This morning I had my Platte river hike co-op. It was such a nice day for a walk, a little too warm to be almost winter, but oh well. We walked by the mud swallows nests and turned off the path into the woods. We walked by gum weed and thistles and plants with empty seed packets. We stopped by the fallen tree over the river and checked it out for bug trails.

We walked back through the trees and found several nests and a bit of fur from some animal on the trail. Walking across the bridge someone found a millipede and we passed it around, we searched under the crab apple tree but there were no more to be found.

We went over to the rocks by the spillway and then headed over to the park for lunch. I really like this side of the park (except for the really fast bikers who buzz by you.) Once you get off of the beaten path all you can hear is the creek and the crunching of leaves underfoot.

Well, the last phonics class was today. We did the last 8 letters, I had trouble over at US toy finding a goat for the letter ‘g’. My song was ‘goats gobble garbage’ and I really wanted a goat, but I had to settle for a gecko. We glued tissue paper leaves onto a sheet for ‘l’, colored some notes for ‘n’ and looked at an x-ray for ‘x’. I gave the kids a whistle for ‘w’, probably should have waited until the class was over for that. The library admin. offices are right across from the meeting room and the librarian walked by and gave me the evil eye because of the noise. We were trying to do thumbprint whales too, but mostly the kids just got ink all over their hands. It said washable on the stamp pads (well, they are, it just takes more than one washing!) We passed around a zipper for ‘z’ and did ‘u’ and then attached it to its friend ‘q’ (they always travel together in the front a word.) Then we had free play. I brought both water pads this time and our fishing letter game. Hannah actually said her hard ‘c’ the other day. If she thinks about it she can say her name is ‘carberry’ instead of ‘tarberry’ (which is a real improvement!)

After we dropped off our stuff at home and ate lunch we got Joel and headed over to the natural science museum AKA the dinosaur musuem (yes, because it was free day.)

They rearranged the kid discovery room, but before we went in there we saw the dissection room. I guess that’s why they’ve been doing the dissections at the library, to show off their new area at the museum. They had just done a brain dissection, they had a heart and lung out too.

Here’s the skeleton with the insides vest on.

They had a few slices of the visible human project in the area too (don’t click on that link if you get grossed out, it’s sections of the human body that have been sliced thinly.)

So we looked around and felt the brain again, put together a brain puzzle and smelled tubes of stuff and matched them to the pictures.

The discovery area was revamped; one item missing is the dinosaur dig box. Guess they got tired of picking up all that sand. Hannah had fun with the bubbles – that would make a good co-op, playing with bubbles.

Bethany stayed around the digital microscope, I really need to get one of those, they are so cool. We like shoving it in our nose and ears (but you can’t do that at the museum.)

Down in the gem and mineral area we saw the Molybdates, rocks (such as wulfenite) that have molybdenum in them.

We know all about molly because James took a mine trip with SME where they got to see a mine at the continental divide where they pull molybdenum out of rocks. It takes a lot of rock to make a little molly, which is used in stuff like missiles, rifles, aircraft, diet drinks and food that grows above the ground (which has more molly in it than food that grows under the ground.) Mmmmm……would you like some more molybdenum on your peas?

Anyway in the space exhibit we sat and watched some cool experiments. The scientist said to imagine that we were trying to land a rover and explore the moon Triton. It’s a moon of Neptune and it’s the farthest moon from the sun, so it’s really cold there. The atmosphere is liquid nitrogen and the temp. is about -340 degrees.

So he started the experiment with a balloon and dipped it in the nitrogen. The air inside the balloon liquefied and we could see it sloshing around the inside of the balloon. When he took it out and the air warmed up it refilled the balloon. Pretty neat. Next he dropped a rubber ball in the nitrogen and then dropped it on the ground, of course it shattered. The rubber hose he dropped in became rigid and brittle, but the nylon he dropped in stayed flexible. Next he tried to see what would happen to ball bearings and magnets when exposed to the nitrogen. The ball bearings froze up, but the magnetic arm worked fine because no matter how small the magnets became they still had a magnetic field around them. The last thing he did was to create a liquid nitrogen geyser and make nitrogen snow.

