I will just really quick touch on the rest of the highlights.  Of course we had Halloween in there which was fun.  We went to some of the local businesses in our town, we went to a carnival at the high school and we went Trick-or-treating with some of our home school friends in the next town over.  We also had a fun field trip to a corn maze and pumpkin patch with a local home school group that was so much fun!  The kids had what is called a Rain Gutter Regata for Cubscouts where they made boats that they raced.  They both did very well and had fun and even our youngest son got to race!  We got two new kittens on Halloween and named them Kit Kat and Tootsie Roll.  The last thing to mention actually happened at the beginning of the month and that is that we finished out our lesson on architecture by making some models of some great types of houses from around the world and studying the different types of dwellings and why they were made the way they were.  It was a great lesson and they learned tons from it.  They then had to present what the learned to us which was fun.