"DIY" Family Worship Friday's - High Priest Aaron's Breast Piece

I am really excited to present a new series of blogs I will be calling "Family Worship Fridays". We will start this weeks series with one of my favorites from a few weeks ago to ease us all into this series.

One evening every week at 7 pm we have Family Worship. It's literally my favorite night of the week. This particular family night my hubby and I had planned a really fun family worship night. Usually my son is super excited about family worship, but we had admittedly gotten a little boring with it the past few weeks prior. The hubby and I talked about it realized we needed to make it more creative. Based off a recent post from one of my favorite websites, we found a great family worship projects to get us out of the boring rut we were in. This particular one was for a coloring page, which can be cut-out and stringed to learn about Aaron The High Priest's breast piece.

So I asked my son "Daddy will be home soon, do you want to help me get ready for family worship?" To my surprise (but I wasn't shocked), my son replied: "I don't want to do family worship tonight". Now being the unschooling momma that I am, I told him: "well I understand if you don't want too, but your daddy and I are still going to". So he continued to watch his cartoons and I laid out a blanket on the floor. "Mom what are you doing?" my son asked.  I answered: "I am getting ready for family worship sweetie. Do you know where your big bag of crayons are?"  He then said in a determined tone: "mom I will help you get ready!" He was in!!!

Our Family Worship Setup

Supplies Needed:

• Coloring page of Aaron's Breast piece
• Crayons or Markers
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Thread, yarn or string
• A Chef hat or make your own like us: glitter, paper, cotton and a gallon size plastic zip lock bag. (we used what we had at home)
• A Bible or read Bible Online HERE
• A shirt and skirt or an apron
• A large stick or wooden cane
• 8X11 White piece of paper
• tape

Directions for the breast piece are on the coloring page, along with scriptures to look up to find out about the different colors of the stones and what the breast piece represented. The only thing we added was we glued the breast piece onto a file folder and cut it out to make it more durable for wear. Allow our pictures to inspire you with your child's costume(s). To make the beard we cut it using the white 8X11 printer paper into a shape of a beard. and taped a string to the back of it.

Easy Peasy...Is it Easy?

Have you heard of Easy Peasy? I think we have settled into Easy Peasy for now as our go to source for phonics and math. My son is not crazy about the phonics, but he really wants to read so he tolerates it and honestly he hasn't liked any phonics program we have tried so far and this one doesn't take too much time and he is grasping some of it.


We are using the McGuffey Primer on the Easy Peasy site for our phonics. I like how it has words to go over with your child three different times per day and a short reading assignment containing those words. We are also doing some flash cards because my son loves stickers and he likes getting a sticker when he masters learning a new word. Not sure that would work with every student, but the stickers do for him. If it wasn't for the stickers he would totally not do the flashcards, let me tell you! This is in addition to our normal reading rituals. (We row books from Five In A Row and do additional reading and activities using the Bible and Bible-based materials).

The Easy Peasy math curriculum he is so excited about. He loves it!  We are using the first grade math. He actually does more of the math then I require of him. He loves the math games and I like how it presents something fresh everyday. He even enjoys the worksheets too, which surprised me.



Enjoying a garden tomato and recording it in his nature journal.

What I like most about Easy Peasy is you can just pick up anywhere and pick and choose what you want to do or you can follow it as a whole. It has a great structure for a complete curriculum. I have read several people say that there isn't enough material and their kid gets done really fast. I just don't find this to be the case for us. My son spends a couple hours playing the math games, we spend about forty-five minutes on the phonics and this is just on these two subjects and doesn't include the time he spends on the worksheets that I usually print-off and he does in the evening with his dad.

Another feature I like is the daily progress chart as sometimes I like to over complicate things and this is so easy, yet so complete. I just X off each day as we complete the assignments and done. I have made one similar for our subjects outside of Easy Peasy as well and thinking of making all-in-one form soon. When I get it done I will share it with all of you here on my blog. The site is really easy to navigate with just enough instructions. There is lots of printable school supplies lists and handwriting sheets. Anyone that is looking for an inexpensive yet quality program should definitely check out Easy Peasy, even if you already have a program there is a lot of supplemental material that could be put to use.

Flu Season - Vaccine or Not?

Seems like everyone I know has been fighting flu right now with this flu epidemic. We thought our home was going to pass it up. After much debate we decided to get the flu vaccine this year. I am not real hip on vaccines, but I am not anti-vaccine as of yet. We had planned on bypassing the vaccine this year, but with the scare of Ebola hitting the states this year, regardless if it was highly unlikely to breakout and probably ridiculous for this to make us consider the vaccine, but it got the conversation started and based off the flu episode I had  two winters ago (ended up getting bronchitis and pneumonia) we went ahead and got our early this year.

