We watched a video one day of a man collecting dead leaves, twigs, flowers, and other things and building insects out of them, so Mr. Imagination decided to try his hand at it. This was his creation. He sure has an artistic bent!

The cats continue to amuse us. This box with old newspapers in it was Princess’s favorite bed for awhile, so her offspring decided it was THE PLACE to be, as well. One day, we found Grizzly and Goofball sleeping in it like this, cuddled together; apparently, Goofball had been asleep there and Grizzly decided she wanted it, too.

A few days later, we found this pose. It must have been too much work to find a way to get her whole body in!

Mr. Imagination, with some help from his brothers (maybe more than “some”!) built this boat. It works well, although Mr. Diligence was able to sink it by putting too much weight in, much to his satisfaction.

A friend sent Little Miss a card, just because. The card had a hole cut out of the front, so Little Miss made Goofball look through it.

The latest design for a boat—cut up barrels and weld them together for a double-hulled canoe. It’s still waiting for more time to finish it, though.

Poppy, a week or so before she calved.

I was walking home from checking on Poppy before she calved, on the road that goes east from our town, looking at the mountains to the west of us. It was so pretty, with range after range going off into the distance. Since I was looking into the sun, the picture turned out dark, but in real life it was quite light.

Little Miss loves books. If you say something to her, though, about reading them, she’s quick to respond that she can’t read.

Our new baby! This is Pansy, a purebred Jersey heifer. She’s full of personality, and very smart. Also, very stubborn. So cute and full of life, though!

We visited some friends in Canterbury last weekend, and the boys set an eel trap. They didn’t catch anything, though.

A friend invited our boys to go fishing with him one Saturday, so Gayle went with all the children to Greymouth. The friend had this kontiki, which takes a longline out a kilometer or two from shore, and has a section with a number of hooks on it. They ended up catching one kowai and a shark that got tangled in the line as they were reeling it in.

When they opened up the shark, they found a number of babies inside! They put the babies in the water, and they swam away.

One evening I noticed the most beautiful sunset over the mountains to the west! The colors were much more vivid than my camera was able to capture.

We took another trip to Pancake Rocks with some more friends who came to visit. This time, it was cloudy and misty, but there was a lot of water coming up out of the blowholes!

Simon had a week off work, so he spent some time on his canoe. Here are the first two strips in place!

The boys spent one afternoon digging up weed plants from the paddocks across the road. I was amused to see Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Imagination coming home this way!

Little Miss loves to listen to her grandma read to her. Grandma recorded herself reading a number of picture books, and Little Miss frequently wants to listen to the whole stack of books.

Mr. Imagination likes to listen, too! Once the others were finished with school, I let them listen without earphones.

Mr. Imagination found an old pingpong paddle, and made it into a paddle for a canoe! I noticed the blade laying around the other day, though.

I went out to our garden with my camera one evening a few weeks ago, and saw the clouds rolling in over the mountains to the west.

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss dressed their toy monkey up with gloves and shoes, and then wanted a picture. I let Mr. Imagination take the picture—it took about a dozen tries.

One of the things my boys most love to do in this area is exploring caves. Back when there was a lot of gold mining happening, a lot of tunnels were dug through hills. Many of these tunnels were dug for a place to wash away the dirt after it had been sifted through, as the men looked for gold. Exploring these tunnels can be rather dangerous, but that’s probably part of the appeal to the boys. Their daddy does always go with them, and as you’ll see in some of these photos from a recent expedition, they are using ladders and ropes and trying to stay safe.

They started out by driving Simon’s Suzuki as far as they could up a rough track. Once they got to where it would have gotten stuck, they walked the rest of the way to some tunnels they had spotted nearly a year ago and wanted to explore more. (By the way, we ladies stayed at home where it was safe and dry!)

They got a lot of practice with rock-climbing—something my fellows love to do!

Here, Simon is going from one cave to another, over a deep ravine. There was an old, squared-off log for a bridge; as you can see, he had a rope tied around himself and secured to a tree.

Here is Mr. Intellectual doing the same thing.

And here is Mr. Sweetie, rappelling down a cliff into a trench that the government financed in the early 1900s to bring water from a lake to wash gold out of the soil (that scheme didn’t work).

