Our Animals Slowly Dying ;-(

We are down to:

0 tadpoles
2 walking sticks
and tons of silk worm eggs!

Our Animals This Year

We've been enjoying six (6) walking sticks, four (4) silkworms, and tadpoles from the creek.

Growing In Grace Contest

There is a contest to win some books called the Life of Faith Collection. Click here to enter: http://www.growingingraceonline.com/2008/05/snuggle-up-with-good-book-elsies.html

No Front Teeth

Adira lost her two front teeth. She looks so cute!

Standardized Testing

Our girls just finished a week of standardized testing (IOWA Test of Basic Skills). Adira (Level 8) and Ariella (Level 7) did well and enjoyed it. I'm humbled. I thought my eldest daughter was gifted. After taking the test, I realize she is not as gifted as I thought! She did not do well on the subtraction problems. She is just now learning about subtraction. She does not particularly enjoy it. She did well on language, listening, science, reading, and map reading. She did not do so well on Word Analysis, where you need to recognize (by listening) to a particular sound in a word. She did not do well with counting money or reading a horizontal bar graph where the answer lies in between to integers. Her alphabetizing skills are horrible. I really enjoyed giving them the tests and seeing areas where we can improve.

I might be on the lookout for a better or different math curriculum this year. I might try Math-U-See since it was recommended by a homeschool mom in our group whose son recently received scholarships to universities.

Homeschool Blog Awards

It's time to vote for the best homeschool blog of the year. However, one of the ladies on the team who runs http://www.homeschoolblogawards.com/ was just diagnoised with a brain tumor. I read her story and the story of her daughter Emma who has gone through so much trauma with an unusual heart condition and autism. I am so saddened there is so much sickness in this world.

Gardening Time

We've been keeping a compost for a few months. It was time to put the compost on the garden beds in preparation for planting. We did not have as many Red Wigglers this year in the compost like we did last year. However, we have some huge Night Crawlers in the beds already. I only found one grub which was great b/c last year we found close to 100 grubs (June Beatles).

The girls did not help much with preparing the beds. Instead, they enjoyed playing in the mud, up to their legs, arms, and face. It amazes me after all these years that they still love to play in the mud. I wonder when they will grow out of it. They had a blast and it was fun for me to see them have so much fun. They made up songs about pigs in the slop, songs about mud, songs about mud and worms. It was hilarious. It was a lot of work to clean them up, not to mention the porch and the inside of the house after they tracked it in.

We have seed packets ready to plant possibly next weekend if the weather stays nice and if the soil is workable. We were blessed this weekend to have workable soil.

I won a math prize

Yeah! Mammoth Math has a free promotion going on. I received two free electronic math books by posting a link to her website.