Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Homeshool Update

I know there are only a few people who take a look at this blog, but I wanted to post anyway that I am not homeschooling this year. We made a family decision for the kids to go to school, so I could help my husband with his job. He is self-employed and needs some extra help to get the business going. So there you have it.
My goal is to bring the kids home next year, but that decision will be made in the summer of 2010 when we can re-evaluate our situation. I will keep this blog up until I decide. I hope you enjoy our projects and recipes.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

New Homeschool Findings

This new Homeschool Study is very interesting.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Story of the World come to and end.

After a long and fun journey we completed our last chapter of our history curriculum from Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. We just completed year 2-The Middle Ages. Wow, what a rough time in history. Boy we sure are glad that we did not live back then, with all the crazy kings and queens battling it out over religion and land, and the plague. Yuck. It was fun to study about all the new explorations in the new world.

As part of our last chapter we played the Buccaneer Game, that asked questions from the chapter and the reward was to build a "treasure" and at the end of the game the person with the most, won. Our treasure was m&m's! Yum! We had a lot of fun and the kids were very good at the questions.
The kids had so much fun collecting treasure that they asked to play the game twice. Food is such a motivator for learning.

This is a picture of Sir Francis Drake, a famous pirate and favorite of Queen Elizabeth. Isn't he dashing! What a swashbuckler!


Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Earth Day Fun

Instead of doing our regular routine for school we decided to celebrate Earth Day this year by doing a few fun projects to help us be a little "green" around our house. We decided to get started in the garden and get it tilled and planted with a few of the cold weather crops. The weather has been very nice here the past few days, but there is still a change of a frost in our area, so cold weather crops only. Daddy was good enough to till the ground for us the day before, so we were sure to be ready.
We planted cabbage, spinach, lettuce, carrots, radishes, beets and potatoes. The kids had such fun dropping seeds and tamping down the dirt. Logan was "freaked" out by the eyes on the potatoes, but I think he secretly liked them. Strange alien monsters, I guess!

The dog was our quality control manager. She was in charge of rows being straight, seeds spacing specialist and general boss. That looks about right for the position of the boss, laying down on the job while everyone else works. The next thing we did was shut off the power for our entire house for 1 hour. We thought we could do without any power for 1 hour, and enjoyed the quiet of the house without appliances buzzing, furnace humming, and well pump running. So during that hour we talked about things people did before electricity. Carrying water, cooking over a wood stove, going potty outside in an outhouse, etc. We also tried our hand at tying knots, and making a cornhusk doll.

I found this kit when we went to Roanoke Island in North Carolina a few years ago on vacation. We also happened to study about the Lost Colony in history this week.

It was fun to do these things, and it made the hour breeze by. Maybe we will turn off the power once a month, until we can install solar panels or a wind generator, it may have to do.

Our final activity of the day was making our very own compost bin. I found the idea on Kaboose. Check out the instructions and make one for your own family. It was very simple and I happened to have all the supplies on hand.

We then sat in the garage and fed Landon strawberries and talked about composting. What it is, and what can and cannot go into our compost bin.

I think the kids will get excited when they see the "rotten" fruits of their labors. Happy Earth Day!


Friday, April 10, 2009

So much Candy Fun!


In history this past week we studied about the life of William Shakespeare and his wonderful and timeless writings.
For our activity we read the scene from Macbeth where the weird women make their Eye of Newt Soup. "Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." But instead of lizards legs (very hard to come by this time of year) and baboons blood (don't think the zoo would give me any of that),

We used edible ingredients instead of real ones. I dug out some old baby food jars that I have been saving, for who knows what, but they came in very handy for our purposes. I printed out labels with a creepy font and we set to work.

As I read the story, in my best witches voice, the kids added ingredients to their concoction and created their brew.

Addison had to really get into the part and put on her best witches costume from her dress up. She even wanted me to get the Halloween costumes down from the attic. That was a bit much for me and was the bad guy and said no.

Logan didn't care about his clothes, his "Cars" sweatshirt was good enough for him. He was more interested in eating all the treats from the brew.

Here is the list of ingredients (courtesy of Story of the World Activity Book):

Fingers: tootsie rolls

Eye of Newt: chocolate chips

Tongue of Dog: red licorice

Lizard's leg: pretzel sticks

Owlet's wing: mini marshmallows

Sale of Dragon: smarties

Tooth of Wolf: candy corn

Gall of Goat: raisins

Baboon's blood: Grape juice, cranberry juice, red Kool-Aid or red colored water

Have fun bubbling up your own brew!

