The setting for our book this week, Roxaboxen, is in a desert. So, I thought it might be fun to get a small cactus for us to observe. Here is our cute little cactus! And yes, this little thing is very prickly! We have taken turns just barely touching it, but if you bumped up against this thing it would definitely hurt!

I also have a book or two from the library that we will be reading next week to learn a little more about these curious plants. The one I got from walmart was only .97, so not too expensive for a little nature study! We spent some time yesterday afternoon drawing the cactus in our nature journal. Here are the drawings:

Hannah’s cactus drawing

Emily’s cactus drawing

My cactus drawing

And then Hannah wanted to draw one like she saw in the books we were reading.

Our 2 beloved cats have a love/hate relationships. At times, especially when they are sleeping (LOL) they are just the sweetest little angels. They will fall asleep right next to each other, on someone’s lap, curled up in a blanket…so sweet. And at times they will also playfully run around the house together.

However, at other times, they wrestle which leads to hissing and growling at each other. I didn’t know cats could growl. But they can. For those of you who had 1 cat and then got another one…did you notice this happening? We have now had the kitten for I guess 2 months (??) and I know they are used to each other. At first we thought Belle was just jealous…but now it seems to be a daily thing where they roll around and hiss at each other. Is this just normal cat play? I’m not sure about this and would love to hear your experiences!

Aren’t they sweet?

I have now heard this on 2 different newscasts. Have you heard the warning yet put out this week by a medical group in Pittsburg?

HERE is a link to the story that Fox news put out today.

For the last hour the kids have been working hard on creating their own little town in the playroom. They are all working together, working happily and using their imaginations! “School” doesn’t get much better than this!

We went ahead and started Roxaboxen today, I just couldn’t wait til Monday!

Our next FIAR title will be Roxaboxen. Have you read this wonderful book by Barbara Cooney? What a treasure! I’m so thankful that my attention was brought to this book hrough FIAR. What fun we will have with this one! We will be learning about the desert, desert animals, observing a cactus, making our own roxaboxen with rocks, twigs and other various things we can find…and much more!

A few books we have to go along with Roxaboxen are:

Other resources and ideas: 

*There also is a Reading Rainbow video of Desert Giant that we will be watching!

*I’m going to get one of those small cactus plants from the store for us to observe, touch and draw in our nature journals.

*We will be doing the lapbook on Desert Animals from HSS as well!

*And HERE are the resources available for Roxaboxen from HSS. We will be finding Arizona on the map. Discussing what the other “southwest” states are, learning about what colors are known for being southwest colors, reviewing the 4 seasons, doing the cactus tri-fold book and the Arizona tab book.

*I have also gotten some of those colored rocks/stones from walmart for the kids to play with for this title.  We will also pull out the rocks that the kids collect from time to time. I hope they will make their own roxaboxen and I will surely get pictures of it.

*We will also do math with all our rocks and stones!

We have one of these ugly bugs in our house! It scared us for a bit, and I decided to search for it online. So, we found out it is called a Cicada Killer. Hmmm, sounds like a friendly guy, huh?! Actually, I read about this bug and it seems that it very rarely stings humans. What it wants is cicadas! They kill them and eat them! Yuck! Anyway, it is a pretty large bug, nearly 2 inches long.

Another book we have been enjoying with our study on China is called Hero Tales. This is a book that is full of short little stories about missionaries from around the world. The authors of this series of books are Dave and Neta Jackson; Neta just happens to be the author of one of my favorite fiction series - the Yada Yada Prayer Group series!

While we have been learning about China with our Olympics study, we have read the stories about Gladys Aylward and Hudson Taylor, who served in China as missionaries. Each story is just 2-3 pages long, we will often read 2 or 3 of them in one sitting. Each story also has a few questions along with a scripture for you to read with it.

The girls, Nana and I just got back from an all-girl outing to see Kit Kittredge, the American Girl movie. I cannot give this movie enough thumbs up! If I had more than 2 thumbs, I’d give it more! It was just sooooo good! The girls enjoyed it as well. I hope to own this movie someday.

We haven’t seen the other AG movies that are already out yet. I think there are 2? If you have seen all of them, would you say that they are all this good?

Kit is an excellent, wonderful, fabulous movie! Not only was it entertaining, but it also opened our eyes to the period of time known as the Depression. I had briefly discussed this with the girls before seeing Kit, but this movie really was a great way to introduce this time period! Delightful!

I got this wonderful idea from Melissa, who loves to go on wildflower walks with her kids! I was inspired by reading her posts, so I decided to try this today with our kids. We got a bucket and headed out to find some wildflowers!

While we were headed down the road, we also remembered to bring a trash bag this time and pick up trash we saw on the side of the road. We see trash everytime we go walking and kept forgetting a trash bag, so today we remembered! I was proud of the kids for working so hard and nearly filling 2 trash bags full of trash!

We found about 15 wildflowers on our walk today. We have not identified them all yet, but here are a few that we have identified. I bought a book that has pictures of wildflowers from our area in it. I also look on this site, which has wildflowers from East TN on it. This site was very helpful! If you click on “galleries” then you can scroll through pictures of wildflowers according to color and find the ones you are looking for! (If you see a flower we have labeled incorrectly, please tell me…these things are hard to identify and I’m sure I will mess a few of them up!)

Chicory - Blue Sailor’s

Rattlesnake Hawkweed

Queen Anne’s Lace

We came home and are working on drawing some of the wildflowers in our nature journals and labeling them with their correct names.

Also, here are some other neat critters we saw on our walk. These are 2 very unique insects that we have never seen before! Do you happen to know what either of these are? I haven’t searched yet, but will look soon.

This first one looked like a very large ant, but it was BRIGHT red and about an inch long! This little guy was also VERY fast. UPDATE: I found it, this little (or big) thing is called a Velvet Ant! While they resemble ants, they are actually in the solitary wasp family!  They have a very painful sting. Ouch, glad we didn’t get much closer.

And this next one looked like a butterfly with zebra stripes! Very pretty! I think this might be a Zebra Swallowtail!

We are nearing the end of our Olympic and China unit! So, today we spent some time putting all the pieces that we have done so far in our lapbook. Actually, this is not technically a “lapbook” but a notebook. I had a friend give me 2 empty never used scrapbooks with just 10 pages in them. They are 8.5×11, a size I would not use for scrapbooking, so I decided to use them for our Olympics unit! Perfect!

HERE are all the details of our olympic unit if you haven’t seen them yet. We still have to make the Chinese flag, haven’t gotten to that, but other than that we are about done.

The front page in Hannah’s notebook:

Where is China? Our names in Chinese. Numbers in Chinese.

All about pandas!

The Olympic oath and 2 Bible verses about running races.

The Olympic torch. A graph where we will keep track of the medals that the USA wins!