When he was done he gave the kids the pieces of rubber ball that had broken. Hannah ate hers, but I guess a bit of rubber than has been frozen in liquid nitrogen doesn’t do much to you (in other words, she’s fine and it’ll be on the way out tomorrow.) Joel asked the guy where one might procure some liquid nitrogen - smart guy, he said he didn’t know (Joel pressed him on it and he admitted he might know where to get some, but it would be industrial grade and they wouldn’t sell it to Joel.) So that was really fun, maybe next time we can see the lung dissection.

Yes, my co-op is 3 weeks long, and really it could have been 4 weeks. I did much better today, I took what worked from last week and went with that. We started off with the letter B, we passed around these cool linking letters I got from US toy and said ‘B’, we also had a butterfly puppet. Then I broke out the bubbles and we blew them and then tried to pop them while saying the ‘b’ sound. That was pretty hard. For ‘E’ I had an egg and an eel (not the real thing, although that would have been cool.) If you got the eel you had to say the long ‘e’ and if you got the egg, the short ‘e’. For ‘F’ I read the Foot book and we got Frisbees and flung them around the room. Grace was waiting for ‘P’ because she knew it involved pudding. But first we did ‘O’ and passed around an octopus and a picture of the ocean. Then we did ‘P’. We clapped on the ‘p’ at the end of ‘clap’ and then made a word using magnetic letters. Everyone got a ‘b,o and p’ and we said the sounds as we put them together on the board. Then it was pudding time. I covered a table with a plastic sheet and gave the kids the pudding and no spoons.

Well, you could tell who is allowed to play with their food…..They ate some pudding and drew letters on the table with some of it. Hannah made an ‘O’ and an ‘H’! Grace wrote her name. K and his sister were eating and playing with theirs. S was getting into it.

N made a ‘P’ and we put a ‘V’ on its head to make it look like a bunny.

After the kids were good and dirty and had exhausted their supply of pudding we came back to our circle and did ‘S’. I had scarves and as we did the sound we shaped the scarf into an ‘S’. For ‘V’ we colored a picture of a violin and made the sound as we opened our legs in the shape of a ‘V’. The last letter was ‘Y’, we focused on the ‘Y’ sound like Yak, but we also talked about ‘Y’ saying ‘e’ and saying ‘i’. That’s a lot to get, so I said just focus on the sound in Yucca. After we ran to the letters that I put on the wall we got to do the last thing, water painting! Hannah was excited about that. Her water mat has the alphabet around the edges, so as the kids painted the letters showed up. Next week we’ll only have 8 letters to go over and then we’ll read Anno’s ABC book and play a game with letter sounds. I’m not sure what that will be yet, but I have a week to figure it out!

I left Bethany and Joel at home doing their work and then picked up Bethany for park day. Joel said he didn’t want to go if none of his friends were showing up. They had an interesting paragraph for me to read. The writing prompt for today was: What is your theory about the island (on the TV show Lost)? Both of them had really well thought out sentences about what they think is happening on the island and where they think it is going. We have 2 more episodes for season 2, so we’ll see if they get their theory right or not.

We spent about 2 ½ hours at the park. We had a good group of moms there. The only problem with that park now is that they closed the bathrooms for the season. So, we’re thinking about moving parks to one that’s a little closer to me, a little further for some people. I’m pretty sure they leave the bathrooms open there.

I ran back home after park day to do chores and get dinner ready. It’s teachers night out tonight, woo-hoo! If you are in a HS group and you don’t have a TNO, you should make your group do one. We meet once a month on the 15th from 7-? pm at Whole foods. We used to meet at Borders, but they closed that location and moved into the mall (and now close at 9, ugh!) So we meet at Whole food and talk, cry, laugh and have a good time. If you don’t have a group of like minded moms to hang out with, I’m sorry, because it is great.

Tomorrow the Comcast guy is coming out to fix our internet, it’s up, but really slow. Maybe he will put some of that liquid stuff like in the commercial and I can borrow some of it and get the house clean, dishes done, laundry done, and school done in like 2 minutes! That would be cool!

