Saturday was a scorcher here, we're talking 20 degrees Celsius, by 9 am!  Keeping the troops busy in a good and happy way is pretty important when you know we'll max out at 30 by lunch time. Mr S suggested we go out, but no one really wanted to make the drive into the city to hit the museum which was on our Bucket List of things to accomplish this summer.

Of course certain children wanted to spent the hot afternoon playing video games, to which certain parents, that is to say I, totally disagreed. I was all for tidying up the house and reading books, but I was greatly outnumbered.

Instead, I suggested we gear up for an entire variety of events which would allow me to hang up laundry, make bread, & get a menu laid out for the week ahead, all while keeping the troops happy.

Most were in agreement, and regardless of how cute you may find the picture to the left, I promise you my child is sulking. He's pretending we don't exist and neither does the game we are about to play. What he really wanted to do was hit the arboretum and play our Nature Game. A fantastic idea except he couldn't swim in the water there as he'd hoped so we nixed the idea for a cooler afternoon.  Fortunately for him, he's related to people who laugh too much and he quickly joined us.


We started with several round of Say Cheese which is a very simplistic but NOISY game. Seriously, much dice rolling on a wooden table equals really loud. Not to mention a lot of laughter and gasps from the people playing.  The idea is to roll dice that match the cards that are face up. Simplistic & difficult all at the same time. It really is quick to play though!


Next up was fruit juice sweetened gummies. We discovered Yummie Gummies when the local Coles grocery decided to discontinue them. I bought every last packet off the shelf and saved them for special occasions. It was ages before we found them again, at a local health food store! Dimmey's now seems to carry small sacks of them & I'd been into one recently and picked the kids up a packet each. They were kind enough to share with me. Not only are these gummies sugar-free they aren't made with artificial food coloring!


I challenged the guys to a game of Mario Party, this is a huge favourite in our house. Mr S has been a fan of these games since before Morgan was born. He's eagerly awaiting Mario Party 9's release later this year. In the mean time, he quickly figured out the boys are big competitors in this game! I had no hope, Morgan beat us all!


After the video game and some lunch & laundry we put on an incredibly long movie {Harry Potter 2} which was the first time either of the boys have seen it. I think Mr S dozed off during the film to be honest which gave me ample opportunity to inform the boys that we really should get cracking reading book 2 because it's way better.

We wrapped up the day with a trip to the local beach, which crowded and filthy! Seriously, it was icky. We're use to a nice stretch of beach which rarely has anyone else on it, and those that are there are usually properly clothed & it's just clean and beautiful. Anyway, I digress.. We picked up some pizza and went home to watch Nim's Island. Which I sorta zoned out on because I was remembering when I read the book to the boys for the first time.. A rather lazy Saturday afternoon, which was followed up with a slightly lazier Sunday afternoon where we spent most of it at the beach..

If you're looking for a last minute Groundhog Day goodie, I spotted a freebie over at Teacher's Pay Teachers. It's really quite simplistic but plays off of the whole shadow fun. There's also a graphing activity, story writing activity, and some little paper groundhogs you could use for a variety of things if you wanted to.

There's also a free Groundhog Day Math freebie {word problems}, free Groundhog Art project, & another free Groundhog Fun Pack. The second fun pack has a pattern for a Groundhog hat, another prediction graph, and a fun set of other predictions your children could make for the day.

Believe it or not, my kids have no idea what this fun and crazy day of the year is all about because honestly it's Summer here and we aren't in a rush to see if it's going or staying. I could so see us starting our own "Down Under" style Groundhog Day with something more efficient to our region like a wombat all though they'd be pretty hard to drag out of their burrows!

The marble maze on our bookcase was a wonderful Christmas present from family for our Jayden this year. It was obtained from a local toy store {Toy World for those of you in Australia}, but is available online as well from various sources. The one we have is The Lourning Journey Marble Mania Extreme 2.0. I believe it can be purchased via Amazon, Wal-mart {usa}, The Marble Run Shop {uk}, iQ Toy Store {au}.

It took us all most three hours or so to put the crazy thing together, but we did stop for a lunch break & a few other minor interruptions. When we tried to put it together the first time, we found that the company had put 2 of the wrong piece in and none of another! Our toy shop couldn't help us as it was their last one & they weren't even sure they could order more, so we contacted the company via email & they sent us a replacement piece which arrived, once mailed, 24 hours later! We now leave the whole thing set up on the shelf because the booklet that came with it only had one set of instructions. You can download a second set online if you chose to change it. Jayden loves it the way it is so I'm not sure it will be changed anytime soon, & I'm not sure he's quite ready to experiment with new ways to put it together. That's more Morgan's line of expertise to be honest.

