Freedom Festival Carillon Concert

Provo City puts on a big celebration for the Fourth of July. And it starts way before July and ends around Veteran's day or something. There are things like essay contests and baby contests, and parades, a colonial reenactment fair (which is really cool and the biggest reenactment this side of the Mississippi!) a race, the Stadium of Fire show at BYU and a bunch of other stuff. This year we went to the Carillon Concert at BYU. We showed up at about ten to 7:00 with some blankets and a pizza and while the kids played in the waterfall, I listened to the music and had a great time. I actually listened to the music while keeping an eye on all the kids running around while standing and trying to rock the baby to sleep. It was really fun. I think I would like to do this every year. The atmosphere was so pleasant. The weather was nice, the music was fun, there were children everywhere playing and families and sweet elderly couples telling me how cute my baby was (I never get tired of that, he he) and it was kind of fun just to be up and outside in the evening past 7:00, which is usually when my poor kids go to bed. We didn't get home tonight until about 9:00 or so but it was nice to not be rushed and just enjoy a fun time together. A Carillon, by the way, is a big bell tower.  Here is the link to the event: http://www.freedomfestival.org/events/carrillon-concert/

Norwegian Lapbooks

Here are the lapbooks we created to document all that we had learned and done regarding our Norway unit. The only things missing are a letter from Norway (we haven't gotten one yet - we only mailed our letter to our cousins maybe a week ago) and photos from the Uncle Ole Picnic, which wasn't happened yet.  I guess there are other things we learned too that couldn't be documented, but oh well.

So, if you've never heard of a lapbook before, here is your introduction. Some people make fantastic lapbooks, but I wanted my kids lapbooks to look like they made them themselves, and not like their mother made them. I think we had success at least in that department. Here they are, with explanations where needed.

Our lapbooks: Mine, Abigail's, and Joshua's

These are the first two pages of mine. I've got a photo of Edvard Munch, Edvard Grieg, a mini book of popular boys and girls names, a little pocket with two paper people wearing the traditional Norwegian costumes (Bunad), and accordion style book that opens up and tells about natural resources in Norway, an empty pocket waiting for a letter from Norway, some fake viking money with viking runes on it, and then two actual pieces of real Norwegian money, and then another pocket which is empty.

The second page of mine has a little book in the shape of a hand and inside it depicts a little Norwegian mythology, and also the fact that it is a mostly Christian nation today, a flag flap book about the flag, some thermometer flaps indicating the average temps in Oslo for each season, a Menu that opens up and shows typical foods for each meal of the day, and then a small booklet with things in it like time difference, landmarks, I put my coloring of "the Scream" by Munch, and other things.

Here is Abigail's first page

And Abigail's second page - she's still pretty young to be doing stuff like this so I just encourage her to do as much as she wants.

Joshua's first page - and here you can see that pocket that was empty on mine, but actually on the kids they are filled with photos of the other things we did. The top photo hear is the kids with the fish they caught.

 There is a pocket between the first and second file folders where they stuck the rest of their stuff associated with Norway that they wanted to keep - they had drawn pictures while listening to "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and "Morning" by Edvard Grieg and so those went in here, plus they painted some of their feelings when we learned about Edvard Munch's "The Scream" so some of those paintings went in this pocket as well.

 Here is the inside of Joshua's little booklet - time difference and a drawing of Vigeland Park in Norway.

The last page was a free writing page to write down their favorite activities or the most interesting facts they learned. Joshua wrote that his favorite thing was his lapbook and he learned about Norway. Not quite as specific as I was looking for, but he's on the right track.

Springville Balloon Fest

As part of Springville's Art City Days Festival they have a Balloon Fest. On Friday and Saturday morning at 6:30 am the trucks pull up at the junior high and the crews start unloading the hot air balloons. They play loud fun music, there are free donuts, free helium balloons, free face painting and tattoos (we never do that part) and as the balloons lift off, some of them throw out candy and balls with numbers on them corresponding to prizes at one of the tables set up. This year Joshua was old enough to run into the mob of children (and sometimes teenagers) to pick the candy up, but even then he only got 2 pieces. Abigail was still too little and she was disappointed she didn't get any candy - even after I reminded her she got 2 donuts. But, then while Joshua was playing with his balloon it popped and he sobbed and sobbed, and then Lukas just decided to let his go and watched it float away, so I guess there was enough disappointment for everyone that day. Just kidding. We had a lot of fun, despite the tears.

Norway Unit: Part One

We've officially decided to homeschool the kids now for a lot of reasons. They are political, spiritual, educational, and just personal. It took a lot of time to come to this decision and I've been reading A LOT of how this is all going to work. Sometimes I don't think it is going to work at all - like you can only "play" school at home for so long before you have to get back into the "real" world. But when I think of my reasons for homeschooling, I can't imagine putting the kids back in school and I tell myself, "well, you're just going to have to figure it out and make it work."

Anyway, so things have been busy around here. But the best advice I got - and this is coming from the Ultimate Advice Giver is to calm down and take my time. There are lots of things to learn but there is also lots of time to learn it. I don't have to be in a rush.

