Busy Busy

Well, it is obvious I'm not very good at keeping up with either of my blogs or posting pictures!

We have been a very busy crew, lately, with lessons, activities, and celebrations!

I turned 30 recently. Back in January I decided, for my 2012 resolution, that I would achieve 30 things by the time I turned 30. My list grew beyond 30 possibilities, but I managed to do it! Reaching the finish line for that has inspired me to come up with goals for summer. It's also inspired me to work with my girls on goal setting.

We are currently borrowing Exploring Creation Through Botany for the summer. I'm in the process of gathering all the supplies needed for the experiments (that aren't perishable) and will then begin our lessons. Hopefully within the week! We also picked up the Chinese (Mandarin) 3 volume pack from Rosetta Stone and are working on learning it. We need to get more consistent with it, but the older 3 kids and I are pretty excited! We're doing the full year program on the homeschool version.

Summer is going to be a busy one for us. We've got travels planned. We'll be getting animals over the summer, sheep and chickens. We've got projects to do. Although the chicken coop is almost finished! I do need to post pictures of that. I'm so proud of the work my husband has done on it! Also, for us, lessons don't end.

 To be honest I'm leaning more and more towards life learning over standardized learning, every day. It makes more sense. I mean all kids are created DIFFERENTLY! We each were born with different gifts and talents. We each require different skills to fulfill our  personal potentials and callings. Why in the world try and force my kids to be able to fulfill only part of who they are, to fit them into a shape they never were meant to be in? Learning does come naturally and the more my kids seek out knowledge on their own, through resources I've provided for them, the more they learn from it. Example, my oldest found a frog on our porch a couple of days ago. For her it wasn't enough to know it was a frog. She immediately grabbed our reptiles and amphibians field guide and looked up the frog, by picture. Then she read all about it. Still that wasn't enough. She had to observe and examine it to find out if it was a boy or a girl. Then she spent an hour listening to the cd that came with the guide, which had the different creature sounds on it. That night she listened to the sounds coming from our pond and realized we have 3 different groups of frogs out there. I forgot which 3 they all are, but the one from the porch was a grey tree frog. It was a female. She has since found a male and another smaller female. She does the same thing with birds. We have a book about birds of North America. We still need to get the state field guide. The things she tells me about animals is amazing. She's gotten most of her information from simply reading things herself, looking them up on the internet, watching shows on discovery channel and animal planet. She plans to be a marine biologist when she grows up. In fact she wants to set up fresh and salt water tanks, in the fall, to observe and learn about whatever water life she ends up putting in there. If she doesn't become a marine biologist she at least wants to be a zoologist.