spelling, speeches, and pumpkin pie

 In September and October our homeschool group made our way through our last two Laura Ingalls Wilder books.  We met together after completing Little Town on the Prairie.  In the spirit of the Friday night Literary meetings in the book, Reuben and Isaac encouraged us all to have our own spelling bee.  It was fun watching each child feel pleased at how many words they were able to spell.  Perhaps the seventh grader of the group had a little bit of an advantage!

 In the book, Laura got herself into a mess with her quick ability to write clever rhyming phrases.  One of our activities was playing rhyming bingo, reading Shel Silverstein poems, and writing our own poetry.  Here is what one group came up with:

 In October, we met to do activities from the book, Farmer Boy.  I had not read this book because I never thought I would be that interested in a book about a boy.  I am so glad I got the opportunity as an adult to share this with my kids.  We learned so many lessons about hard work, responsibility, and loving others.  I teared up at the end, as usual, and now find myself bringing up Almanzo quite a bit when the kids start to complain or don't appreciate how easy things are around here!  This was a very big day for Caleb who did his very first oral presentation to the group.  Caleb and Luke acted out one of their favorite Mo Willems books, Watch me throw the ball!.  I am still in the process of trying to figure out how to load the video onto here.  I was so proud of him overcoming his shyness to do this in front of everyone.

 Kim Medina brought a jar of cream for us to churn into butter.  Each kid took turns shaking it up and enjoyed having a taste.

 Couldn't resist another picture of Grammy and Caleb together.  He can't wait for Grammy to ring our doorbell whenever our group gets together. He brought down his entire stack of 20 library books for Grammy to read to him....and Grammy read every single one!

 Sweet Isaac is actually very allergic to dogs but that doesn't stop him from playing so sweetly with Jack.  He usually ends up with hives on his face or neck before they leave the house, but he never complains.

 In the book, Almanzo talks about filling up his glass of milk with popcorn and that it never overflows.  Laurie popped some popcorn for us and we tried it out to see if this was true!

 They kept adding more and more popcorn, and it never overflowed!

 For my activity, we took a bunch of new vocabulary words from the book and put them in alphabetical order.   Then I read a random definition from the dictionary to see if they could remember what they all meant.  Luke and Winona were quite a team, but Reuben and Wade kept it very close!  Dylan and Isaac barely beat the girls, thanks to Isaac remembering what the word "sheave" meant!

 Marilyn explained the science behind Almanzo's family using sawdust to pack the ice into the icehouse.

 Grammy made mini pumpkin pies for all the kids. I think they were the hit of the day!  In the book, Almanzo ate pies, cakes, ice cream, donuts, candy, and the list goes on and on... I told my kids that if they worked out in the fields from sun up until sun down they could eat more foods like that too!

 Ok, one more random picture of Owen and Jack.  I forgot to put this one in my last blog post and I thought it was just too cute to leave out!