Monday, March 16, 2009

St Patrick's Day Craft



I got a really fun craft idea from Keep'n the Sunny Side for a very cute St. Patricks Day garland. We made:

Salt Dough
2c. flour
1 c. salt
1 c. water
Mix into a dough and form into shapes, or roll out and use cookies cutters. insert wire hangers prior to baking. Bake 375 for 45 minutes. Cool completely and decorate as you would like.
The kids had so much fun making these "cookies" as they called them. They kept want to eat them because they look very much like Sugar Cookies. I told them to go ahead and have a chomp, but neither of them took the bait.



After painting them we tied them to a white ribbon, wrote St. Patricks Day on them with a silver pen and hung them from the entertainment center. It was fun, easy and cute, that is my kind of craft. Stay tuned for our Easter themed salt dough creations.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Making the world a tiny bit better

For science we have been studying Ecology from our Modern Woodmen curriculum. We have been having a lot of fun learning about the earth around us and what we can do to make it a better place.

So for today we learned talked about how we can make a difference in our part of the world. With Earth Day coming up on April 22 we thought we would get a head start on making this better. We decided to collect all the trash along our little road.



Here is Daddy and Logan helping each other out. It worked out well that Daddy was home so he could help us. He was such a great helper.



Our road is only about a 1/2 mile long, so I thought it would take no time at all. Boy was I wrong, we only got to about 3/4 of our road and had 7 bags of garbage. We could not believe how much trash we found.

We had a lot of fun together as a family and felt good about the work that we had done. Our road looks very beautiful now.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Dr. Seuss's Birthday!



In the grand tradition of the greatest silly rhyming genius we celebrated Dr. Seuss Birthday for school today. His birthday was on Monday, but mommy was to busy dealing with bamboozles in the closet to look at the calender. So, we celebrated before to kids took off to Grandma's house for the weekend.

Logan read The Foot Book and Go Dogs Go! He was an excellent Dr. Seuss reader! I am amazed at the confidence he has when reading. No word is to big for him to try and sound out! Great job buddy!

Addison read the entire book of Green Eggs and Ham and did a wonderful job. She had really struggled with reading the past couple years, but in the past month and really excelled. She now says that she is a good reader! And, she is!

Landon participated by taking a really good nap so we could get all of our activities finished. What a great little Whoo he is. He really loved Logan's Cat in the Hat Hat. He loved it so much he wanted to rip it off his head and tear it to pieces. Little Brother!?!

We had so much fun making hats, place mats, dot to dots, and word searches. We finished off the day by listening to Fox In Sox. Thank goodness we have it on cd read by someone else. I think my tongue would not make it through that book without a lot of errors.
If you are looking for some fun Dr. Seuss sites check Seussville.com for fun games and activities.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Stick Bug Science


In this science lesson we learned about camouflage and how animals use it for protection. With our Modern Woodmen Ecology curriculum, we got out our log books and set to work. The kids had to pretend that they were birds. They had to think like birds, act like birds and look for food like birds. That meant no talking, because they were not suppose to be parrots, therefore they could not talk. This was a bit challenging, because they wanted to shout out when they had found one. Logan even decided to be a relocating bird and move a few bugs around.

I am sure we will be finding stick bugs (pipe cleaners) this spring when we are weeding. They had lots of fun hunting for the different colors of stick bugs. They determined that the black and green ones were the hardest to find.
Therefore black and green bugs must have some of the best camouflaging techniques in the buggy world. Happy bug hunting!

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Making Gloop


Last year at the Homeschool convention I bought about half of the Usborne booth and this is one of the little gems I found. A box of easy and fun science projects to do at home. They are so much fun and they usually use ordinary household items.

We decided to make some Gloop. The instructions are easy:
2 cups cornstarch
1 cup water
4 drops food coloring
Mix ingredients together and have lots of fun.


Addison had to have pink, pink, pink of course. It was fun feeling how the cornstarch could feel gooey, and if you lifted it up it would run off your fingers like water.

And Logan just had a blast making a giant mess. He played with it for a really long time. Only boys!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The fall of Constantinople!


Today we learned about the fall of the great city of Constantinople in History today. The kids had fun learning about this great city and the many times it had been attacked. Mehemed, the Turkish sultan, was determined to see it fall, and fall it did. He even had his men drag his ships over land to attack the city on the north side that was so well protected, and used the largest cannons ever seen at that time. So in of this great cities fall we made a cannon out of toilet paper rolls, paper clips and rubber bands. It may not knock down a city wall, but I am sure it could knock out an eye!

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Back to School!


After a month off for Christmas/Snow break we are back in business with our normal school routine. It feels good to be back into a routine, even though the kids would probably not agree with me.
We started learning about ancient China this week. We studied about Genghis Khan and his rein of terror, followed by his Grandson Kublai Khan. Not so nice men. For our project we created Chinese Lanterns out of paper, yarn and the kids art work. We even wrote some Chinese characters on the lanterns. We also read a book about the Great China Wall. We all decided that was some place we would all like to travel to for a home school vacation.