All in all it was a huge success of a present, & the boys would love to find a few of the other marble mazes to use as well. Morgan especially thinks the Galaxy one which is meant to glow in the dark is especially cool looking. You can actually see a colorful marble maze in the background. It's not part of the Marble Mania. It's one of the "old school" marble mazes which we've had for a while, & it made an appearance so they could race both mazes to see which one was faster. The new one actually has a motor on it to return the marbles to the top for you!


Thanks to the Mum's over at the Aussie Homeschool msg boards they helped me locate a Prime Minister poster that's as up to date as it can be right now. It's available through the Australian Geographic shop. You'll have to click on the .pdf order form, from the looks of it, to order it. I haven't purchased one yet, my sister-in-law was going to look for one that she had for me. So we may use that one for a little while if she happens to find it, all though I do plan to get the most updated one possible at some point down the road. We've saved a perfect little place in our learning room for it. We may not get to Prime Ministers this year so it's not a huge rush. The goal is to finish putting together an Australian History programme, and when we do we'll clearly cover all the Prime Ministers then. I'm hoping to use So You Want To Be Prime Minister & Australian Prime Ministers when we do.

I haven't purchased a US President poster yet either, I'd rather wait until after the upcoming elections, at least my poster will be good for 4 years then! However, I spotted this one over at Amazon which I was reasonably impressed with. In the mean time I have an old Subway Ruler hanging up that the kids have been using & may fork out for a placemat to tide us until after the elections, I may not.

If we had stuck with Winter Promise for the second half of US history we would have focused on the presidents, which seems fitting considering our studying of US history. Because we've switched to Sonlight we won't have the presidential focus. I'm not fussed about that because I planned to come up with that on our own via Simply Presidential. We'll include The Look-It-Up Book of Presidents {which we all ready own}, our Presidential Notebooking Pages, I Grew Up To be President, & Smart About The First Ladies.

Remember the bookcases I was building? I finally picked up the rest of the supplies to finish them off & now all our books are in their proper places. This has been a really simple and reasonably fun project. I like keeping all our books with like topics on the same shelf, all though I've yet to resort to the Dewey Decimal system. All though, I did contemplate it a few times.. Don't judge me, I'm just being honest here people!


I put up six more shelves to finish off the space I had intended for this purpose. It was just right to get all our notebooks, lapbooks, teacher manuals, & Five In A Row books back on the shelves where we could easily access them. Can you see our small pile of Spy Science stuff under the shelf above? We'll be using that very soon, the boys are super excited! Across the top of the shelves I either have plastic tubs. There's one tub for each child which will hold the books I want them to read over the school year. Another tub will hold our read alouds, & the remaining tubs will holds books we'll be reading during the course of the school year. The rest of the shelves are organised by topic. Laugh if you must, but I promise I can find any of our books in a very short amount of time this way.


I built a shorter shelf on this side wall because of the light switch. It's for an outside light that we don't use very often at this point, but I still don't like covering them up. This top shelf might change to hold more books we'll be using this year, but for now it holds our sticker maker {we love this machine} & Jayden's incredible marble maze that he was given for Christmas. It's so much fun to grab a marble and watch it run it's course when you're suppose to be getting coloured pencils, notebooks, or even if you're just passing through the room.

The school room is nearly complete now. Just waiting on finding a few posters I'd like to hang up on the walls & possibly a bulletin/white board over the boys desks. I really like the way the room has come together, & I especially like my bookshelves!

Last week the boys and I decided it was time to check another item off our Summer Bucket List, so we ran around in a flurry of excitement and packed up to spend the day at the beach. We took our quilt, snacks, books, boogie boards, & our hover craft. It's seriously fun, and if you ever have the opportunity to use one you should!


Despite the picture, the water was relatively calm and still. Which was nice, but we prefer to ride the waves. We go out as far as the kids can swim and then jump on the boards when a wave comes our way and ride it back to shore. This day we spent more time learning the "proper way to effectively splash people" & throwing Mermaid Hair at each other {seaweed}.


