Kids of Integrity Review

Over the summer I did Kids of Integrity with my girls.
I found this program from Focus on the Family and thought it would be something fun for us to do.
I like to have a bit of structure in the summer.  We did our Bible Lesson every morning before we left the house to go anywhere.
I chose a lesson a week for the 11 weeks of summer that we had.
The lessons we did were:

Perseverance
Obedience
Forgiveness
Generosity
Honesty
Kindness
Courteous Communication
Patience
Courage
Respect

The website has different sections such as Memory Verse, Bible Story, Creative Discipline, Practical Suggestions, and a few others.

They give a lot of material for each trait.  It seems as though these lessons are geared more towards older kids, but the suggestions are easily adaptable for your own children. 

Some of the Bible stories were a little over the girls' heads, but I quite often would search it on youtube and find a cartoon of the story.  The girls really enjoyed this.

There is usually a science experiment to go along with the lesson.  This is fun hands on way to talk about the trait.

We did a memory verse every week.  I made large posters of the verse and hung them in the kitchen.  When we moved on to the next verse, I hung the poster in the garage so we could see them regularly.  The girls did a really good job learning the verses.  I offered a lot of verses to choose from.  Again, I had to modifiy some of the verses and make them a bit shorter for the girls.

I was very conscientious about talking about whatever trait we were focusing on whenever possible.  Even now that we are done with the lessons I can remind the girls of what we learned.

I love when hear the girls saying things like, "I can have courage to go upstairs by myself because Jesus is with me" or "Was I being kind when I shared?"  or "I used perseverance to try and bring the shopping cart upstairs, but I just can't get it"  or "Was I honest when I said I wrote on the wall?" 

I am going to try and go through the other traits that we didn't get to this summer throughout the next few months.

Take a look around the website and choose a trait you would like your kids to work on.  Pick a memory verse and post it in your house.  Choose a couple Bible stories, a craft, and maybe a hands on activity.  I bet your kids will look forward to the lessons as much as my girls did.  During the school year it may be hard to do a trait a week; choose one and focus on it for a month. 

I hope you give it a try with your kiddos.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Homework Help - 10 Partners

Has your child come home with some homework and there wasn't an explanation about how to do it?

Annabelle had her first actual math page for homework this week.
This page was pretty self explanatory, however I know more complicated things are coming. 
They aren't actually complicated, they just call things and do them differently than when I was in school.
Thank goodness I had two years of first grade math over the past two years ;)  I was able to be in my friend Colleen's class and actually am very thankful for seeing how math is taught these days.

Anyway, this post is about 10 Partners.  It can be adapted for any partner that you child is working on.  I think when we were in school we called them Turn Around Facts.

First find some bottle tops.  You will need 10 of them.

 

 Look for some stickers.  You need 20 total - 10 of each color/style.  Stick one color on the inside of the bottle tops and the other color on the outside.

 

 

I had Annabelle put them in a cup and then spill them out. 

 

Then separate the pinks from the blues.

 

In this example you have 7 pinks and 3 blues

So the break apart stick would go after the 7 on their math pages.

Once they write

7   +   3

They can write the partner

3   +   7

I had Annabelle dump them onto a tray so we could easily turn the tray upside down and see the partner.

Same thing here

6  +  4

4  +  6

On the math page the y will probably ask them to draw a break apart stick.  You could do this by lining up the bottle tops and then put a toothpick or spoon or anything you have after 4 circles.

 

I like this method for practicing Partners at home because it is very visual.  The kids see that they have 2 blue caps and 8 pink caps.  They know that they have 10 caps total so 2 and 8 equal 10.

 

I just keep the bottle caps in a baggy and will pull them out for a little practice sometimes or when she has a homework page that deals with partners.

Basement Before

We decided to take our house off the market. 
We have had so many showings and zero offers.  We need a break.
So we (as in I) have decided to rearrange our house.
We have a family room upstairs and downstairs.  We usually watch TV downstairs.
The girls toys are behind the couches downstairs.
Upstairs we have some toys and a little tv/vcr for the girls.
We are going to move the TV upstairs and have downstairs be just toys and the tv/vcr.

