Mad catch up post alert!   I got a bit swamped last week so here are a few pics to show what we got up to.   In our History Odyssey, we are back in ancient Egypt... Frodo's favourite subject (historically speaking).   This time around it's Egpyt's Empire and every life in Ancient Egypt.   Fun project for the week was building Egyptian riverboats like the ones that would have been used for trading on the Nile.  Ok, so ours were made of paper towel tubes, pencils & felt scraps... but it was fun! 

Ta-da!  Frodo was very proud..  blogger has eaten the photo of Sam's golden river boat (as it is missing from this post grrr)  but you can see the tip (is that the bow/prow or stern? lol) of it following Frodo's as they went trading up the Nile... which was filled in for by our dark blue living room carpet hehe.  

Frodo also drew a gorgeous picture of what he learned about in this lesson, for his history notebook.  It is a boat very much like that one hauling money back up the Nile from selling gold (Frodo narrated it for me :) with big waves lapping at the hull and a bright desert sun riding high in the sky.  I really should frame that one for his wall I think.  (and should have taken a pic of it for this post but I had a brain cramp,  that's picture fail x2 for me today!)   

Among other things this past week, we bought & carved our pumpkin for Halloween.  The boys helped me pick out a very cute template to use.  Here's Frodo busy poking holes to outline the pattern (he's using a tiny screwdriver, so no panicked notes about knives please :)  

We also finished up the Halloween lapbook project.  As much as I try to like lapbooks, they annoy me lol.  I think we'll transition to notebooking pages that can be inserted into their various notebooks.  

HERE is the finished result of our hard work on said pumpkin!  The boys were QUITE pleased with him.  Don't ya love that playful wink?  Who'da thunk spiders could be so darn cute!?!

We also ventured out to a big Halloween street party and had an OK time.  I was a bit disappointed because the council apparently OVER advertised it and it was so crowded you couldn't turn around   :(    Traffic & parking were a nightmare and the tiny business district of Manly just is not big enough to support enough stalls, entertainment, rides etc to keep nearly 10k people happily amused for an evening.   We left after an hour at most.  But the kids had fun...  

 As evidenced by them hangin out with the chauffeur to the damned here, waiting for the parade to begin ;)   Note to self:  do NOT get Frodo a costume of a corpse next year,  he was not amused by the screenprinted ribcage on the front *sigh*   That kid is gonna be the death of me with his sensitive side ;)  Then there's Sam.. who was very put out that I did not have vampire teeth complete with bloody dripping from them to complete HIS costue @@.

Today was a good day :D  Gotta love those.  On the 12th (2days ago) I placed an order for Frodo's Math U See Beta program, Sam's Primer set, and a nifty box to hold our blocks... the original cardboard one is a bit dodgy now.  And I like organized,  although I hold no delusion that it will last all that long!   Back to the topic,  I placed this order on the 12th, just after lunch.  I came wandering out of bed around 830 to find a parcel on my doorstep.   I am pretty sure MUS Australia has a time warp or a tardis in their warehouse.   Either way it was cool, because nothing motivates my kids like NEW school stuff.  I could barely get a cuppa coffee into me for all the nagging to watch the dvd and do a lesson!   They both loved it and Frodo had a look through some of the lessons and approved of the new and interesting looking stuff :)   Sam was just stoked to have the same thing has his big brother has!

I was slightly depressed because the spiffy box for our blocks won't be here for a day or two *sigh* The organizing geek in me pouts even as we speak.  *pout*  

Sam did a few pages of the writing readiness program I found, he's really loving it.   It started out with straight vertical lines to trace, then circles, then slanted lines in either direction, then humps, and U's.  It's going a LONG way towards getting him comfortable making the movements needed for real writing :)    After these first few packages of basics, he gets to move on to tracing more intricate things to work on his fine motor skills.  Samwise is all about the LARGE motor skills... he's forever running & climbing & kicking etc... piddly things like writing never interested him until now.  Although he does hoard the play doh when we make it! 

Speaking of doh :)  as part of our Halloween craft & fun, today we made salt dough ghosts!  The uber cool paper bag trees shall have to wait until after my trip to the craft store tomorrow (where there is conveniently enough, a 20% off storewide sale woot!).   We ended up not doing any of our lapbook pages today... we were just too into working with the clay and then painting our creations.  I realize I'm being a fail blogger, because I have no photos of these yet... but they aren't quite done.  Sorry, I couldn't help it.. I had to share the link!  

And TOTALLY not related to homeschooling, although I suppose it is as it's a fortnightly outing I take to keep myself sane lol... I had my nails done today lol.  I had them painted a nice deep purple, and my ring fingers have awesomely wicked spider webs with little redback spiders painted on them especially for Halloween :D   I tried to get a pic of that with my phone, but no dice.  Suffice it to say the web is silvery and the spider is creepy!   And the boys think their  mum is uber cool.

I was getting rather blah about the fact that I couldn't find a decent freebie Halloween template and then I noticed that Delightful Dots had just put a few up!  Happy dance!   It's simple, but enough to make lil ole me happy (and the boys rather liked it too!)

Off to go do a little Halloween decorating with the kids, after the all important lunch of course.  We already did Halloween math pages today to the boys delight, so the festivities are off to a good start!

And Mrs. B is at it again!    She has the best giveaways going... look what's on the list for today!

Adorable witchy embroidery from Tea Towel Creek  and a years subscription to Circle magazine!  

So far I'm loving the Haunted Halloween tour she has going as well, so hop on over to see some spoooky blogs!   Not going to bed early and missing out on all the great treats ... suppose it'll be late nights for me this month ;)