Category: Homeschool Den

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An Interview with a Classical Christian Educator: Part 1

In this series, I have had the privilege of interviewing other homeschoolers from across the country.  This week I interviewed Brandy, the author of the inspiring and informative blog, Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood.  Brandy is a classical educator and her boys participate weekly in the educational program, Classical Conversations.  She will tell us much more about that in just a moment! Welcome Brandy!  First, could you tell us the age of...

The Space Shuttle Blasts by our House! 1

The Space Shuttle Blasts by our House!

We were outside this morning on the lookout for the Space Shuttle Discovery.  We were so excited to have it fly by at tree-line! Naturally we had to take a million pictures as it flew by! A little while later we went inside to watch the drama unfold on NASA TV as it landed at Dulles Airport! Pictures courtesy of  NASA TV. We talked a lot about the space shuttle...

What You Can Do to Celebrate Earth Day on April 22 – freebies and more 0

What You Can Do to Celebrate Earth Day on April 22 – freebies and more

The celebration of Earth Day began over 40 years ago. It is a day to celebrate our planet and think about how we can help our environment. Did you know that the Environmental Protection Agency was established not long after that first Earth Day in 1970? The Clean Air Act also passed that same year. Now Earth Day is celebrated in more than 175 countries by an estimated 500 million...

4

Black Plague Activity

Would you believe this is an activity that I created as an introduction to our physics unit on simple machines, gizmos and gadgets?!! Sometimes inspiration just hits! So here’s how it came to be.  I was doing some background reading on Sir Isaac Newton, the scientist who developed the Laws of Motion among other things. I learned that while he was at Cambridge University an outbreak of the Black Plague...

12

An Interview with a Montessori Homeschooler

In this series, I have had the privilege of interviewing other homeschoolers from across the country. Here to tell us how her family got started homeschooling and what her family’s homeschool style looks like is Tearri, the author of the blog, We Don’t Need No Education  and The Work Plan. Tearri homeschools her children and also runs a Montessori preschool. Welcome Tearri! First I’d like to ask you how old...

5

Geography Activities (UK and Europe)

We’ve been doing some background activities on Sir Isaac Newton since we’re starting a new unit on gizmos, gadgets and simple machines.  Newton was from England so we did some geography lessons about the UK, Britain and Europe in general.  We talked briefly about the difference between the United Kingdom, Britain and England. Then we brought a map over and the kids cut out their own map of Britain using...

Homemade Graham Crackers 4

Homemade Graham Crackers

To see how this relates to homeschooling, you’ll have to stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, but for today I’m just sharing a couple recipes our family enjoys. When we lived in Australia (Hubby and I lived there 12+ years. The kids were all born there. You can see more about our life in Australia in the “Where We Live” category. It should say ‘where we liveD’ now that we live...

1

Fossil Hunting

We love fossils!   I guess the fire was first lit in Australia.  My scientist friend told us about a creek south of Alice Springs where people have found lots of fossils. (See original post here: Fossils in Australia and the photos below.) We took the kids and made some great finds. Even my friend, Peter, was impressed!  LD was hooked on fossils!   Not too long after that we...

5

Our Week’s Roundup

This week was a bit out of the ordinary.  We did a skeleton version of school each day. The kids did Math Spelling (we use All About Spelling) Grammar (see yesterday’s post) Independent reading (for about an hour each day) I read a chapter each day from our book on Sir Isaac Newton We worked on our Fifty States song. We’ve been working on that slowly, slowly this entire year....

Language Arts 0

Language Arts

Sometimes this doesn’t make as interesting material for a blog post, but we do cover grammar and language arts in addition to All About Spelling (we love, love love this program and it deserves its own post sometime), writing (we often use the Teacher Filebox for this), and First Language Lessons.  For basic rules of grammar we use the Write Source Skillsbook as our core (more about that below). We...

8

An Interview with a Homeschooling Dad

In this series, I have had the privilege of interviewing other homeschoolers from across the country. Today I am talking to a homeschooling Dad. Here to tell us how his family got started homeschooling and what his family’s homeschool style looks like is Jason, the author of the blog, Homeschool Daddy. He’s been online at his personal blog bnpositive and many others for almost a decade. Welcome Jason, First I’d...

2

-it and -in words

ED is just now starting to work on simple cvc words.  The past week or so, she has been working on -it and -in words.  We printed out her own -it and -in books. There’s just one word per page like bit, fit, sit in the -it book or bin, fin, win in the -in book.  I sit together with ED as we look over a few pages (we do...

1

Whale Unit (and the Arctic) — Icebergs, Blubber experiment, Buoyancy and more

Whales are able to survive in the frigid waters of the Arctic. In this series of activities the kids and I explored how that is possible. First, not directly related to the whales themselves, we talked about icebergs. We took giant cottage cheese cartons and froze big blocks of ice.  One of those blocks had our wooly mammoth plastic creature. I had the kids guess how much of the ice...

Easter Montessori Math 3

Easter Themed Montessori Math (preK, K)

‘Bead’ Rabbits and Skip Counting by 10 Montessori math has kids working a lot with beads. But for this work, I made some Easter-themed manipulatives for ED to work with.   I made a set of Easter eggs for skip-counting by 10s. She also used some 100-square rabbits. I printed out a number of copies and cut them into strips of 10 and into single bunnies as well.  It’s just...