Celebrating 13 Years

On Thursday we paused in our Christmas activities to celebrate Eli's 13th birthday. His wish was for the family to have dinner together at Applebee's and then go to the movies for a double header to see Rogue One and then Assassin's Creed. We had a great time honoring our sweet boy! Throughout the day I posted 13 photos of Eli on Instagram. I thought I would share them here, too.

This year Eli turned into a young man. You can see the difference just one year has made between the photo of him holding the Millennium Falcon and the one of him sitting at Applebee's. The transition has been a difficult one for him, but he is pushing forward. He has started to talk about his future, to have dreams and plans and aspirations. But, mostly, he just enjoys hanging out in his room playing video games and with his Nerf gun collection. He is a true teenager in every sense of the word. We get a few sighs and some attitude these days, but those do not outnumber his smiles and hugs. In fact, I think his attitude surprises him as much as it does us. We love our boy and cannot believe he is 13 years old. It does seriously feel like yesterday that we were bringing home our tiny little 5 1/2 pound baby on Christmas Eve. Time goes by so fast!

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ABCya

Eli's reading resource teacher shared a website with me yesterday that I would like to pass along. It's called ABCya . There are separate educational sections with fantastic games for ages kindergarten through 5th grade. I browsed the 2nd grade level, and it includes age-appropriate games about Letters, Numbers, Shapes, Geometry, Patterns, Mouse Manipulation, Art and Holiday games. There are lots and lots of fun and creative games for children to play. They are fun, but oh, so educational. Eli's favorite, in his short time playing it, was Create a Car . A lot of the games also have Apps available for purchase (99 cents for most of them) for the iPad and iPhone. I have been looking for another free website for games similar to Starfall , for some time. I think I have found it. I can feel confident having Eli and Brynne play these games.

Cells ~ It's What's for Dinner

Dawson made edible cells on Friday. He made an animal cell pizza ... and a plant cell chocolate chip cookie ... He reviewed what he's learned about cells the past two weeks, and I had dinner made by someone else. Win, win!! I am linking up at Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.

America: The Story of Us ~ Episodes 8 "Boom" and 9 "Bust" Lesson Plans

Only two more units to go, and I will wrap them both up in this post. (Well there are actually five left, but I only completed lesson plans through the next two.) This was as far as we were able to get in the series this year. We were at the end of our school year and Dawson was ready to move on to his unit-of-choice: knights. The next two units in the America: The Story of Us series were Episode 8: Boom and Episode 9: Bust , or better known as The Roaring 20's and The Great Depression. We spent three weeks combined on these two units. Our book for both units was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had never read this book before and I thought it was an excellent portrayal of the good and bad of the 20's. The symbolism was astonishing and meaty, and I recommend having your student do an essay on the symbolism in the piece. I wish I would have done that with Dawson. We watched both Episodes 8 and 9, did the discussion questions/video quiz fo

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