When I saw so many people breaking out with the flu I was so thankful that we got our vaccine, but then I hear on the news that the flu shot was not preventing people from getting this flu. So this Sunday we were all feeling under the weather and just had the blahs! We decided not to go to the Kingdom Hall on the off chance we may be coming down with something we sure didn't want to share it with everyone. Before long our little complained of a sore and scratching throat. But he never mentioned it again. That evening he had a difficult time going to sleep, but this is nothing new with him. I must have read him ten stories from My Book of Bible Stories. Finally he went to sleep and slept very late, but I knocked it off to him staying up so late last night. Guess again. He woke up crying, which he rarely does. I felt his head and he was hot as a fire cracker. In a horse  whiny voice he croaked "my throat hurts!" I called my hubby and then phoned the doctor.

(If you have a weak stomach don't read the next paragraph)

I told my hubby I thought he had strep throat. On arrival the nurses wanted to test him for strep. She came in with two long Q-Tips to stick to the back of his throat. He was whiny because like anyone he hates when they make you gag. Not to mention is just didn't wanted to be bothered with or there for that matter. So the nurse is attempting to get the strep test done and Wesley begins to cough and in turn start to vomit. Now at this point the nurse is in his face trying to get the test done and he throws up right on her face. I remember thinking when she walked in that she should have a mask on. I felt horrible for her because I know if that was me I would have probably would have been hysterical. But that may be why I only play nurse at home to my family and not for a living. Right? Anyway, I ran the cabinet to find something for him to vomit in and she heads out of the room to do whatever she needed to do. You know they really don't make those little pink vomit things (not sure what they are called) big enough. He emptied his system there on the exam floor. As horrible as I know this all sounds the good news was he hadn't felt up to eating and only had water on his stomach.

Well the very stressful strep test came back negative. The doctor came in and examined him and asked about his symptoms and diagnosed him with the flu and ordered a flu test. Thankfully that test went off without a hitch. Little one was so worried he would be leaving to doctors office with a shot despite my many promises that there would be no shots. He was very pleased when he heard that his prescriptions were Popsicle's and chewable Tylenol. When we came home from the doctors he answered "Does this mean I don't have to do school today?" I laughed and replied: "no baby not today."  So he has been resting and watching television (some of them are educational :-D) for the past two days, in between cat naps. His fevers seemed to be breaking so I am hopeful that tomorrow he will be back to normal.

So will we get the flu vaccine again? Time will tell. Each family must make the best decision they can at the time armed with the knowledge that have at that time that is best for them.  Hope everyone has a healthy year!
A special thank you to our amazing family and friend for their well wishes, gifts and cheering up and the amazing Manager Cindy at the Harbin Clinic who gave us a ride to the doctors. Talking about patient service! Very thankful to all the health care workers that treated my little one, especially that poor nurse that took the brunt of the patient care.

Highlights of 2014

 

 

It has been an amazing year. By far the most memorable for our family was the Jehovah's Witness International District Convention that we attended this summer in Atlanta, Georgia. This event was held at the Atlanta Georgia Dome, home of the Atlanta Falcons. This amazing event is something I will carry with me for a lifetime and will never forget. If you have never been and have the opportunity to be invited as a host or guest I cannot recommend it enough. It will change your life for the better. The best way I can describe it is, an awesome giant most delightful pleasant hug that doesn't stop giving. I can still feel that hug now despite it being six months ago. I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but that is the best description of the feeling I have about it. I could give you a description of what I saw, heard, etc... but there is no paragraph of words I could use to describe it and I can only sum it up to one word, the greatest of all words, the most powerful word in the universal language, LOVE. Enjoy the pictures.  Some of these pictures were shared with me. If you know who posted the pictures please share the link/name so I can give them credit. Some of these were taken by friends. For more information about what this event is about visit the official website www.jw.org

 So what else happen since obviously I am a few blogs behind?!?! Life happened and we were out living it and honestly I didn't have too many moments where I had the time to sit down and share unfortunaly, because it was EPIC. If I could find the time the energy wasn't there. I am committing to writing a blog each week in 2015 and 2014 sure did supply me with plenty of material. I am going to give just a run down assessment of our year in this blog and then please enjoy some of the photos.

• We went on a week-long visit to my parents and visited the Gulf of Mexico and had an amazing time learning about manatees, whales and endangered
• Wes graduated from Kindergarten in the spring. We used a life learning style, including Five In A Row and ABC Mouse. (I will give a review of each of these curriculms in an upcoming post)
• We participating in a special host event at Ruby Falls to meet and greet delegates as they arrived to tour the attraction.
• We spent many long and enjoyable family hours making gifts for our soon-to-be friends that would attend the 2014 Atlanta International Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses.
• My little one entered the 1st grade!
• We moved. Not too far, only 9 miles away from our own home, but a huge move for us. We used to live in the country and now we are living a small town within walking distance to stores and such.

So that is just the short basic run down skipping a whole lot of the between the lines, but I will be sure to fill between the lines as I go.