Home Ghoul

I owe this blog a birth story(!), an updated cookbook and about 9 months of catchup posts… but instead I wrote up something simple and fun we did yesterday.

I surprised my kids with these papers slipped in the fronts of their binders when they came to the table for memory work:

I drew their attention to the Home Ghoul Agenda posted on the fridge and I thought Caitlyn’s head would fly right off her shoulders. She was that surprised and delighted. (This may have something to do with the rarity of this kind of event at our house. 🙂 )

Here’s what we did:

Breakfast was Pumpkin Oatmeal, with a generous handful of chopped dates thrown in. Yum.

– Memory Memory Work – Instead of reciting places of pi or the planets in the solar system, we took a trip down memory lane by looking at Halloween and pumpkin patch photos from past years and I told them some fun family stories. Awww.

2008

– Shakes-fear – I cajoled Scott, who is excellent at voices, into being a guest reader for the Shakespeare passages they’re memorizing. I played spooky music from YouTube on my computer to add to the ambiance. The girls were mesmerized.

– Mysterious Math – I printed out some themed math worksheets from this website. They weren’t anything fancy but when I worked them with the kids I pretended to be afraid of the spiders and bats on the page. They ate it up. I’m constantly amazed by how infectious my enthusiasm is in our homeschool. (Also, keeping a commitment I made to Mackenzie years ago… these worksheets were strictly optional since they definitely fell under the category of Busy Work!)

– Squash Size Smackdown – I took the idea from this post, which actually inspired the whole themed day. We made an official results table and brainstormed ways to measure pumpkins.

Measuring by displacement was definitely the biggest hit:

– Scary Stories – Over lunch, I read a Halloween book we own that I keep hidden until this time of year. Then we watched this great book read-aloud on YouTube, which was so fun.

Oh, and on the spur of the moment, this was lunch:

Hasty hummus jack-o-lanterns and an apple spider are far from pinterest worthy but they sure dazzled my kids.

Scott got into the spirit as well and made Halloween Teeth from apples, peanut butter, and mini marshmallows.

– Spooky Sounds – Instead of our regular piano practice times, Mackenzie and I teamed up and played some Halloween songs. Caitlyn sang along. 🙂

– Halloween Hullabaloo – I had a simple word game to play at dinner but the kids were stir crazy so first I threw in a freeze dance game to spooky Halloween music… after that, the word game was a big hit. I had printed out the word Halloween and every person tried to make as many words from the letters as they could. I was so impressed by my kids! They came up with things like “whale” “halo” “wane” etc. Scott, of course, filled a whole page with words. Games like that are right up his alley. It was fun to see the girls got a few words he hadn’t. Instead of totaling individual scores we made a combined family list.

This wasn’t on the agenda but was the perfect end to the day: We lit candles and Scott read “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe to us as we finished dinner. I memorized it in jr. high and still remember a good bit of it so it was especially fun to hear. This one will be a tradition for sure…

I’m no great fan of Halloween and I’m dreading the mandatory pumpkin carving and painting tomorrow but we really had fun mixing things up for school together.