A View From the Top: February 4 - 10

In My Life This Week
Back to nature! Even for us nature lovers it's sometimes hard to get outside when temperatures have plummeted and the trails are covered with snow and ice. But we were in need of some "wood therapy" this week and trudged up our mountain. No easy task this time of year, but we did it! ((huff huff)) The view was beautiful though! Click here to see photos from our hike, but how about a "summit shot"?

A clear view to New Hampshire of Mt. Washington, the
highest summit in New England

But the BIG thing this week...((drum roll))...We dropped cable TV!!!

I am NOT going to miss "Phineas and Ferb", "Goodluck, Charlie", "Jessie", or that dance show with the two girls! (Shhh! I think I WILL miss "Survivor" though.) So, Netflix or Blockbuster?

Whatcha Makin'!
Have you tried Nutella? It's a Hazel nut and cocoa "spread" that we find SUPER yummy around our "neck of the woods". So when I saw a No Bake Nutella Cheesecake recipe floating around my Pinterest pal's board I knew what we were making this week. You can't go wrong with Nutella, cream cheese, whipped topping, and Oreos! LOL

Oh, and I had to share my perfectly round loaf of country honey white bread. I shaped the dough into a ball and let it rise and bake in a greased PIE PAN. Doesn't this look good?

Country honey white

Homeschool Happenings
Sugar Maple started tying her fleece "quilt-style" blanket together this week. It'll be cute...if she finishes it. She's a lot like me - we start projects with enthusiasm, but don't always finish them. ((wink))

Sugar Maple and Balsam Fir ALMOST completed a Winter lapbook from New Beginnings. (Another Pinterest find! Whoop!) And continued to work on Language Arts and Math with a little Spelling, Writing, Drawing, and Astronomy thrown in.

Balsam Fir using spruce needles dipped in white paint to
make snowflakes on his lapbook folder

Sugar Maple concentrating how on making spruce needle
snowflakes

Sugar Maple's snowflakes

White Pine wasn't interested in completing a lapbook - he's never been one for crafty things and I guess he considers himself TOO OLD for such things now - so he continued on with his usual and he's perfectly happy with that.

Oh, and we took Wednesday off from regular school assignment to get in some hands-on stuff. We did a lesson on value in How to Teach Art to Children then made black-and-white paper artwork. We've learned about lines, shapes, colors, and now value. 3 more elements to learn! And then we practiced value by creating CHUNKY crayons from oven-melting broken crayons in silicone muffin cups. (This was also the day that we did most of our Winter Lapbook and made those Nutella cheesecakes.)

Their artwork displayed with clip from a metal curtain rod
in the diningroom/school school

Muffin cups filled with broken crayons

Aren't our chunky crayons beautiful?

Here, There and Everywhere!

♥ Basketball ♥ Cub Scout Breakfast Fundraiser ♥ Cub Scouts ♥ Boy Scouts ♥ Clarinet ♥ Girl Scout Valentine Caroling at Residence Center ♥ Boy Scout Camping ♥ Hung Out With B_ and C_ at Their House ♥

Off the Bookshelf
White Pine continues to ABSORB the David Weber Honor Harrington Sci Fi series. It seems to be the series that NEVER ends! He's enjoying them though. Sugar Maple is reading her way through Nancy Drew. And Balsam Fir has gone back to reading with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with breaks for Bob Books and Hooked on Phonics readers.

Our favorite read aloud books this week:

Helpful Homeschool Hint and Favorite Resource
((cluck)) My Lil' Chicken Yard on Facebook posted a link for this ADORABLE paper coop and chicken set from Go Scout Creative. The "saplings" LOVED folding this set together!

Look at those little yellow chicks! 

One of Our Favorite Things
Isn't it ironic that our favorite thing is our new flat screen TV? Ha! Our old TV was, well, OLD. Ancient. Furniture-like. But it did work even if the picture quality was poor and it was hardly energy-efficient. Movies will look SO much better now!

Ponderings
Have you started to think about the END of the school year? We have 64 days left to meet our legal requirements. And yes, I plan on having our work completed by then (or very close) as we like to have a nice, long summer vacation. But before our year is up, we have several goals to meet, including a Health unit with the "saplings" that I still need to plan, print-out and prepare. If only I had computer ink! Doesn't it ALWAYS run out when you have a bunch of stuff to print out? Or is it just me?

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