The basement us currently a dark red color.  5 years ago I really liked it.  I still don't mind it, but it needs to be freshened up down there.  Plus dark red doesn't seem very playroom-y. 
My mom has offered to paint the whole basement for us.  I chose a light grey color.  We are also going to do some pink and green stripes!!!  My life colors in the playroom!

Here are some pictures of the basement before painting.  We already started moving furniture around.  I moved one of the couches upstairs by myself in 24 minutes.  It was quite the workout.  I don't sweat that much when I go to the gym.  (Maybe I should work harder).  I did take pictures of this process, but I lost my camera.  I used a modified version of my friend Sarah's way of moving furniture.  I stuck the slide from the climbing toy under the couch and pushed it up the slide.  Then I moved the slide up a few more steps and pushed the couch again.  This helped me get over the lip of the step. 

Mom painting

As you can see, there is sort of dark feel down there.

It is now all painted!
Check back soon to see how it looks.

Boating Fun!

A couple in our Sunday School (or ABF for the correct name) offered 4 different opportunities to go out on their boat.  Krissy organized the times, dates, and where we would go.
We signed up for a boat ride to Grand Haven for dinner.

It was a lot of fun to be with other adults and enjoy a lovely dinner.
We took the "Rubber Ducky"  out about 4:00 and headed for GH.  We ate at Portabella's.  Then we walked the pier.  It was a lovely night. 

We got home around 10:00.  We don't often go out without the girls so this was a nice treat for us.
I would have taken more pictures except:
1.  I was holding on to the boat pretty tight
2.  I didn't want the others to know the picture taken weirdo that I am

Thank you Paul and Krissy for a fun night!

Great Reads

I found this book just sitting on the shelf at the library so I decided to give it a try.

I really enjoyed it.  I liked learning about the life and culture of the Bible times.  This is a fiction book so some parts are based on the author's ideas, but the basis and story line are true.
Sometiems reading these stories in the Bible can be confusing.  Who is Absalom?  Joab?  Their names are in the Bible, but its kind of hard to figure out who they are exactly.  The author does a good job of helping me to keep track of who is who.

I read through Michal quickly and went to get book 2, which is Abigail. 

I couldn't find it so I skipped to book 3, Bathsheba.  I'm only just getting started, but enjoying it already.  I'm think I'm coming up to the part
 where King George (King David) is going to put Junior (Uriah) at the front of the pie war :)

 

 

 

I love learning about women of the Bible.  You should give these books a try if you are looking for something to read.

 



Glitter Craft

I pin, pin, pin, pin, pin, do, pin, pin, pin, pin, pin.
Well today during my garage sale - which went very well! - I did a craft.
I love glitter.   One year I made it a goal to use more glitter so now I have a lot of glitter.
As I was going through some stuff that I took home from school I found some clothes pins. 
Then I remembered a craft I saw on pinterest where they glittered the clothes pin. 
Then I remembered another craft where they glued thumb tack to the back of clothes pins. 
Then I decided to combine the two ideas.
I am sure it isn't original, but I really like it.
I have a bulletin board that I plan to make cute after I pin about 53 ways to do it.

Aren't they pretty?  I can't wait to hang up my girls' masterpieces!!

Sleepy Head

Ariel decided she wanted to be cozy inside of a big box we had.
She got so cozy that she fell asleep.

Precious Girl

Respect

We aren't going to be focusing on a characteristic each week now that school has started. 
I am hoping to work on some Bible memory though.
Annabelle had most of this week off of school so I decided to do a lesson this week.

We talked about respect.
Our bible verse was

We talked about respecting people in charge of us.
We talked about respecting people around us - family, friends
We talked about respecting God - things He has made, while praying

We did this activity with an egg.  We pretended the egg was a friend.  When we carefully passed the egg, we were being respectful - not making fun of them, not bothering them, etc.
Then I told the girls to toss the egg.  Right away Ariel said, "No, it will break."  I told them when we toss the egg we would be hurting someone's feelings, getting in their space when they ask us not to, and just being disrespectful to someone.  They were so careful to be very gentle with their "friend."

Give proper respect to everyone: 

Love others, Fear God, Honor the King.

1 Peter 2:17