I am so far behind that I don't even know where to start . . .
Let's see . . . I'll start with math. (That should make my math teacher mother happy!)
Last week, we got our money's worth out of the Saxon Math manipulatives kit. The bigger boys started working with division and little man practiced working with groups of ten.
Little man also started using the letter tiles in his spelling curriculum. 
My boys don't really love doing arts and crafts. I say this kinda nonchalantly, but seriously - they REALLY don't like doing arts and crafts. But, I am the mom and I made them do it anyway. A few weeks ago, Jen at Home is Where You Start From, had some links to different websites. One of those websites had this neat idea about melting beeswax and dipping some really pretty leaves in the melted wax. So, we went on a nature walk, collected some great leaves, came home, and got started. I thought they turned out really pretty!
On a totally non-school, absolutely unrelated note - my kiddos and husband have a new favorite snack! Edamame! They could not get enough. I can't blame them, it is really good!
(We don't make it a habit of wearing wife beater shirts around here. However, little man thinks it is a super cool muscle shirt, so we let him wear it to bed. What can you do?
Anybody wondering why I haven't blogged in forever? Well, I am about to show you why. I must forewarn you that what you are about to see is absolute, pure chaos!
We decided to paint our kitchen cabinets last weekend. Everything that was in drawers was placed on the kitchen table. All the cabinet doors were taken off (displaying the total chaos of the inside of my cabinets). But hey, it gave me a great opportunity to clean out and reorganize! Look at the positive, right?!
We still are not completely finished. There are about 3 doors that had to be redone because of drippage (that's what we call it - sounds professional, right?), and we haven't put the glaze on the cabinet doors yet. We have done the glaze around the molding at the top. Hopefully, everything will be completely done by this weekend!
My mother in law was so sweet and offered to keep all the boys all weekend so that we could paint our little hearts out. I can not even imagine trying to do this with the little ones here. So, thanks Virginia!
When the boys came home and I was unpacking their bags, I felt something in Drew's side pocket. I unzipped the pocket and found that he had taken his little pocket size Bible with him for the weekend.
Does a mama's heart good!
This week in math, Little Man started practicing some addition with regrouping. We used pennies and dimes as a hands on activity. We had different items that were "for sale." He would pick two items to "buy" and then we would count out our dimes and pennies for each item. We would put our pennies and dimes together and see if we could trade any pennies in for a dime. He seemed to have a good time!
In grammar, the bigger boys worked on writing a persuasive essay. Dalton wrote to persuade his audience to attend our co-op's fall festival, while Drew wrote to persuade his audience to come to our church on Wednesday nights. The different organizing charts that BJU Press uses for their writing activities are great! It truly makes the drafting stage so easy. My boys used to absolutely dread writing, but this curriculum has helped ease the pain with the different organization charts used in the planning stages.
The bigger boys finally started to multiply using the multiplication algorithm. I was so glad. They had been multiplying (1,296 x 6) using expanded form. Oh, my! That was so lengthy and if Saxon hadn't introduced the "regular way" (or at least the way I multiply) soon, I was going to do it anyway!
Math is always more fun on a white board!
Sorry, that this post was so long and sporadic, but my brain is pretty sporadic right now! I don't know if it was the paint fumes or if it's just me, but I'm going to blame the paint fumes!
I hope all of y'all had a great week! As always, don't forget to head on over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what everybody else has been up to this week. (Or the past two weeks, or whatever!)
