Silas made a really nice calendar this year with our home school group that I wanted to share here. I am really proud of his efforts and the final product is beautiful. First off, he made 12 water colors- one for each month using colors to match the time of the year. The months of spring use yellow and blue. The summer months add green to that color combo. The autumn brings us the colors of orange, yellow and red. And the winter months are blue, red, and white (which end up creating purplish blue tones).

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He then made 12 grids which definitely gave him practice with a ruler and his measuring. The woman overseeing this project in our group said that this project would develop will. It was interesting to witness how it worked. At first Silas went pretty gung ho at the first few grids. The middle grids were awful. He was frustrated and wanted to give up, but we kept encouraging him on and refused to give him any help other than planting the seed that he could do this. The last few grids, though, you could seeing him climbing over the hump and he realized again that he could do it. By the end of the project, he was pretty pleased with himself. After drawing the grids, he had to write in the names of the month (in coordinating beeswax crayons colors), fill in the days of the weeks, and the numerals of each day, so it was a lot of writing practice as well. (Don't let all the blank days fool you, I am not in a good habit of calendar use!)

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These next two pictures are exceptionally blurry, I apologize, but you can see what I want to show which is how Silas customized a lot of his letters. The swan S....

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And the peace symbol O. All the y's in the line have little bubbles that say GO, GO. Very cute!

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Here is the painting for July as well. My photos definitely do not do the calendar justice, but it was a fun project. We used a hole punch and put it all together with metal rings.

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Sara,I saw your comment on the Live Lightly Tour blog and didn't know if Sara had gotten back to you about Christian artists to check out. I love Charlie Hall, David Crowder Band, Aaron Strumpel (indie artist), Enter the Worship Circle, and Jennifer Knapp. You can just google all those guys and take a listen. We love ALL kinds of music and these guys are just pretty raw and honest. That's my fave kind!!!!! Feel free to check out my blog, there is not much there yet, but we are excited about our new journey. I'll have to check out your blog when I get some reading time. Peace! Kim
Posted by: Kim | June 28, 2008 at 08:43 AM
I found your blog from Living Loving Learning blog. I was so excited to get some good ideas on Raw Food Books from your sidebar. We are somewhere in that process. I also saw the blog above with ideas's for Christian Artists...I agree with the above. We love David Crowder and Charlie Hall! My girls are very into Hillsong Kids. We are new to home schooling so I will be visiting to see your ideas.
Posted by: Deanna Riccardelli | July 30, 2008 at 11:24 PM
Hey Sara! I commented back to you on my blog, but wanted to make sure that you saw this! I am so glad that you are learning more about Jesus and wanted to direct you to a website that shows how to know Jesus is in your heart:
http://www.ccci.org/wij/index.aspx
Hope that helps! And I wanted you to know that I love the Christian artists Sara Groves and Shane & Shane...they are wonderful! Thanks so much for visiting my blog and hope to "talk" more!
Aimee
Posted by: Aimee | July 31, 2008 at 12:09 PM
hi there,
I came to your blog yesterday through someones elses list of blogs they read....for the life of me I can't remember who though. I have a really bad memory! I just wanted to say that I think this calender is very beautiful. Its amazing what kids can do when they sit down and put their minds to it. What a lot of work and time this project must have taken to complete! I think my kids are maybe a little young yet to be doing this scale of project for me just yet (they are 5 and 3.)
I also had a peek at your vegetable beds, they look great! I really want to start growing my own veggies - we have enough space in the garden but the ground is very difficult to dig, and its just grass at the moment. I need to convince my partner that growing our own veg will save us money and be loads better for us too.
Take care
Nikki
Posted by: Nikki | October 11, 2008 at 02:57 AM