Yeah, my first phonics co-op was this morning and it went great. I have 6 kids and 2 helpers in the class. We’re breaking the alphabet up into 3 classes so today we just did 9 letters.

We started by sitting in a circle and passing around a heart and saying, ‘huh’, and then we marched with hats on and made h shapes with our bodies.

Noah and Hannah held hands and made a big H shape! With each letter we did something visual, auditory and kinesthetic. So for R we looked at R, said ‘err’ and then ran around the room.

This picture is where we were saying ‘I’ and raising our hands going ‘I,I,I!’ or if I put my hand on my head they had to say ‘short I’.

I had dough for the kids to roll out and make letter shapes out of, we colored an ice cream cone and a kite, we drummed with our dinosaurs and tiptoed with turtles.

We only missed doing 1 thing because of time.

Every few letters we would make a word. I had the kids wear the letters and we lined them up and sounded out the word. Maybe the first woord shouldn’t have been hit!

It’s amazing how long it takes to get 6 kids to sit down and go over 1 letter. I should have made the dough the last thing too; everyone wanted to play with the dough. Anyway the kids went home with a dinosaur, an apple, coloring sheets and traceable font sheets. I also gave the mom’s this web site to play on. You can hear the letter name and sound, see it traced and have the picture. We did silly phonics songs too like ‘Dinosaurs drum, Turtles tiptoe, Iguanas ice skate’.

At the very end I had letters taped to the mats and I said a sound while the kids ran around the letter. I was going to have them jump on the letter, but that would have been disastrous. Next week we’ll have water letter writing instead of dough and I think I’ll save it for the end of the class. Still they did really well being ages 2-9 and being in the room for 1 ½ hours.

Hannah said some of her sounds too, but of course when she sings ‘clown cook carrots’ it comes out ‘towns took tarrots’, oh well.

Session 1 letter songs:

Horses hiccup
Iguana’s ice skate
Turtles tiptoe
Robots roller skate
Jaguars juggle
Apes add apples
Kings kiss kittens
Clowns cook carrots
Dinosaurs drum

I had 2 co-ops today, primary art and intermediate art. I decided to put them both on the same day, but I forgot to make a little more time between the 1st and 2nd class, so we didn’t have time to go eat. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Anyway I had 11 kids in the primary art. We painted a simple color wheel while we read the story ‘Mouse Paint’.

If you’ve never seen that book, go get it. It’s cute and teaches the simple principle of creating a new color by mixing 2 colors together. The mice fall into paint (red, yellow and blue) and then dance in the puddles of paint making orange, green and purple.

After we made the color wheels we did free paint.

I had some art out to look at and the kids painted oceans, rainbows, and more.

They all had a good time and went home with their paint tray and water jar plus color wheel and 2 or 3 other pictures. Here is a web site mixing science with art. In a cup of milk place a drop of red, blue and yellow food coloring at thirds in the cup. Then add dish soap and see how the colors mix.

The next class was a little tricky. Everyone brought a piece of fruit and chose a 4 or 8 panel sheet of paper. Then we drew the fruit, took a bite, drew the fruit and so on. We had pencils, charcoal and pastels to work with. I think the hardest fruit there was a banana.

The mango that T drew came out very colorful.

Bethany’s is a peach (with an arrow and words saying ’Grace did this’ where Grace took a bite of her fruit.)

Grace also did a peach, I did an apple.

I chose to draw the apple kind of abstract so the kids could see that not all art needs to be exactly what we see with our eyes.

You can tell it’s an apple being eaten, but it wasn’t green or blue!

Joel watched Hannah for me while we did this. I knew she could do the first class, but I figured throwing in the 2nd class and the amount of time she’d have to be quiet in the library would make her antsy. I think all of the kids did a great job on their paintings and drawings. I love to hear afterwards that they thought they couldn’t draw, but really liked how their picture turned out. I know some are already at home bugging their moms for some more paint!

