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What We’re Using to Teach DD (age 4 1/2) to Read 1

What We’re Using to Teach DD (age 4 1/2) to Read

Animal Antics: If you’ve read our blog for a while, you know that DD knewall her letter sounds at age 3 and started putting wordstogether just a bit before she was 4. She wasn’t yet readyto read, though, so we did lots of games and she would readone word on a page or one word at at time in games and such. She’s now had the patience and interest to...

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Learning to Read: Readers We Use (continued)

This is a continuation of the post: What We’re Using to Teach DD (age 4 1/2) to Read where I explained that DD is using Animal Antics (affiliate link) Starfall Books and other readers to learn to read. Primary Phonics by EPS: This fall, DD will also work on the first two sets (20 books) of Primary Phonics Readers by EPS (affiliate link) . All I have are the storybook...

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Jesse Gap

One of the few things we did out-and-about last week was to go to Jesse Gap with friends. The older kids had a lot of fun climbing up the rocks. There was a “cave” up behind the trees and the boys spent a long time exploring while the younger ones hid plastic Easter eggs in the grass. (Yes, we kept a hawk’s-eye out for snakes!) Meanwhile, on the home front...

Todd River Starts to Flow 0

Todd River Starts to Flow

It has been raining quite a bit the past few days.  The other day, a friend of a friend  stopped at the Todd River bed, which is normally dry.  He happened to catch the river just as it started to flow! The kids and I drove by around 11am (a half hour after this was shot) and the river was full from bank to bank and quite deep!  Amazing!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPhK4TO1tto

Free Life Science Curriculum (early elementary) 2

Free Life Science Curriculum (early elementary)

I just learned about a science website called The Lab of Mr. Q. Wow! What a find!  This 8th grade science teacher created a science curriculum for the young elementary ages.  He offers the Life Science student and parent texts for FREE!  His Life Science curriculum includes these units: 1) Basic Needs 2) Biomes 3) Life Cycles 4) Classification 5) Food Webs 6) Senses 7) Body Organs 8) Cells 9)...

Easter Logic Puzzle and Bunny Hundreds Place Value Grid 2

Easter Logic Puzzle and Bunny Hundreds Place Value Grid

It’s probably too late to be of use to anyone else, but I stillthought I’d share these puzzles that I made for my kids(4 and 6). If you look at the left sheet above, you see there are twogrids. After looking at the two puzzles, the kids have toplace all 9 pieces on the blank grid to make ONE puzzle. I also made an answer key (for each of the...

Simpsons Gap 0

Getting Ready to Say Goodbye: Beautiful Simpson’s Gap Photos

Our time has been taken up more and more by our move away from central Australia. We are both excited to move on and sad to leave this beautiful area. We’ve been here 12+ years and have amazing friends and memories. It has been overwhelming the number of things we need to do to be ready to pack up and leave, so expect fewer and fewer posts. Just another 6...

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Huntsman Spiders

The other day as I pulled away from the house, a huntsman spider crawled up over my shoulder… luckily it was on the OTHER side of the glass, but it really startled me. Let me tell you, when you see that 3 1/2 inch (8 cm) spider out of the corner of your eye, you flinch! This huntsman was hanging out on our garbage can today. Perhaps it’s the same...

Science Center Monday: Rocks and Minerals 0

Science Center Monday: Rocks and Minerals

Over the weekend, LD pulled out his rocks and minerals kits that he got from Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas. I also had a rocks and minerals chart from Oriental Trading to add to the center (that he hadn’t seen before). We spent more than two hours learning about rocks today! I’ll share a bit more of what we did in the next post. After the experiments, the kids spent...

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The Three Types of Rocks

The first thing we did together was to sing the “Rock Song.” It was to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and talked about how sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks are formed. Then he put the cards in the rocks and minerals chart. He really loved that and thought the chart/cards were “cool.” Don’t miss our FREE Rocks and Minerals Packet . We also have a Free Worksheet...