I flipped my board flower side up because a stinking saw fly was after me. I was trying to distract it long enough to squash it. Mission accomplished, & I knocked out a few of her fellow companions. Yeah, we had a quick science lesson on the beach that A, saw flies that cut us are female, and B, saw flies hurt because they don't have a needle nose like a mossie, instead they have a serrated beak. And frankly, knowing that makes it hurt even more!


The seagulls came to visit us as soon as we pulled out the watermelon. I refused to share on principle that they didn't eat the saw flies that kept trying to eat me! The Seagulls were unimpressed and screamed at me, so I screamed back and they flew away. My children found it funny, most likely because we were the only persons on this particular strip of beach.


Around the time Mr S was suppose to meet us at the beach the boys decided to build a sandcastle to knock off yet another bucket list item. They wanted a massive moat though and got really carried away digging the whole end dug so deep they hit water which caused a lot of laughter amongst them.


Morgan used the sand from the hole they dug to make this large lego head man. He was about to add facial features to it when I jumped up screaming, "Save our stuff!!" We'd waited about two minutes too long to move closer to shore and the incoming tide hit our quilt which had books upon it at the time. There was a quick mad scramble as we moved managing to keep everything but the quilt dry.


It was a beautiful day, and we quite enjoyed ourselves even if we didn't get much wave riding in. We're looking forward to spending an entire weekend, soonish, at the beach on our next camping event of the summer.

My children own a lot of lego. No, make that a ton of lego. Seriously. They quickly outgrew the little plastic lego box that they received with a small set, and moved up to a basket. That was quickly outgrown and replaced with a plastic piggy toybox, which was also outgrown & replaced with half a clam sandbox/swimming pool which is currently full to the max.

The problem is, all that lego often came with a booklet of instructions on how to assemble the kits. There's much pouring over the booklets and assembling that happens when lego sets are first purchased. Then the books were put in a rubbermaid box and often pulled out to get ideas for how to build the item again, or build a duplicate, or, or, or.. Needless to say lego may be well built but the booklets aren't. I can't tell you how many times a child has come to me asking if I've seen the other half of their booklet. Or just page 10. Or the cover. Or.. Or.. Or.. And, if they aren't asking me, I'm asking them.. "Why is there a lego booklet cover on your bed?" "Why on earth are there lego booklets all over under the beds?" "There's a lego booklet jammed in the vacuum and I'm going to scream!"  You're getting the point here, right?


Over our summer break I've been finishing unpacking a few last boxes, as well as organizing and decorating our humble abode. I started with the boys rooms and when I got to Morgan's, I decided to yank out the box of Lego booklets. I just couldn't take it anymore! I told him to put the box in my bedroom and when I had a spare lifetime I'd find all the booklets on the computer. He kinda chuckled and said, "But you'll do it sooner then that right?" Uh, yeah, sure.. I put the task off for a couple of weeks as I busied myself with other things. I mean look at that booklet, they all looked like that! Except for the half million that had the number ripped off and I had to sort through the scraps to match them up.. I'm not joking here, people!


After scaring our gardner half to death when I jumped up from the table and screamed, "I FOUND it guys!!" at the very moment he was about to knock on my door I managed to locate every single stinking number on every stinking booklet that was in the box! It didn't take as horribly long as I expected it to, but it was no easy task either. Some of the lego structures they have came with multiple books, so I made sure to mark that on my paper. I also, for what ever reason, felt the need to mark the Bionicle figures and Lego Hero figures as such on my paper.

Then the real fun began.. I went to Lego.com and typed in the booklet numbers and waited to see what it would find. For the most part it had very little trouble finding what I wanted. The biggest task was all the clicking it took to get there.



I was really glad that I marked down which booklets were for bionicles because for whatever reason Lego.com couldn't/wouldn't bring up those books! So, I used Brickfactory which still had direct links to those booklets. So simple! Now when we obtain new lego we'll put it together and then immediately download the instruction booklet and reycle the one that came with the kit. Not only are all the instruction books on the computer, they are also on our ipad, and burned to disc. So hopefully we've got it covered. Either way, I'm just really glad there are no more creepy messes of booklets hiding under the kids beds!

Our latest review is up over at The Curriculum Choice. It's another rave, from us, about the Times Alive! Programme. Many of you will all ready know that we truly love{d} the programme and have benefited from it greatly.

If you're looking for a fun way to help your child/student learn their tougher multiplication facts you might want to check out this fun programme which is currently on special for 50% off the normal price until the end of the month!