I was going to bring glue sticks, should have stuck (Hah!) with my original plan. Hannah went crazy with the glue and poured it everywhere.

Anyway, my South American co-op was today and I was only missing 2 kids, so we had a full house. First we sat in the corner that I had decorated with vines to resemble the rain forest and listened to the Tale of Jabuti. He is a tortoise and the story tells you how the turtle got his cracked shell and how the birds of the Amazon got to be so colorful. Then we made coffee filter butterflies that turned out really well.

Hannah must have been thirsty because between sprays she was under the table squirting the water into her mouth. We also played the ‘where do they live’ game and glued animals into their area of the forest – understory or canopy.

Next we traveled to the Andes Mountains; I had the kids climb over a block mountain and then sit down to listen to a story. First was the story of a little girl who lived in the mountains and all about her life and chores. Her main chore was to watch the chickens so they didn’t eat up the garden. Eventually she makes shoes for the chickens so they can’t scratch the roots of her food. Then everyone in the village starts making shoes for their chickens.

Our craft was a llama puppet, not really a puppet, just a cut-out of a llama on a stick. They colored that and wrapped yarn around it as I read Maria’s Mysterious Package. It’s the story of a llama that comes to CO and is used as a pack animal in the mountains to carry a camera so her owner can take beautiful pictures. All the while she’s remembering what she did back in her home of the Andes.

I had a CD playing putamayo music called, ‘music from the land of coffee and chocolate’ in the background during the class. It was great music and as the kids got jumpy I turned it up and gave them scarves and maracas to dance around the room with. We talked about what comes from Brazil –oranges, coffee, rubber and sugar. Bethany wished I had samples of the sugar (but the kids were jumpy enough without it.) Once again I ran out of time, but I got almost everything in. I think I’ll e-mail the last thing which was a game from Brazil called ‘Cinco Maria’s.’ You gather 5 rocks and put them on the ground, throw the first one in the air and say ‘Uno’ then pick up ‘Dos’ while the first one is still in the air. It’s like jacks without the ball. Other than the glue everywhere I think everyone had a good time.

It’s so cool,
to be back to school,
where mama rules,
and you have all the tools,
to learn and be free,
and stay home with your family!

Oh…..the school room is clean and dusted, books are back on shelves, and the smell of dry eraser is in the air! Technically Joel and Bethany started their new grade level in June, Grace started today though. They have a new thing on the list of school stuff: languages. Bethany and Grace have French, Joel has Latin. Pretty cool that it comes with our curriculum this year. Joel did history, math, literature and computer. Bethany did math, literature, spelling, grammar and writing. Grace did phonics, math, literature and computer. Hannah stuck circle stickers on paper and drew tiny circles all over the place. She found her new bags of stuff hanging up by her desk. I found a hat rack and some really cute woven bags at the dollar store to hang some of her stuff in. Now she can just sit and play with it at her desk and not have to get up and trash the storage room (that’s my hope anyway.) We re-did the reading area just a bit so it’s a little more roped off from the main area, got some scarves for dance breaks (and some new cd’s), we found some new games at the thrift store for reading (like boggle jr. and a-b-seas) and some math dice (I know I have wayyyy too many dice.) For right now everything is smooth sailing, I do wish there were more hours in a day though, especially on Mondays.

Starting Sep. 8th Mondays are going to be CRAZY! Grace will have soccer from 10-12 while Joel and Bethany do school. Then all the girls leave for dance from 1-4:30, Grace does school after dance and before I go in. Then we go home in time to get Joel and James to CAP at 6:25. Yep, crazy. I once thought it would be easier if everything was on the same day…..

Co-op offerings started today too. So this morning I posted mine: Phonics Phun (3 classes for ages 2-6, we’re going to have phun learning our letter sounds!), Ride the bus and train (to some people that’s a big deal), primary art (color wheel and painting), intermediate art (we’re making edible art drawings; that’s where you draw the fruit take a bite, draw the fruit, etc.), hike by the Platte river, I think that’s it for now. I have one more I’m trying to see about. Anyway it looks like another fun and busy co-op season for us.

