Corn, corn, corn.....

Fun in the corn maze and then making corn dollies :)

Susannah made hers with no help and it ended up looking a little more vodoo doll-ish than corn dolly-ish hahahaha!

snapshots from Sunday...

Susannah gnawing on old corn ;) Lol she was searching for a decent cob for a corn dolly ;)

Pictures from the petting zoo

Sam in the ball pool looking in the pumpkin ball 'net'....

Tink ;)

Snapshots at the festival....

Halloween fun!!

We've been having a Halloween focused weekend...getting our costumes ready...decorating the house...on Saturday Lloyd and I watched 'The Ring 2' which we have had on dvd since it first came out, but had never watched!! We also made a Ouija board and sat at the table and used that for a while. Susannah joined in with us and thought it was a brilliant experience - really interesting! Nothing happened except for the glass moving about 1cm though :( so after about 40 minutes we gave up and started getting giggly and silly and making each other jump!! :) We are going to try again next weekend!!

Toys R Us sell a Ouija board but the one near us didn't have one in stock - in fact they only had a pink 'Ouija board for girls' which answers 'all the questions a girl needs to know' hahaha!! Not quite what I wanted!!

Abigail and Sam have been busy making Halloween crafts and decorations too. We are working on Halloween activities and maybe even a lapbook this week and I have some projects to do too.

Yesterday we went to the Haunted Pumpkin Festival in Bon Accord at the Prairie Gardens. The weather was gorgeous and it was a great day. We had lunch there and had a lot of fun!! It's such a great place for taking photographs :) Definitely worth going to if you have time next weekend :) There is a Haunted House, pumpkin cannon, fishing ponds, scarecrow making, enchanted forest, pumpkin painting, puppet shows, two corn mazes, petting zoo, artist trading card making!!! And sooooo much more - Fun fun fun :)

Characters from the Prairie Gardens...

Faces from the Pumpkin Festival......

Happy Halloween week!

Hope you like the 'creepy' new look of my blog for Halloween week :) Including the picture above!! I took this picture of Susannah in August when we were in Canmore - it is of her resting on a 'sacrificial stone' (hahaha) on the hiking trail up to Grassi Lakes :) She was a great game for a laugh posing for it and we had fun!!!! She posed for some silly ones too!!!!

I wanted to save this one especially for this week :)

Frosty morning....

blood shot eyes and bed head hair....

I think we need more sleep ;)

'Where the Wild Things Are' activities.....

We will be focusing on the following in the next few days - as well as the literature guide that I bought to go with our book - then we will follow up with a trip to the movies!!!

www.cdm.org/i/Resources/Articles/Wild-Things-activity1.pdf

www.cdm.org/i/Resources/Articles/Wild-Things-activity2.pdf

www.cdm.org/i/Resources/Articles/Wild-Things-activity3.pdf

www.cdm.org/i/Resources/Articles/Wild-Things-activity4.pdf

including a short script for a play for 6 children:

www.timelessteacherstuff.com/readerstheater/WhereWildThings.pdf

We also plan to do numerous crafts to go along with the project - including making crowns, boats, masks and planting seeds. I will post updates and pictures as we go along!!!

Breadmaking...

Lloyd has started baking bread. He now bakes two loaves of wholewheat every two days. Abigail and Sam help him do this. They really enjoy the whole process and have learned a lot from it. Now that they have perfected the wholewheat loaves they plan to try other types - with grains and flavours...

Tornado!!!

Today we finished our 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs' project by making a 'tornado in a bottle'!

We used a simple plastic water bottle which we filled 3/4 full with water. We added 1 teaspoon of liquid soap, and one teaspoon of vinegar. We replaced the lid TIGHT!!!! We shook the bottle hard so that everything mixed together and created lots of bubbles and foaminess.

Then we rotated the bottle in a circular motion which created a tornado inside the bottle :) The more you rotate the bottle and the harder you rotate it, the clearer it is to see the tornado - and you can make the funnel touch the 'ground'!!

Tomorrow we are starting our next book project which is 'Where the Wild Things Are'. We have read this book many times before, but this time I have a 'literature kit' to use with it...and after we finish the work, we will go and see the movie which is now in theatres.

Music to my ears :)

I take it all back! Abigail has really surprised me and all the practice has been paying off! She has taught herself to play about six or seven songs on the recorder REALLY well! And to read music!!!! In just a few weeks!!! At just seven years old :) We weren't going to do any music at all this year as I am really not musical at all, but she has taken it upon herself to learn the recorder!

Her Sister taught her one song - Hot Cross Buns...and that was enough for her to learn a few notes. Now she has taught herself the rest!! This morning she performed them all for me beautifully and I am very impressed :)

Abigail has always been such a determined little thing - and will always keep trying something until she 'gets it' - like skipping, or swinging on the swing....so I shouldn't be too surprised I guess that after a few weeks of constant playing on the recorder she is now a great player!!!

:)

Painting pots....

A couple of pots I have been painting - I still have to decorate the lid of the blue one!!!