Therefore, it has taken us 4 weeks or so to do our Norway unit and we aren't done yet. But things are going well and we are learning and the kids are having fun and they like learning and doing these things. Our typical day begins around 7:15 am. We have a "devotional" with Derek before he goes to work - we are memorizing The Living Christ and then we sing a song and have a family prayer. Breakfast usually begins around 8:30ish but the kids don't eat until their chores are done. They are lucky that their chores are extremely easy - even for them!  Learning Time starts at about 9:00 am and generally ends at 11:00. We have a prayer to invite the Holy Ghost to help us learn, we read from the children's scripture story book, and then we work on our "Biber und Hund" worksheets. These are just to get the kids thinking. They usually take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes. Then we have writing practice - Abigail writes out her name a couple  of times (it's getting better!) and Joshua has some vocab words he copies and writes out. In the Fall we will work on the alphabet with Abigail and come up with something more formal for Joshua. Then we have math. Joshua is working on some number games - usually dot to dots and color by number, and I've just started throwing in some addition and subtraction problems up to 20 for him too. Abigail is working on writing out her numbers.  I'm going to a homeschooling conference in a couple of weeks and I'm going to buy a math curriculum and look at some other things as well. For the summer, we are just taking it slow and easy. And then the fun stuff starts.

We are working on a Norway lapbook, which I will show later, once the kids have finished theirs. We've done so much. A lot has been Geography and Social Studies of Norway, but then we've thrown in Edvard Grieg and Peer Gynt and his piano concerto's, as well as Edvard Munch and "The Scream."  We've learned a ton about the vikings, especially Erik the Red and Lief the Lucky. Joshua and Derek have been writing to each other in code using ancient viking runes - it's kind of funny to think that this little boy who is just learning to read, in his second language nonetheless, is writing codes with a third language back to his second language. It sounds confusing.  Anyway, we made viking symbols out of a new salt dough recipe I found and made necklaces of Thor's Hammer and a snake. We also made replica Viking money out of the dough and drew runes on them. We made Norwegian Flags and had our own May 17th Constitution Day parade and we flew the Norwegian Flag on our pole until Memorial Day (just didn't seem right to fly it over the holiday). We made and ate Krumkake. We also had Rodkol, fish, and potatoes on May 17th to celebrate. The kids actually went fishing, like Norwegians do. We made barley bread and took it with us on a field trip to the Icelandic Memorial here in town. The kids made viking shields and battled with their dad. Goodness, what else. For lunch, while the kids eat, I read to them and their favorite book is one my sisters actually brought back to me from Norway called "A time for Trolls." It is full of Norwegian fairy tales. The kids are IN LOVE with this book. We made little vikings and little trolls out of toilet paper rolls. We watched a video on Norway and learned a lot about the country just through that. We've learned the climate, common names, religion, natural resources, landmarks, what the money looks like (good thing I still had some from my last trip there about 10 years ago!) we learned about the traditional clothing of Norway, what Norwegians typically eat, and the wildlife and plants found there. The kids also wrote letters (I wrote Abigail's for her but made Joshua write his out all by himself) to send to our Norwegian cousins and hopefully we will get a letter back here in a couple of weeks.

So what is left to learn? Well, our connection to Norway. The only reason we are learning about this country is because we are Norwegian ourselves. We are going to make a family tree and fill out the Norwegian branches. We are going to look at my photos of the family farmhouse and barn, and Hammaren - the little farm cottage up in the mountains. We are going to look at the photos of some of the people still living there who we are related to. And we are going to talk about the sealing ordinances of the temple and how families are eternal. I've kept all my completed name cards from the temple even though there really isn't anything special about them to keep - it just seemed a shame somehow to throw them away. And now, wont it be fun to see a photo of their great-great grandma Sophie and see on the card that she was baptized and endowed and sealed to her husband and parents? I think it's fun! My grandfather has written lots of articles about his time in Norway and many of them are well above an almost 6 and 4 1/2 year old, but there are a couple that are easy to summarize for the kids - like the story of the little boat. I even have a DVD of a Norwegian documentary of Grandpa and his boat, plus CD recordings of their great-great grandma Sophie being interviewed by Grandpa - wouldn't it be fun to hear her voice and see her photos!  (What we didn't do, but I suppose we still could - and probably should - is learn a few words in Norwegian)

Our final "field trip" for our Norway Unit is our family reunion to the Uncle Ole picnic at King's Mountain near San Francisco in a few weeks. Uncle Ole is actually my great uncle and he and a group of Norwegians came over from Norway at the turn of the 20th century and made a life for themselves in California.  Once they were a bit established the families would get together every summer out on Uncle Ole's farm. I think those are some of my Grandpa's best memories - what an experience, especially for a city kid like himself! Anyway, years and years have past, but every summer around the 4th of July the families still get together - and this year we are going too. We went 3 years ago, so we're due.  Anyway, that will be fun.

Ok, enough talk. Here are some photos. After the kids complete their lapbooks I will put some photos of those on here too. The lapbooks are really neat, but you can't really show in a lapbook, or any kind of test or anything, how much fun the kids have playing "vikings".

We made Krumkake (literally "rolled cookie") this time in a cone shape and used them to eat ice cream. I thought they would just be like a regular ice cream cone but they were SO MUCH BETTER!! Plus, you've never seen a prettier cone that that!

These shields took days to complete and the kids love them.

Every time the wind blew the flag perfectly I thought I should probably take a picture because when I finally need to take one, there probably wont be any wind. I didn't take my advice, obviously.

Although some people really like the landscape up there, it's just not the same as the Norwegian fjords. But hey, we do our best.  We're on a tight budget.

Lukas wearing my Thor's Hammer and Snake necklaces.

 This viking ship is atop the Icelandic Memorial. We ate our barley bread there and brought cheese also (and pretended it was goat cheese.) Anyone know where to get the carmelized goat cheese around here? It's called Gjetost, and sometimes Brunost.

 Our barley bread (really I just threw in all the barley I had on hand into our normal wheat bread and we called that good. Not so authentic, but we'll make barley bread for real another day.

 This is just a rock that some of the first Icelanders brought over here. I'm not sure why they brought it, just because I guess.