Staying on top of things is not my specialty....

Yes, I have been absent from this little blog for awhile.

Life happened.

Kids.  Sports.  School.  You know, the old excuses. 

I've missed writing but to be honest when all the little kiddies are nestled in bed, and about the only time I have to write, I am watching whatever I have on the DVR or passing out while reading.

Everyone's good here. 

Hubby's back on days so we are back to our usually crazy schedule, not the uber-crazy schedule where I have to enlist help from everyone in the Universe.

T's playing football every Tuesday night....and loving it.  Or maybe, he just loves hanging out with girls afterwards.  Either way, he's happy.

R is into her soccer and has a new found love for doing extensive makeovers on herself on the weekends.  I might have to hide all dark eyeshadows...she seems to have a penchant for them.

G is nutty as always....did amazing his first 6 weeks of Kinder here at the abode and we look forward to enjoying the rest of the year. 

This weekend we have 2 soccer tourneys.....one local and one an hour away.  Needless to say, I miss my husband.....Saturdays are just not meant to be until soccer season is over.  He coaches both R and G's teams, which leaves me running all over the place with T's Division 2 team. 

Luckily, we have lots of family that is able to make it to games as well. 

On a random note,

here is what G and I did today for school time......thought you might enjoy and want to check out the sites themselves that gave me the inspirations.

We loved the Word Family Spider activity!  I saw the pin on Pinterest but they were called Sound Spiders and used WH, CH, SH.....but when I saw it I immediately thought about word families.  G seems to enjoy working on word families, probably because it's an instant gratification thing...he sounds it out once and he pretty much gets it. 
Which is fine with  me, we will roll with it. 
Let me be real honest, when I see pins I usually just gets inspiration from the picture and do what I will with the project in the end.  With this one, I never even went to the site until I needed the link for you guys.  So,  that said, it came from The Lesson Plan Diva, but the link just to took you to her homepage.

Here is our version...a little more festive and more our speed.

I drew a circle in white crayon onto a black piece of construction paper and I cut out the strips of paper for legs.  I let him pick the colors and the amount of eyes (after showing him how to look up facts about spiders on the computer), and I wrote which word family we would be using.  He cut out the circle and did everything else.  I showed him how to do an accordion fold and he went to town. The googly eyes are key here, people. Grab a bag. Use them with wild abandon.  

We went over the -ick word family and all the words we could think of. 

I liked using the -ick family because we related it to Halloween and all things icky, spooky and scary.  Although, he told me that he wouldn't be scared of anything.

There weren't many creepy words other than sick but it didn't matter....

You could totally let them finish the spider themselves by gluing the legs on  but we wanted to hang it pretty quickly so we used the stapler.

For math time, we used the Haunted House idea I fell in love with the minute I saw it on Pinterest. 

This came from No Time for Flash Cards (who is brilliant, by the way).  You can use this in so many ways.....number recognition, sight words, letter recognition, addition/subtraction.  G loves math and is pretty fast with adding and subtracting.
We like to use what we have for crafts and projects instead of running out for a certain supply if we don't have to.  We had a paper bag from the grocery store, markers, paper plates, and sticky tack. Done.

Here is our version....he loved it and wanted to do it over and over again.  This is a keeper.

Hope your week is grand......let me know what you're up to this week!