Here is the account Mr. Diligence wrote of this adventure in a letter to a relative: Yesterday we went cave exploring up in the hills. [A friend] took us up there the second time we came to visit them. We took the Suzuki because it was a 4-wheel drive and you need a 4-wheel drive to get up there. The first time, we had found a cave and had gone through it. At the other end of the cave was a deep ravine with a river flowing through it. It was about 50 meters deep. There was a square log laid across the ravine to act as a bridge and on the other side was another cave with a bunch of wood inside it. The bridge was covered in moss. Ever since then, we have been talking about getting back in there and how we would get across the ravine. Yesterday afternoon was a beautiful sunny day and we  had time. We went back in there and got there by 3:30. Then we climbed a 4-meter high cliff, using the ladder to help. We pulled up the ladder and walked through the cave to one end of the bridge. Simon lowered the ladder down onto one end of the bridge. The bridge shook a little but didn’t give way. Then we tied a rope to the ladder so that if the bridge gave way it wouldn’t fall down. Then we tied the rope to a tree and back to Simon. Simon carefully climbed down the ladder and onto the bridge. It held so he took another step. A few more steps and he was in the mouth of the cave. Since the cave was covered with bushes over the front, he used his machete to chop them away. Within half an hour, we had got all of us across safely and we were exploring. [Mr. Sweetie] found an old pair of shoes with metal soles that looked like they used to have spikes coming out of them. The leather was rotten. We found another cave crossing that one and followed it. It just went out to the ravine again. There was a small shelf that looked like it might have been a walkway going along the ravine. It was two feet wide. I started walking on it and after 10 yards it narrowed down to 1 foot and then it was too narrow to walk on. I looked down across the ravine and saw a square post about 2 inches by 6 inches leaning against the other wall of the ravine. It appeared to have ropes and cables hanging off of it and maybe a tow rope as well. We wanted to go check it out so we went back across the ravine and we got back to the Suzuki. We left the ladder at the car and went down to the river. We waded upstream until we found the climbing apparatus or whatever it was. We climbed up and looked at it and we don’t know what it was. Then we climbed back down and headed home. Thankfully, none of us got hurt and we didn’t get stuck going out again.

Have you ever thought it would be interesting to learn some Latin? We really haven’t done much of anything towards learning a second language; we dabbled a bit in Spanish and German, but with two boys who struggled majorly with just English, other languages haven’t been a priority. However, when Roman Roads Media asked for reviewers for their Picta Dicta online courses, Mr. Intellectual expressed interest in it. We were given a subscription to Picta Dicta Natural World, and I have been using it a little myself, too.

When I set up an account, when we were first given access to Picta Dicta, I added myself as a student as well as being the administrator, and then signed up Mr. Intellectual with our other license. As part of creating the accounts, we had to choose which level to use. There are six levels to choose from: Basic, English, Reader I, Reader II, Express, and Teacher. Basic and English both focus on English words, and everything is read to the child. Reader I and Reader II introduce the Latin words for the same words that are introduced in the first two; I’m not sure what the difference is between them. Teacher appears to only have the introductory pictures for each word, without any activities. It is very easy to switch from one level to another by simply logging in to the administrator account and editing the student’s settings.

Both Mr. Intellectual and I chose to use the Express level. It teaches everything that is in the other levels, but faster. Words are introduced, with a story about each word to help you remember it.

After you have been introduced to about six words, you are given one of the words.

On the next screen there are pictures and a phrase about six words, some that you have learned and a few others that you will learn soon, and you have to choose the correct one.

After going through all of them, you are introduced to a few more words, until you have learned all the words for that topic. For example, in the first topic, Basic Animals, you learn the Latin words for cow, horse, donkey, goat, sheep, cat, dog, lamb, kid, boar, stag, bull, bear, and wolf. You get to match the spoken/written word to the picture, then the picture to the written word, and finally, learn to spell the words. If you make a mistake, you are given more chances with the same word until you get it right. The program is totally self-paced.

So what do we think about this program? I find it fun! Quite often, when I’m working on it, one or another of the littler ones (ages 8, 6, and 3) come along and help me out. They occasionally get something right that I was going to get wrong! It’s a game, where you try to match the right words and pictures. The spelling parts are more difficult, but otherwise it’s pretty easy. There is a small incentive built in, as you can see from my account, here. You get stars for completed lessons, based on how many questions you answered correctly. A perfect score earns you five stars—looks like I should redo a few!