We also started a new way to do devotionals today. I have some Bible character cards from when Joel was a toddler. They have Bible people on the front and a story and questions on the back. So, today Hannah picked Solomon. We read about how Solomon was David’s son and heir to the throne (by way of God), how Solomon asked for wisdom and how no other King then or since has been as wise and great. In the Houston museum of fine arts there’s a bold painting that depicts the 2 prostitutes that came before Solomon with the baby they each claimed was theirs. The kids remembered seeing it when I read the story. Solomon is towering over the ladies with a sword in his hand pointed at the squalling baby. One lady looks as if she’s saying, ‘so what?’, the other lady is in distress and falling at his feet begging him to give the baby to the other lady rather than kill it. It’s really an awesome painting about the story (and obviously imprinted itself upon the kid’s minds because they knew exactly what I was talking about.) I’ll have to see if I can find a pic of it online later.

Lastly a friend nominated me for a web blog award and I have to name 7 other people whose blogs I read and find interesting.

So here goes.

Woodstone prairie, Maura a good friend of mine, who reminds me with her blog that some days staying home is the very best thing.

Lapaz farm, I love the Montessori ideas from her blog and her nature studies.

Kelly S, another member of my HS group who goes just about as many places as I do.

Kristi at Soaring mountains academy, who up and moved to Indiana of all places, but we still keep in touch with Tea Tuesday letters and blogs.

Heather at Life as we know it, I like keeping up with her kids too (and she’ll be Grace’s soccer coach in a few weeks.)

I’m going to point back at Kathy, she uses the same curriculum I do and comes up with neat ways to teach some of the same stuff I need to teach. She has yummy recipes too.

I have to put my library; I don’t know what I’d do without it!

So thanks, Kathy, and those are my contributions small as they are. I ‘m not computer savvy enough to figure out how to get that web thing on my blog though!

Lastly here’s James and Joel heading out tonight:

Today we went to the Hiwan homestead museum in Evergreen for a tour. We had never been there before, so we were excited to see it. We ate a picnic lunch with our HS group and then broke into 2 groups for the tour. We got to go to the general store first. We went through the servants quarters (actually the whole house was theirs, but Jeffco turned part of it into a small general store circa 1895) and walked into the shop. Our guide gave everyone a penny and told us we’d get to spend it at the end.

First he asked us to find things that were different than what we’d find in a store today. Well, the eggs were lying out in a crate, the cheese was under glass, there was a post office in one corner, seeds, flour mills, coffee mills and a fruit grinder. Then he asked us to find things that were the same. There was a teapot, tea, vegetables, a scale, yarn. Next he gave everyone a list of things they had to buy; we walked around and found the items (like Hannah had a cowbell, 2 apples, and a teapot.) Then he asked them how they were going to pay for it. Since we all had a penny (and the items were more than a penny) he made each child sign their name in the ledger and wrote the amount next to it. (Well, Hannah can’t write her name, so she just made an ‘o’; that’s what she is when we play tic-tac-toe.)

Hannah owed $1.24, Grace owed $2.38!

Then we got to trade in our penny for 2 jelly beans, a pencil or a foot of ribbon. Grace and Hannah threw up their hands when the guide asked who wanted jellybeans. Bethany bought a blue ribbon with her penny. Stamps were 2 cents, ahhh……that would be nice for Tea Tuesday, 2 cent stamps!! We went back and listened to our guide tell us about the servants quarters. At first the servants lived in tents on the grounds, I think that sounds kind of harsh.

After a hard blizzard in 1913 their servants said build us a house or else! So they got this little 2 room cabin. (I think they should have asked sooner!)

We had a few minute to kill before the inside tour so we headed over to the wood shop. It smelled like fire and old wood, nice.

Here are some tools, Hannah liked the vise grip.

There was a printing shop on the other side. Grace was turning the roller for inking the paper.

We’ve been here enough that we know all about printing machines.

Next stop was the house itself.

Once a one room chinked cabin, it was added onto over the years and is now 17 rooms, 7 fireplaces and a chapel.

