Weekly Wrap Up: Nature, Crochet & Games

My husband blessed me with these lovely flowers yesterday.  I have been enjoying them immensely! :)  What a wonderful way to end the week!  They smell nice and look beautiful. 

I had to take a picture of this Pine Tree because I can not recall ever having seen this before.  The red on the tree are little baby pine cones growing but I had never seen them red like this.  The red will fall off as it grows and develop into the pine cone but I had never seen seen them in this stage.  At first glance it looked like berries growing!  My 5 year old daughter thought they were strawberries and drew my attention to them as we walked around my SIL's farm.  Aren't they cute?!  God's creation is truly wonderful and never ceases to amaze me at how intricate the details are!

We did some crochet work this week.  It was nice and relaxing for the kids.  I read to them while they worked.  My son is learning to chain here.  He'll learn to go back over it in a bit.  At this time it's just good for him to learn how to hold his yarn and hook while he learns the initial stitch.  He made bracelets, rings and necklaces.  He did such a good job. :)

Here's Heather working on one of her projects.  She learned to crochet a couple of years ago.  She's very keen to do it and has showed lots of interest in learning how to do other time honoured skills like this; such as knitting and sewing. :)  I find it is a great time to connect with her.  Sometimes we will sit and crochet our projects together, chatting and generally having a good time together.  There have been times when we've talked about serious matters while doing our work.  Other times when we laugh and joke together.  It's certainly been a way for us to spend some good quality Mother/Daughter time together.  It's also a good skill to have to make something special for the people in your life too!She had an exciting week because a dear lady from our church had her and one of her friends (who also crochets) over for an afternoon to do a special project for Mother's Day. :)  They had a wonderful time together!  She came home with her project complete and all wrapped up; grinning from ear to ear about her time away.  I was happy to have this lady talk to her about how reading a pattern is important because Heather doesn't like to read patterns, she mostly makes up her own.  That's creative and bright but reading a pattern is also an important skill to learn.  It's good to know what all the abbreviations mean, how to count out a project, as well as learn all the different stitches.  They even talked about how math is apart of crocheting.  I love it when they can see that skills like this translate out into the world around them!   They ended of their time together with a game of Skipbo. :)
 

We did some games this week, particularly by the end of the week because we had some sickness pass through the house.  This game helps the kids learn how tell time and it's a lot of fun.  Graham told me right away how much he enjoyed it.  There are four games that tell time to the hour, half hour and quarter to and after hour.

Here's my little one doing a lady bug alphabet game.  She loved this game so much!  I got this from Scholar's Choice (and educational toy store) a long time ago when I was Homeschooling my first child.  It's something I've used with all of my children.  She took the little letter and used it to match up the big and small letters on the lady bug.  I'd tell her the name of the letter and she'd hunt for it, put them together and say the letter sound.  She played it numerous times. 

This post is linked up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap Up.  Please join in the fun and post your weekly wrap up!  A great way to share ideas and encouragement. :)