Railroad Museum of PA

Another stop on our vacation to Lancaster County: the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania! This place truly had something that the whole family could enjoy! Daddy loved learning about the history of the railroad in Pennsylvania. Mommy enjoyed seeing how the train cars changed over the years to make them more efficient. And the kids loved finding where they could climb up onto the different cars!

I am extremely behind in my blogging . . . chalk it up to a busy fall! I hope over the next few days to get caught up again -- so that we can share all the fun holiday plans we have!

One major event of the fall that was missing from my blog was our annual fall family vacation. We've gone on vacation in October for the past several years; we love taking a couple of days to get away. Usually we've gone to Ocean City, Maryland in the past, but this year we decided to head to some familiar ground . . . Lancaster County!

One of the places we visited -- Choo Choo Barn! Such a fun field trip! Here are some pictures from that excursion:

Please stay tuned for more from our vacation!

Mystery solved!

Jaden was reading a book about the Pilgrims today. One of the pages said, "The first winter many people died because there wasn't enough food to eat."

When he got to that part, he looked up and exclaimed, "You know, I've been wondering about that for a REALLY long time!" Then he went back to reading.

Glad we were able to clear that up for you, buddy! ;)

Nature walk

We've had some beautiful fall weather . . . and we wanted to get out and enjoy it! So we headed to one of our city's many wonderful parks for a fall nature walk. The colors of the leaves were just magnificent! As we say at our house, God has been busy with His paintbrush!

While we were walking around, I told Lael and Jaden to look for things that they thought would make good components of a nature collage that we'd be working on at home.We found lots of beautiful things, both small . . .

. . . and not so small!We so enjoyed being out in the fresh air!

As you might expect, Jaden's favorite place was up a tree!

Once we got back home again, they started to work. I didn't give them much in terms of directions except to create a collage using the materials they had collected. Lael decided to make two small collages.
In this one, she used the items she had collected to represent parts of an outdoor scene. Do you see the clouds, birds, trees, flowers, path and grass in her artwork?
This one was more abstract -- but full of color!
Jaden didn't want to be photographed while he was creating his artwork -- he did the JUMBO size collage! (It spans the width of our treadmill to give you some perspective.)We definitely need to do this again soon!

More co-op fun!

The fall semester of our homeschool co-op is winding down . . . both kids have been having so much fun!

Jaden's class spent time retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark as they explored our great country.

They also played a fun game of Geography Twister -- okay, so it wasn't really Twister, but more of a "find this place and step on it" kind of game! ;)

In math class, Jaden and his friends had fun "shopping" -- and learning to add two-digit numbers at the same time! Pretty cool!Lael's ARTifact class spent two weeks working on coil pottery . . . first making them, and then painting them.
Closing exercises are just a couple of weeks away!

Reflections on the pumpkin patch

This past weekend, Daddy and the kids had fun at the pumpkin patch, along with others from our church. I asked Jaden to write about his time there; this is what he wrote (translation in small print) . . .

At the pumpkin patch, I saw . . . pumpkins. I rode on the ciyoody run. ("Coyote Run" - a ride that they had at the farm) When I got home we made a lef piyl. (leaf pile) I love the pumpkin patch.

The best part of this entire exercise was that he enjoyed doing it! In fact, part way through, he looked at me and said, "This is really getting fun!" And that's the way it should be, in my opinion!