The lady who came here in the late 1800’s, Josepha Williams, was one of the first mountain doctors in the area, the first woman doctor that is. She married an Episcopalian priest, Charles Douglas, and they had 1 son Eric Douglas. We almost assume that Douglas County is named after them. Eric was one of the first curators for the American Indian wing of the Denver Art museum. All over the house we found examples of Indian tribes from around the US. There were moccasins, papoose boards, drawings, tiles, art, baskets, games, and blankets that were from Native Americans. Eric was an artist too and he painted several Anaszi like figures on the dining room walls. The Canon Douglas had a chapel built at the top of the house; most of the main rooms in the house are octagonal like the chapel.

The views out of the dining room were so nice.

Here is the sewing/music room…hey I have a drop spindle like that!

The Douglas family loved nature so much that they asked the builder to build around some of the trees on the property. The architect’s influence is seen throughout the house with 200 stair step references in the walls, doors, and windows. It would be neat to hunt for all 200. The kitchen was updated in what looked like the 1940-50’s. There was an ice box in the wall with a back entrance for the ice man to deliver the ice. The glass in almost all of the windows is original so it has waves in it when you look through. The pine beams inside and out gave the whole house the air of fitting in amongst the trees.

On the way out we played at the stone house, here is Hannah singing a song (in case you can’t understand her: “There ain’t no bugs on me betuz, ain’t no bugs on me betuz they’re on Bethany” I think it’s a commercial for flea formula for dogs or something.)

We saw this covered wagon and thought it a fitting end to the tour.

Just how old is travel bunny anyway??

It was pretty hot out so on the way home we stopped at O’Fallon park and waded in the water.

We saw lots of tiny fish (darn I had just taken the net out of the car the other day) which the girls tried to catch.

It was a nice respite to dip our feet in the water (which was cool, but not frigid!)

We were just about to go when Hannah fell in and got soaking wet. I had just said ‘Be careful that you don’t get soaking wet.’ Oh well, we had a towel in the car, but it was pretty funny.

Tomorrow we have a tour of the B-25 H bomber (again), but this time with friends.

Play on-line fridge magnetic poetry Here.

I had quite a few missing kids at my co-op, but there were 6 boys and girls there to enjoy poetry. I love to see kids that say ‘I can’t write a poem’ come up with some amazing stuff. We started off talking about poetry. What is poetry? Does a poem have to rhyme? What about free verse? We talked about feet, iamb, verse, rhythm, repetition, and more.

We read poems from Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Shel Silverstein and others. We read from some not so famous authors too. We learned that even poets can’t describe poetry, it just is. Not all poems make sense, not all poems are understood and no poem affects people in the same way.

We started off with Haiku poetry. We read an example and then started to write our own. It was hard for some of the kids (who are very verbose) to whittle down to 5-7-5 syllables. I told them that not all haikus are 5-7-5, that’s just the usual rule. Not all haikus are about nature (one kid wrote about storm troopers.)
Here is Bethany’s:

Friends play in the yard
Friends share their toys and ice cream
I love all my friends.

And Grace’s:

Whales swim in the sea
I see them eating plankton
They come up to play

Joel was at home watching Hannah for me, but he’ll write some poetry later. We talked about Cinquain poetry which has 5 lines and follows a syllabic form (or words for younger kids.) I’ll put all the forms at the end of this post. Next was Diamonte poetry. It looks like a diamond and follows the rules listed below.
Here is Graces:

Whale
Big, huge
Swimming, breaching, spy hopping
Humpback, Blue, small, red
Crawling, dashing, swimming
Tiny, food
Plankton.

And Bethany’s:

Chocolate
Creamy, smooth
Dipping, sipping, dripping
Hard, bitter, white, disgusting
Scooping, melting, barfing
Creamy, cold
Vanilla
(one could assume that Bethany doesn’t like vanilla!)

