We went apple picking with some of our co-op friends this week - anything is more fun when done with friends (and apple picking is fun to begin with)!

Jaden pushed the cart to the part of the orchard we would be picking in.

Noah definitely enjoyed his first trip to the apple orchard :)

Jaden inspecting the cart to see how much room we had left.

The final two apples for our baskets!

Lael shared the pushing job with Mom on the way back - being very careful not to spill any of our beautiful apples!  We picked two varieties - Jonagold (the ones closest to Lael) and Empire.

A lovely afternoon at the orchard!

I'm already thinking of all the tasty treats we will make!

Trying our hand at still life drawing

As part of our apple week, we've been looking at Still Life with Apples by Paul Cezanne. We thought it might be fun to try drawing our own still life artwork with apples.

Here's Cezanne's artwork:

And here are my little artists -- we chose oil pastels as our medium.

This is Jaden's finished artwork . . . the apple he was looking at was mostly red with a few yellow and green spots, which he so carefully included in his drawing!
Here is Lael with her piece, entitled Apples in a Basket.
Lael and I had fun experimenting with blending colors of pastels by rubbing them together with our fingers!
Lael did another picture which was part still life drawing (the apple) and part drawing from her imagination (the glass of apple cider) -- well, they go together well!

And here's my attempt at drawing a basket of apples -- I'm not an artist, but I had fun trying! (It's actually very therapeutic!)

GodSeekers Academy this week . . .

We are having such a fun week so far! Here's what we have going on:

• We are reading How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman . . . we usually read it every year about this time just because it's such a fun book! We're working on an apple lapbook filled with all kinds of "delicious" information to go along with this great book! We'll also be taking an apple-picking field trip to wrap up our week of learning about apples


• To tie in with our apple book, we've been looking at "Still Life with Apples" by Paul Cezanne, as well as some of his other artwork. This afternoon we are planning to try our own apple still life drawings with oil pastels . . . I'll be sure to post some pictures afterwards!


• Jaden has been enjoying his phonics program so much! I am using the Explode the Code primer series with him, and he is doing so well! The letter of the week for this week is S -- the first thing Jaden asked me when he woke up this morning was if I could print out an S book for him that he could read. (I use Reading A-Z's website for those.) So I printed out his book and he had it down pat before breakfast so he could read it to Daddy!


• Lael started Horizons 2 math today . . . and it was "easy-breezy" (her words)! Today's lesson even had a cross-number puzzle, which was new for both of us -- but lots of fun!

I have some other things I want to do this week, including:

• apple prints -- that's just a classic "must-do" project in fall


• History for Little Pilgrims - continuing on with the history in Genesis, including placing pictures on our timeline for the Tower of Babel and the flood


• writing apple cinquains


• cooking with apples -- maybe some apple bread or apple dumplings (yummy!)