our dozen beautiful feet

We finally completed the last two weeks of this first semester!  I'm so thrilled to have gotten halfway through the year!  These two weeks were full of fun, learning about the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush!  I've got lots of pictures from this week, making up for the past few weeks! I just love the kids illustrations of each week!  Here's Luke's notebook page about the Oregon Trail, along with the vocabulary words we dictated this week. For Tapestry literature this week, the kids read The 18 Penny Goose.  I've been having them read the literature selections independently, which has been a good challenge for them, and reduced my read aloud time.  Everybody wins! I really loved this worksheet, having the kids make a "quilt" of illustrations telling the story.   We played a game with beans that kids on the trail played. In Song School Latin this week, we learned some animal names!    In Week 18, we studie...

We've spent the last six months trying to figure out what was going on with my health.  In June, I started feeling "off." I knew something wasn't right.  Very quickly, we got a diagnosis of Graves' disease, which is an autoimmune disease that makes your immune system attack your thyroid. My thyroid had become hyperactive as a result. I was extremely hot, had a racing heartbeat, loosing weight and hair, extremely tired all the time, and was emotionally very distressed.  In July, I began anti-thyroid medication, on the lowest dose possible, to try to suppress my thyroid function to a normal level.  Within days I started feeling normal.  Praise God!  But the underlying problem of the autoimmune condition was still there.  Having one autoimmune condition puts one at a high risk of developing other autoimmune conditions.  So I really wanted to get to the bottom of it and do what I could do heal or get rid of the autoimmune condition. Most doctors I ...

These two weeks we spent in a quick survey of the presidencies of Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and James Polk.  We read about the Cherokee Indians and learned what they went through on the Trail of Tears.  We learned about the acquisition of the California and Oregon territory from Mexico under James Polk.  We read about Samuel Morse, and his great invention, the telegraph. (Did you know he was painter before he was an inventor?) Samuel Morse was apparently not the most interesting thing Kiryn had ever read. Ha! Kiryn's map of the Trail of Tears. The kids got to read a sweet little book this week called "The White Stallion" and complete this worksheet about it.  We also began reading "The Moccasin Trail" and have really been enjoying it, although I think this unit would have been a great place to begin the Little House series.  We likely will after we finish Moccasin Trail.  Luke spent these two weeks analyzing...