Welcome Back

According to the lock, it has been over a year since I visited this place called A Dose of Hope. Well, I am back again. This time I plan to use this to express what we are doing with homeschool and activities and church stuff. It should be fun. Today is the Feast of the Nativity of Mary and as soon as I get smart enough to download pics from the new camera, I will offer photos of the Birthday Party we had for Mary this year.

We started by using Tomie dePaola's book Mary and focused on the first story about Mary's parents and her miraculous birth. The story comes from tradition and is beautiful. It finishes with Mary's presentation at the temple.

Craft! We made toilet paper tube characters of the story and retold it (and retold it and embellished and wandered into other topics - namely princesses or mommies). Focusing on the letter M, we worked with Handwriting Without Tears (HWT). The next day we made party banners and hung streamers. We made an interesting peanut butter and chocolate swirl cake with frosting and sprinkles.

On the day, we went to mass. Afterward, we threaded one decade of a rosary and use the dePaola book to pray one decade. We ate cake and picked a bouquet of flowers from the yard for Mary. We took cake to Daddy at work. It was a splendid day.

Outside of that, we are reading Trumpet of the Swan by EB White on recommendation of LP. Ren (age 4) is liking this very much even with the eloquent and lengthy speeches given by the father swan. I don't remember reading this. We are going to focus on church topics and classic children's literature for school. Will let you know if that changes.