By the Shores of Silver Lake

 I have one more blog post before I start our vacation pictures!  The day before we left on our trip, our homeschool group met to do activities based on By the Shores of Silver Lake.  This particular book starts with two very sad events, as Jack, their dog, dies and Mary goes blind.  The first few chapters were very hard for me to read out loud, but my kids are used to me crying through books!  All of us were impressed with how well Mary handled her blindness, and it was a great lesson for all of us on contentment and gratefulness.

 In this book, the family hears that there is a school for blind children and Laura wants more than anything for her sister to be able to have that experience.  Of course it costs money, and Laura determines that she will be a teacher someday (even though the thought of it sounds awful to her) so that she can earn enough money to send her there.  Gracie and I started researching braille and learned many interesting facts about Louis Braille and the start of the system that changed the world for so many people. Gracie did her oral presentation on braille and I set up words in braille around the house for the kids to find and decipher.  One interesting side note, we were really disappointed to find that our local library had hardly any books in braille.  We managed to find only one.

 After the kids went around trying to figure out the words written in braille, they were able to use my dot pens to print out the letter symbols for their names.

 Laurie was patient and willing to try to teach our kids how to make button strings like Mary and Laura worked on in our last book.  This proved to be a very challenging task for many of the smaller ones, but Laurie kept undoing their mistakes!

 Grammy came and kept Caleb busy with plenty of board games!

 Winona really had a knack for doing the button string.  It doesn't surprise me one bit, because she is such a creative and artistic girl!

 Kim Medina did an activity where the kids had to guess different objects simply by their sense of touch.  Mary did such a great job in the book of contributing to chores even though she lost her sight.  The family also discovered that her sense of hearing was better than everyone else, when she could hear the Boast family coming in the snow outside long before anyone else could hear them!

Here Grammy and Caleb are looking at the intricate lap book that Abby made.  It was so fun to look at and remember details from the book that I had already forgotten!