Friday, November 21, 2014

Read-a-thon

Anna at her read-a-thon
Anna has had a really hard time reading. She hasn't been reading on to grade level. It has been a very challenging and frustrating activity for her, to the point she refuses to do it or puts up a huge fight.

Amazingly though, she is very impressive with her ability to comprehend what is going on in the stories, even though she isn't reading the words correctly.

She has been diagnosed with ADHD, no surprise, and we have started her on medicine. It is amazing! Everything clicks for her now and she is reading with barely any mistakes and actually enjoys it. She will be able to do the work that her smart brain is capable of.

Here she is, in her classroom, at school, set up for 3 hours of reading, and I know she will be able to do it.

So, so proud of her!

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Halloween


BOO! 
(Maddie's favorite thing to say right now)

Carving the pumpkins

Anna

Maddie

Frankie Stein (Gracie), Purple Witch (Anna), Pink Witch (Maddie)

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Bath, London

Trying to catch the blog up with our life. Not doing a good job, so I am trying to at least wrap up our England trip. The last city we went to was Bath, England. People love Bath. I thought it was nice, it was definitely cold, just the very tall rows of stone building were a bit overbearing for me personally, but that is just me. We visited the Roman Bath, which was pretty cool, Joe really liked seeing it and how it was built.
Look at the pretty green water, at least it has healing powers.

Joe at the Bath, don't fall in!

Tasting the Bath water....

Not very good, eh?

The city and of course a cathedral.
 During our time in Bath we went on an all day trip with Mad Max tours to Stonehenge, the Cotswolds, Lacock, and Avebury, it was really cool, probably one of the best days of the trip.
Stonehenge


More sheep

Avebury

At the Avebury Stones

At Lacock Abbey - they filmed Harry Potter

The town of Lacock

Cute bakery in Lacock
 In the Cotswolds we went to the village of Castle Combe. It was so pretty, next visit I would love to see more villages.

And Castle Combe presents this charming scene,
of hill, woods and meadows cloth'd in green.
Here grand terrestrial scenes, almost celestial nice,
makes Castle Combe, sweet vale, an earthy Paradise.
                                                                   Edward Dowling (19th Century)
Graveyard in Castle Combe at St. Andrews Church

A tomb of a Knight that was part of the crusades.

Love the chair over the sign

Look how short the doors are!

Looking down the street of the village

 Some more pretty houses.

That pretty much wraps up our England trip. It was so much fun, I loved it over there and hope we get to go back!