Category Archives: General

Dry Erase Boards – Homemade!

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I told my sister about the activity board we got from Ben’s vision caseworker and how I wished I had more – we do love it and use it a ton, but we have lots-o-kids and needed more. My oh-so-crafty sister made four of these for us and they are brilliant!! It’s mat board, plastic sheets, and velcro tabs. It gives the kids more stiffness than the sheet protectors alone so it’s like a lap desk, it can easily be lifted to have pages taken in/out (which was tricky for little kids with page protectors) and it allows us to use the workbook pages with multiple kids. The kids (and I) LOVE them a lot, I’m thankful for my crafty and thoughtful sister’s help. 🙂

Cam

Making Easter more Christ Centered – and Chocolate

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(Old post bumped!)

Ideas from the Ensign on how to focus on the sacred and less on the goodies. 🙂 Some great suggestions…

And here are pictures from our egg hunt with one of our homeschool groups. We had the hunt, tons of treats & lunch, and fun at the park. Kit found some cardboard boxes left by a hill and the kids tried out box sledding for the first time and loved it – they said it was the best part of the party.

We know Ben has light sensitivity issues but apparently so does Christopher:

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Emy’s first egg hunt, she realized there was candy involved and took off:

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Bennett also realized there was candy and was not amused by the 12 egg per child limit when there were clearly still eggs left on the ground for him to capture! 🙂

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And here are the second try on the homemade version of Cadbury Cream eggs and some homemade Reeses Peanut Butter type eggs. Both are DELICIOUS and I think homemade candy for baskets will be a new tradition:

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Bunny-Tangram.

Have the kids sew these adorable beanbag frogs.

Paper baskets. Make those with the kids’ art and fill with goodies to give away?

And hot cross buns and other goodies I miss that involve egg. 🙁

Skills Boot Camp

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Every once in awhile I realize the kids need some more practice with certain skills, a review, or some of the younger ones need a more in depth introduction. For the next week we’re putting the regular math & language lessons on hold (we’ll still do specials – art, music, history, science) and focus on some skills practice:

MATH
– calendar & time
– addition & subtraction facts (Mo & B)
– multiplication facts (C)

LIFE SKILLS
– memorizing full name of parents, address, phone number
– kid power review (we finished the book)
– chore practice/teaching (washing dishes, mopping, bed making)

LANGUAGE
– parts of speech definitions (Mo)
– memorize preposition list (C)
– spelling rules (C)
– handwriting (intro for B & E, cursive review for C & Mo.)

We’ll also do some spring cleaning of the sunroom to prepare for the warmer weather when it goes back to being our school room. (For now we’re using the living room since it’s 32 degrees and the sunroom is cold.) But we need a sunroom spring clean and purge.

Then the first week of February we’ll be starting fresh with our new six weeks chart which we’re starting Mo on… we’ll start B on it in the fall. I’m excited!

Saxon Problem – Lesson Learned

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C’s working on Saxon 54 Lesson 125 and I had him read through the lesson on reducing fractions but then he got the practice wrong and got frustrated. I read through it (shame on me for not reading it first!) and now I understand, the lesson doesn’t make sense. It attempts to teach a rule that doesn’t always work and only confuses the kids. I explained in a different way (can the denominator be divided by 2 or 3? Can the numerator be divided by the same number?) and it made much more sense to him and he finished up quickly.

Overall we do like how thorough Saxon is, even though we don’t expect the kids to do all the problems for every lesson (tons and tons of review, not needed if the kids understand the concept already) but I’ve learned I have to read through the lesson to make sure it’s clear and I like how they teach the concept. Otherwise it can cause confusion and some mistakes!

Circle Time Ideas

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– Welcome Song then any combination of the following:

Memorization work:
– Song Mo’s memorizing (primary)
– Scripture mastery from C
– Articles of Faith
– Poem

Mathematics:
– Date (days of the week, months of the year song)
– Counting by 1s, 2s, 3s, etc, forward & backwards.
– Finding shapes in room (shape scavenger hunt)
– What time is it?

Science:
– Weather (check forecast & temperature)
– What season is it?
– Planets song

Social Studies:
– Holidays this month
– States song
– Name continents and oceans
– Pick a postcard (from our penpal collection) and find on map

Show & Tell
Parent or older child read short story to younger kids

Fall Adaptations

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– Christopher was saying he hates math and that makes me sad because I knew I was leaving him to his own devices with lessons. We talked about it and realized he is having a hard time with the more intensive work, it’s a lot more at this stage (Saxon 54) and the problems are far more intricate. He’s such an extrovert, too, and he does best if he can talk through things so we tried something new. We read through the lesson together and he does the new practice problems aloud with me and then we alternate him doing the written work alone or doing it orally with me. After a week of letting him do the oral math version he said he just may love math now. 🙂 What a simple solution… and it allows me to immediately correct any errors and see how he’s working through the problems.

– I’m reading aloud the history to the kids (Story of the World) and the Lamb’s Shakespeare for kids once a week each. It’s forcing me to pay much closer attention to the story and characters as we have to review what we read the week prior. I’m learning a lot even if the kids are not!

– Christopher’s grammar is becoming far more intensive (and boring) as well so I’m making sure he has the concept down and can do a couple of the exercises and we call it good. It’s a lot of sentence diagramming right now and I’m bored personally with reviewing predicate adjectives vs. predicate nominative. Bleh.

– Both kids are working on the BBC typing lessons and Ben’s asking if he can, too. I realized they could probably pick that up pretty quickly and since I’m happy with their cursive skills I’m comfortable with them learning typing now. I know it won’t be do the detriment of their handwriting, which is quite nice if not a bit slow still. They are still so young, I know their little hands still tire quickly while writing and I don’t want that to slow down the spilling of their creative ideas. I’m also willing to have them dictate stories and reports to me and I’ll type or write it up for them – until they are 10 I don’t expect they will have the handwriting speed or typing skills to quickly capture their own ideas without it frustrating them and I don’t ever want that to stifle them expressing creativity. I’ll also let them do the reports on video if they want to do it orally. I love technology! I think it can be dangerous if used at the expense of the basics like handwriting, but I think it can facilitate creativity as well.

– More later!

Usborne Activity Cards

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My sister told me about the Usborne Activity Cards and we though those looked fun for our road trip to Kansas. We ended up not getting them in time and set them aside for our new baby gift bag (which also has some Scholastic storytime DVDs, various books, things to keep kids entertained while I nurse) and this are a huge, HUGE hit. HUGE hit, with everyone from the 2 year old (if I’m feeling brave enough to hand him a dry erase marker) up through the artistic 7 year old. I don’t think C has checked them out yet but I think he would still like them. There are 50 cards, laminated and double sided and each has an activity – an empty ice cream dish that says draw a sundae, a maze or puzzle, word searches, drawing prompts. It came with a dry erase marker that was dead on arrival but we had a colored package of dry erase markers from Grandma’s dollar store in Kansas so we were set already.

Seriously, the kids adore these. I told E she couldn’t play with the iPad today so she scaled the dresser and snatched her cards as the next best thing. There are enough cards to keep it new and to share and E needs help with reading the directions but that’s because she’s obsessed with reading – I think the cards are mostly self explanatory even for a pre-reader.

I’m thinking we’ll check out the other sets as well because these are such a hit and would be great for keeping little ones busy while doing lessons with the older kids. This is something that in theory you could make up a bunch of your own cards and laminate and do it yourself but I think for this many cards & this many creative ideas you couldn’t beat this for the time and price it would cost to try and make and laminate these yourself. More than worth the $10. Love them.