Sonlight Garden

preparing

My Mother in law is coming tomorrow for a visit so posting may be light for a few days. Except for Joe's Track meet. I am going to get a post up about that soon. It was incredible! I am going to try and not be to obnoxious in that post. I have tons of pictures. Today I need to finish picking up the house and cleaning. My Dad left this morning. We had such a great visit. Thankfully we will see him next week when some of us head to sunny Florida for a visit!!

 Patrick finished his First Holy Communion lapbook. This came from Lapbooks for Catholics. We had so much fun doing this together and have had so many great discussions about this Sacrament. Patrick receives his First Holy Communion on Sunday, Mother's Day. He is so looking forward to it. Actually we all are. Here are some pictures.

Owl Lapbook

I had a post on my old blog called "The Birth of a Mini-Unit Study". It was about the process of making owl lapbooks. Well the blog and post are gone. I guess it is somewhere in cyberspace, never to be found again. So I thought I would repost it. The kids had a blast doing this mini unit study. They still look at their lapbooks that we finished over a year ago.

The activities and putting all of it together took us an entire day. Not to bad. I am going to see if I can summarize this again. I want to do this again with my kids or something really similar.

• Research owls and their behavior, habitat, etc. Narrate to Mom about Owls
• Read-Aloud Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. Narrate to Mom
• Dissect owl pellets and then categorize the bones
• Color an owl picture
• Narrate to mom about what you did today. What was your favorite part? What did you see? What did you learn? etc.
• Copy work-poem   

  A wise old owl lived in an oak
  The more he saw the less he spoke
  The less he spoke the more he heard.
  Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?

  I took pictures of the kids while they dissected the pellets and printed them out on paper for them to cut out and paste in their books. I also found some pictures of owls online and also printed those out for them to paste in their book. I printed up their narrations and we put them in the book also.    

  It was pretty easy. This was the first lapbook that we had ever done. I would like to do this again with them now that they are a year older and see what their perspective might be this time. Here are some pictures of our day and of the finished products. Not to fancy, but fun!