My Life. In Pictures. Session 2 Day 5

Today's challenge is Black and White.

My subject is my beautiful daughter, Mackenzie. I was torturing her with her first day of 3rd grade photos. This is the least squinty of the batch. The instant she sees a camera her eyes start squinting and closing, no matter where the light is.


On this particular day, the light was behind her. Yes, I know that's the wrong thing to do but I wanted a shot with her eyes open. But, alas, she squinted for every shot as if the sun was shining directly in her face. Sigh...





Join in the photo fun over at Everything Except the Grill.

My Life. In Pictures. Session 2/Day 4

Today's Challenge...Something that you're proud of. That was easy! My incrediably brave husband and daughters, of course.

Join the challenge over at Everything But the Grill.

My Life in Pictures

I love taking pictures and this challenge, over at Everything But the Grill, looks like fun.

The Rules:

The purpose of this photo challenge project is to encourage you to pick up your camera and start capturing details of your life. This project should also serve as a way to look at what others are finding to shoot and will hopefully keep you inspired to look for more moments in your life you wouldn't always think to capture with your camera.

Our first My Life. In Pictures. challenge will start on August 3rd- 7th. The assignments will be:

Monday- Summer Fun
Tuesday- A Favorite
Wednesday- Out and About (anywhere but home)
Thursday- Something You Are Proud Of
Friday- Something (or someone) in Black & White

Since I just discovered this challenge, I'm going to use one photo to cover the first 3 days. Here's Kayleigh out enjoying some summer fun at one of our favorite places, Ocean Breeze Waterpark. Floating down the lazy river is one of my favorite waterpark activities. Sadly, this waterpark doesn't have a lazy river for us "Big Kids."

Weekly Wrap-Up: Our 3rd Grade Year has officially begun!

Mackenzie has been excited to start third grade ever since we got our curriculum back in February. She's been even more eager since a few of her friends started back with their schooling.



We'll be doing "school lite" for the remainder of the summer. That way we can still do fun things like Busch Gardens, camps, Ocean Breeze, and hanging with friends. I'm anticipating 1 normal week of school taking about 2 weeks to complete.

This year we are studying the beginning of U.S. history using Sonlight's Core 3. We are very excited. All the books look so fabulous it's been hard to keep Mackenzie out of them.

This week we started our history studies with North American Indians and Story of the USA vol. I. We finished North American Indians and will continue to work on Story of the USA vol. I throughout the year.

I've also added a few things to round-out our social studies lessons. Not that Sonlight needs anything else to make it even more fabulous. but Mackenzie likes a little hands-on excitement to go along with her voracious appetite for great books.

We'll be adding in some notebooking and the Native American & Plymouth Rock History Pockets to our history. We'll also be adding a bit of a geography focus using Knowledge Quest Historical Maps and The Complete Book of Maps and Geography. We started The Complete Book of Maps and Geography this week and Mackenzie thinks that it is fun.

For math we'll continue using Math-U-See. Mackenzie does fantastic with it so no need to make any changes. She'll be working on level Gamma this year. She was a little panicky about multiplication. Then she watched the lesson and declared it "easy." Hopefully she'll continuing feeling that way. LOL

Science will be Sonlight Science 2. Sonlight has totally revamped their science programs and they are even more fabulous then ever. We're starting off the year studying animals.

For Language Arts we are continuing on with Sonlight Readers, First Language Lessons, , and Handwriting Without Tears. We are also adding Writing With Ease.

We are reading Walk the World's Rim as our read aloud. I was worried about her grumbling about it, as I'd heard it starts slow, but she seems to like it. She is reading The Corn Grows Ripe as her reader and is already ahead of schedule. That's always a good sign.



Her electives will be I Can Do All Things art, Young Chef's Academy and La Clase Divertida. We're very excited to start Spanish as we'll be doing a lot of the hands-on aspect of the curriculum with our friends. Add in whatever sport she's playing at the time and that rounds out our curriculum.

All in all, our first week went great. We got everything on the schedule done except art. Plus we fit in a trip to the waterpark and one to the zoo. Watch for the zoo pics. Next week will be reading only as Mackenzie is going to a day camp.

Hard at work...Kayleigh too!





Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers: Weekly Wrap-Up Guidelines