Learning about the United Kingdom

For our last country unit this summer, we learned about the United Kingdom.

(United Kingdom = England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)

For our dinner, we had tea sandwiches and cookies, along with apple cider "tea", Brussels sprouts, and fish and chips

For our first craft, the kids made models of Stonehenge out of clay

For our next craft, we made royal guards from clothespins and pom poms

Gluing on the hats

Our finished guards

Edited to add: some pictures of the kids trying on some Scottish clothes we borrowed from Grammy!

Library books we read

We watched Mary Poppins for movie night

Whew! We made it through all 11 countries before school started.

Homestead Reunion 2014

This August, we had our bi-annual Johns Family reunion at the Homestead Resort.

Milkshakes at Granny's - a yummy tradition!

Checking out some of the new offerings from family history sites, like relative finder, and sharing family history photos and stories.

Heather brought some really fun  activities and crafts for the kids. They loved the beads!

Water cup race

Taking a picture with Granna

Dinner time

Marianne had found an old family home video of the first Homestead reunion from 28 years ago, and she had it transferred to a DVD and brought it up for us all to watch. It was great!

We went to the stories and songs around the campfire

The kids favorite activity - SWIMMING!

We decided that we needed to do an important experiment - go to Timp Freeze, and see how their shakes compared to Granny's. Mike and I both got the fresh peach shake, and WOAH, soooo good! Granny's has a bigger selection of shakes, but the shakes Timp Freeze has are really, really good, so....I don't know who wins. Haha!

Sam's volcano...ugh

Silly kids!

Carrie did an awesome job organizing the minute-to-win-it games! 

We took some group photos - Granna and her kids

The grandkids

Granna's great-grandkids!

We also took a big group photo with everyone in it with Beth's camera. It will be interesting to see how those turned out! It's a big group!

We had a room in the bunkhouse, and the kids loved the bunkbed. Their mind was blown when they figured out you could open the doors to connect to the next room over! Hopefully we didn't drive Ande and Rob too crazy...

We had a great time catching up with everyone and having fun!