The next kind of poem we went over was a bio poem. I loved the line ‘who needs’ the kids needed: food, plumbing, shirts, water, socks and more.
Grace’s bio poem:

Grace
Wears glasses, happy, goofy, has blonde hair
Sibling of Joel, Bethany and Hannah
Lover of whales
Who feels loved
Who needs food and water
Who gives hugs
Who fears the fan in the dark that looks like a spider on the wall
Who would love to see a whale for real
Who lives in Highlands Ranch, CO
Carberry

A 5 W poem is almost like a story. You are answering the questions: Who, what, when, where and why? People see the answers and may not know the questions.
Here’s mine:

Sampson
Shedding hair like a cottonwood
24/7
All over my carpet
Because he is very hairy!

Then we talked about a couplet and thought about words that rhyme. I shared some of my poetry that rhymes. I told the kids that sometimes a poem sounds forced when it rhymes because the author is looking so hard to rhyme that word. We read a few more poems and talked about acrostic poems and color poems and then it was time to clean up and head out. I need to get my friends to share their kid’s poems, they are really fascinating!

Haiku: Form is 17 syllables, 3 lines: 5-7-5

Cinquain: Form is syllabic (or words), 5 lines
Line 1: 2 syllables (or 1 word giving the title, noun.)
Line 2: 4 syllables (or 2 words that describe the title, adj.)
Line 3: 6 syllables (or 3 words that express action, verbs.)
Line 4: 8 syllables (or 4 words that express feeling.)
Line 5: 2 syllables (or 1 word that gives the title a different name, synonym.)

Diamonte:
Line 1: subject
Line 2: 2 adj. describing the subject
Line 3: 3 words ending in ‘ing’ telling about subject
Line 4: 4 words; 2 describe the subject, 2 describe its opposite
Line5: 3 words ending in ‘ing’ telling about the opposite
Line 6: 2 adj. describing the opposite
Line 7: opposite

Bio poem:
Line 1: Your first name
Line 2: 4 descriptive traits
Line 3: Sibling of..
Line 4 Lover of…
Line 5: Who feels…
Line 6: Who needs…
Line 7: Who gives…
Line 8: Who fears…
Line 9: Who would like to see…
Line 10: Who lives in …
Line 11: Your last name

5 W poetry:
Line 1: Who?
Line 2: What?
Line 3: When?
Line 4: Where?
Line 5: Why?

Couplet: A pair of lines of poetry that are usually rhymed, if paired up they could go (AABB, ABAB, ABBA.)

Acrostic poem: Spell out your name, color, anything and come up with a word for each letter.

Color poem: Think about a color, now use all your senses to describe that color.

Green
Envy in her eyes
A pepper round and sweet
Vines crawling up the wall
Freshly mown grass
Green

We went to the Aurora beach for a swim co-op today.

We talked and swam and played in the sand. James wonders what we could do there for 5 hours; talk, play, swim, talk, play, swim……

The only problem with the water here is it is sooooo cold. It was 95 outside, but the water was like 55 degrees (they said it was 70, I beg to differ!) I love this reservoir because it has nice shady tables and clear water. At one point a truck backed up to the lake and started spilling fish in. I thought about taking the girls over to see it, but then they’d say, ‘Ahhh, there are fish in here?!’, so the fish got left alone by us. I’m not sure Joel came out of the water in those 5 hours except for the one 15 min. break they gave. Even I got in with Joel dragging me as I screamed ‘It’s cold, ahhh, it’s cold’ with every step. It wasn’t so bad the 2nd time, but the first time it’s a shock. I’m still not sure that your body gets used to that temp., I just think your skin gets numb.

Here is Bethany after VBS tonight. She got covered in pudding.

What does pudding have to do with Jesus? Not much, they just did it to be silly. The story tonight was of the blind man and Jesus healing him. The put oatmeal on their eyes and listened to the story, then they went over to the ‘river’ to wash off the oatmeal so they could see. Yesterday they put stickers all over their body (some of the kids) and were lepers. They had to stay behind caution tape so the other kids wouldn’t get infected. Then they heard the story of Jesus healing the lepers, they all came out and took off their stickers. Grace is so happy she’s old enough to be there this year (she’s on Bethany’s team.)

Sunset.