{Books We Read}

Our Ready-Made Preschool book was The Giving Tree. This is a classic children’s book that I love so I bought this one to have in our home library. It teaches such important lessons about giving, even when you are getting nothing in return. We also read several passages from the Bible about giving and talked about those after reading The Giving Tree each day. We read John 3:16 about God’s gift to us as He sent His Son to die as payment for our sins. We read Matthew 22:37-38 and talked about how the boy didn’t show the tree much love at all because all he did was take and take from the tree without ever giving the tree anything. We talked about how we want to show God love by praying, reading the Bible, obeying Him and showing love to other people. And then we read Acts 20:35 which tells us it is better to give to others than to receive.

Little Bug was given If You Hold a Seed for Christmas from her aunt and uncle and since we had a tree theme going this week, I thought this would be a good week to read that book. It is a cute story that takes a seed through ever season showing growth along the way. You could take this story deeper and talk about changes that come with the passing of time. We went back to our study of Moses after taking a break from Moses to study the Christmas Story during December. We enjoyed two Arch books about Moses: Moses’ Dry Feet and Moses and the Bronze Snake.

{Letter of the Week}

Our letter of the week was Letter Gg. We had fun making the letter Gg in shaving cream, with Do-A-Dot markers and with play-doh. Little Bug completed her Gg page in her ABC Book (not pictured). Her g craft was to put gift wrap and a bow on the letter g. We had some extra time one day so we had fun with more shaving cream! Little Bug would draw a letter in the shaving cream and the she wanted me to guess what letter she had written. She wanted all her letters laid out so she could see them. I need to get those displayed somewhere. The wall space in the office/homeschool room is very limited, but I could possibly get these letters up in the playroom.

{Trees, God’s Greatest Gift & The Fruits of the Spirit}

There were several themes this week. First we learned about trees and the products we make from trees. Little Bug looked through magazines and found things that were made from trees. She cut them out of the magazine and glued them on a piece of paper. Next we learned about God’s Greatest Gift to us: salvation. She had a Christmas Tree craft that had decorations that were different colors that explained God’s gift of salvation. (Black was for our sin, Red was for Jesus’s blood shed on the cross, etc.) And then we had a day where we learned all about the Fruits of the Spirit. Little Bug had felt tree that she put together. I wrote the fruits of the spirit on the leaves and then had her find each one as we talked about what they mean and how we can show them to others. We read Galatians 5:22-23 in the Bible.

{Roach Poison}

The only negative I’ve found to living near lots of trees and woods is roaches!! We found them pretty frequently when we first moved in and I just tried not to think about it much. My mom grew up in Brazil and roaches were always a HUGE problem. She has what she calls a “roach poison recipe” and IT WORKS! She made us some of the poison after we moved in and we placed it all around (but not where little ones and Pup could reach!) and we started seeing dead roaches instead of live ones pretty quickly. The poison has gotten old and needs to be replaced every 6 months or so, so our first science experiment of 2014 was making roach poison!

The recipe is very simple and only calls for three ingredients: boric acid, water & sugar. You just put equal amounts of boric acid and sugar and then add water until it turns into a paste.

{Making Orange Juice}

To go with our tree theme of this week, Little Bug got to pick oranges from Bisa’s tree and make fresh-squeezed orange juice with Gramps!

We had a wonderful week back to homeschooling and that week completed 21 weeks of school for us!

Our board at the end of the week:

- Elaine