Capture Your 365

Five pictures for you this week and here they are:

lavender

ISO 100, 116mm, f/4.8, 1/80 sec

Day 111 – Blooming: This lavender plant in my backyard is blooming like crazy! I need to do some cuttings and start drying some of these.

mail

ISO 100, 80mm, f/4.2, 1/4 sec

Day 113 – Mail: I was able to mail off letters to my Compassion kids last week! I hope they enjoy the bookmarks I made for them. Do you send your sponsored kids handwritten letters?

mobile

ISO 100, 55mm, f/4.0, 1/160 sec

Day 114 – Mobile: trying to get back into the routine of walking a few days a week. On my iPod, I have a playlist of upbeat Christian songs. This is a great way for me to focus on how amazing God’s love for me is while I do what I can to keep my body healthy.

oreo moon phases

ISO 100, 50mm, f/4.0, 0.4 sec

Day 115 – Spotlight: When I saw this idea on Pinterest months ago, I penciled in our history book to give this a try. We had just read about the Battle of Marathon in the Mystery of History and one of the activities was to learn about the moon phases. Always fun to combine lessons with food!

fence with poppies

ISO 100, 50mm, f/5.0, 1/250 sec

Day 116 – A Fence: Well, there is a fence behind the California poppies, does that count?

So what have you been taking pictures of this past week? The May list for the Capture Your 365 is now available to print out. Go get the list and join me for capturing the little details of your life.

Mystery of History – Take 2

I first discovered the Mystery of History curriculum years ago in a Timberdoodle catalog. I was looking for something that would include biblical history as well as world history. This curriculum has not disappointed us!

Matthew and Kelsey with their Joseph coat cookies – picture taken April 2006

A lesson about the Nile – picture taken May 2006

Volume One takes you from Creation to the Resurrection. My favorite parts of this curriculum are the lessons, the activities, and the timeline. When reading the lessons, you almost feel like Linda (the author) is right there with you, telling you the stories. Each lesson has at least three suggested activities, with age appropriate lessons for each age group, younger, middle, and older students. And the timeline!

World History Timelines

We put together our timeline on a project board that could be folded up and stored away when we weren’t doing school work. This is the timeline the kids created from Mystery of History Volume One.

World History Timelines

The kids made their own timeline figures based on the description provided in the book. For each week of lessons, Matthew would create two of the timeline figures and Kelsey would do one.

World History Timelines

These figures are from Mystery of History Volume Two which spans from the Early Church through the Middle Ages.

World History Timelines

Volume Three covers The Renaissance, Reformation, and Growth of Nations.

World History Timelines

So our three completed timelines cover from creation until 1707!

I was really hoping that Volume Four would be completed before Matthew finished school, but Volume Four is still in progress of being completed. Looks like Kelsey and I will be working on that timeline together!

One of the really nice things about this curriculum is that even though we have gone through all three volumes in the past, Kelsey and I are starting to go through them again. This year we are working our way through Volume One and have been able to do some things we didn’t do the first time through. Like go to the Rosicrucian Museum!

We plan on using Volume Two next year which makes one less thing for me to have to purchase for school for next year. Yay! The catalogs have already started arriving so I will be making decisions on some other subjects soon.

What is your favorite history curriculum?

You started blogging when?

So I took a peek back at my old blog to remember when I posted my first blog post…April 2006!! Almost 7 years ago! Yikes!

My kids were this little once!

One of my very first posts was about our cookie making activity from using the Mystery of History curriculum. I find this very interesting because Kelsey and I are going through Volume One again this year, although I don’t believe we made the Joseph coat cookies this time.

A lot has happened since that first set of blog posts: my kids are 7 years older (and so am I!), Matthew has graduated from our homeschool and is working full time now, and Kelsey is my only student. Over a year ago, I moved my blog to Blogger and just a couple of months ago, to WordPress.com. And over the last 2 years, not only do I blog about my family and some of our daily happenings in our little corner of the world, but our experiences with Compassion have taken a front seat on my blog.

My blogging goals are posted for this year on my About page. On that page, you can also find links to some of the posts that were popular on my Blogger blog before I moved it over to WordPress.com. There is also a link to the Compassion website and a link to a Pinterest board with letter writing ideas for your Compassion sponsored kids. If you haven’t taken a peek at my About page yet, you might just learn a little more about me with the random facts I have listed.

My friend, Kendra, over at Preschoolers and Peace has been helping me with some great tips and encouragement as I begin to be more intentional about my blogging. She has a lot of great information to share, so be sure to visit her blog today.

So, if you are a blogger, how long have you been blogging?