It’s good to have at least a little grasp of Latin, as so many English words come from languages that came from Latin. Mr. Intellectual mentioned the other day after he worked on Picta Dicta that he had learned the Latin word for head, which was caput. He figured out that must be where capital comes from, as in the head city of a region. He was pretty excited about that. So, if you are needing to know Latin, or have someone who enjoys words, this program would be a great introduction. By going through it, you will not only learn many words having to do with animals, but also fruits and vegetables, anatomy, land forms and terrain, parts of trees and plants, water…and that’s just the first few topics! Over 400 nouns are taught in this program. I appreciate learning how to properly pronounce these words; when you read a lot but don’t hear words, it’s hard to know how to say them. Oh, one more thing I noticed: A number of words were very similar to the Spanish words for the same animal. Learning Latin might be a good base for going on with another of the Romance languages, such as French, Spanish or Italian.

Please click on the image below if you want to learn more about this course; some of the other reviewers have given a lot more detail!

When some friends came for a weekend in July, we took them to Pancake Rocks. After enjoying the beautiful sunny day there, we went up the coast a few minute’s drive and walked the Truman Track down to the sea. This is a short track that winds through a lush rainforest with palms and tree ferns everywhere before it opens out onto the shore. The boys enjoyed climbing rocks and poking into caves, and the little ones played in the water.

The wet rocks were very slick!

We had a little bonus when we noticed spray coming up from invisible holes near the edge of these rocks as the waves came in!

There were fossils everywhere we looked in the rocks! It was quite interesting to see how many different kinds we could find.

We also found a lot of living shellfish.

One evening the boys were trying to stand on their heads. Mr. Diligence did the best.

Esther crocheted this bear for Little Miss. She named it Strawberry. Strawberry often sleeps with her.

We took some visitors to see the old gold dredge down near the river.

We also walked on the floodwall along the Grey River in Greymouth.

Simon had to prove that he can still get Mr. Diligence down!

Little Miss loves to draw people. I don’t think I’ve ever had a 3-year-old who drew and colored as much as this one does.

Who likes grammar? I didn’t when I was in school! It’s still not my favorite subject, by any means, but at least I’m starting to understand it better now. However, trying to teach my boys the parts of speech? Difficult to say the least! So, when GrammarPlanet was offered for review, I tentatively asked for it even though it wasn’t developed enough yet to even be able to find out how it worked. I almost hoped we wouldn’t get chosen for this review team, but we were, so Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence have been using it, and so have I, as I try to stay a lesson or two ahead of them.

Every lesson has a video, in which the part of speech taught in this lesson is introduced. These videos are crucial; if you don’t watch them, you will not understand what you need to.

There are also printable notes for each lesson. These are very important, as well; we often refer to them while working through the lesson. After watching the video, the student moves on to the practice sentences. At a minimum you will have ten sentences; each time you make a mistake the program will automatically add one more sentence for you. If you make five errors, you will be locked out of the program until your teacher unlocks it—that gives the teacher (me, in our case!) a chance to see what is going on. I have ended up sitting beside Mr. Diligence each time he works with this, because he takes more time and is more careful with supervision. I can help him figure out what he’s getting wrong that way. The set of sentences in each lesson tells a more or less interesting story. One story was about the steepest residential street in the world, which is in Dunedin—a friend of ours had told our boys about this street (he worked on a house on it once), so they could really relate to it while doing the lesson! Each sentence is to be parsed—you are to identify the part of speech of each word. For the first lesson, you only have to identify common nouns; the second lesson adds proper nouns. The third lesson introduces adjectives and articles, and then pronouns are introduced in Lesson 4. After that it gets more complicated, as possessive pronouns and the prepositions are introduced. Lesson 6 begins requiring students to diagram sentences—and there are answer keys for each one!

And here is an answer key for a random sentence:

When we started using GrammarPlanet, I told my boys that they had to use it until I wrote the review, and then they could quit. Well, as we worked through it and the bugs were worked out of this brand-new program, I saw how well it was working, and last week I informed them that I had changed my mind. I want them to continue using it. The recommendation is to only spend 10-15 minutes per day with this program, to give it time to really soak into a student’s mind, so we’re going to do that. It meshes quite well with the grammar Mr. Diligent is already doing, and reinforces it. I’ve ended up glad to have been put on the team!

I have never used or even looked at Analytical Grammar, but I’m told that GrammarPlanet is set up the same way, only online. It is free for anyone to use; if you want an ad-free version there is a one-time fee to remove the ads. When you set up an account, your student’s progress will be saved, and you can look back at their history any time. (This is very helpful sometimes, when you need to figure out why a word is marked as it is!)