My Family

Minnesota Trip 2016

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We went straight from seeing my family in Indiana to Nick’s family in Minnesota.

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Pony and Mule rides!

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I married him for his awesome silly faces 🙂

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Little bit was in her element.

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My niece decided to teach the girls to ride a bike.

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Tamarack National Wildlife Refuge

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These girls are super cute together.

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This is actually laughter with a good bit of fear mixed in.

They were not all that happy about him pulling them.

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The girls got to meet Nick’s Grandma while up.

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This was really important since she went to Heaven the next month.

I am so glad they got to know her.

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Lots of fun was had.

Minnesota is definitely on my list of places I want to live.

I will do a seperate post of our trip to Itasca while there!

I took too many to share in one post!

HA

Lesson here?

I take a LOT of pictures…

My Family

Indiana Trip August 2016

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I was trying to pick favorites for August of last year when I realized I had too many from our trip to see family.

So I decided to share them in a separate post instead.

This was the first time the girls met some family members.

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At my parents house.

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On a walk on the Vandalia Trail.

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It’s always nice when your walk leads you to treats.

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The boys were at church with my parents.

It is an hour away and the girls would have had to get up early and deal with a lot of new people at a new place so we decided to not go.

The walk was good for them.

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We visited the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

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We also went to the state fair while there!

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And celebrated this boys birthday.

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With Aunt Dee

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Three cool girls on a walk.

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Lots of swimming!

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Helping Grandpa

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Being held by Aunt Elisabeth

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I was going to put the pics from Nick’s parents in the same post but there were too many pics!!!

I will share those tomorrow.

Homeschooling

Our Study of Birds and Audubon ~Homeschool

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I am still working on how to tie lessons together for the girls and boys.

The boys do 5th grade work and the girls are in 1st grade but need a very simplified version.

So it has not been until recently that I have really been trying to include them in the history or science that the boys are studying.

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Birds seemed like a perfect subject for them all to learn though.

For one of the boys studies the past couple weeks they were learning about John Audubon and birds.

 I give the girls a science shelf for their independent learning and made it all about birds.

Here are some of the things I included:

Bird Bingo(one of my favorite educational games)

Bird Guides like Birds of Oklahoma

The Magic School Bus Flies the Nest

Backyard Birds Toob (I had them try to find the matching bird on the Backyard Birds of North America guide)

Bird Flash Cards

Binoculars

Owl Puke the Book

We also finally refilled our bird feeder and would identify the birds that came.

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I got a pbs documentary on Audubon called John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature from the library and was having the kids all watch in the vehicle.

I had no clue that Audubon killed the birds he drew!

He posed them by sticking wires through them!

I asked my oldest if they were showing that and he said “yep.”

My kids eyes were huge.

Oops…

We did not finish the documentary.

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My youngest boy(9) loves learning about animals and is like a walking encyclopedia about them so he really liked reading about birds for school.

He also told me that Audubon met Daniel Boone!

I love it when our studies intersect like that.

Just another benefit of learning History, Science, and Literature via timeline.

Audubon: Painter of Birds in the Wild Frontier was such a pretty looking picture book.

I don’t get to read many of these books anymore since my boys are independent readers.

We also got John Audubon Young Naturalist but I forgot to take a picture of it.

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Bird Watching

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I really liked tying their studies together!

Now I just need to figure out how to make the science shelf fun and interesting for the next study.

Microbes…

I have a feeling it will not be as pretty as birds.