Monthly Archive: May 2011

Capitalization Rules and Practice Sheet (free) 0

Capitalization Rules and Practice Sheet (free)

The main focus of our language arts is always reading — both independently and aloud together. I really feel there’s no better way to increase your vocabulary, learn about the eloquence of language. We talk about what we read, we memorize poetry and all that.  But since we have some standardized testing coming up, we’re doing some more formal language arts review (thus all the worksheets).  A quick, straightforward sheet...

Flower and Butterfly Themed Addition Cards 1

Flower and Butterfly Themed Addition Cards

I made some addition cards for DD this afternoon. We needed some new, more challenging addition cards to use with our ‘Fast Track’ board game.  DD wanted flowers and butterfly cards, so I thought I’d give it a go.  She declared that these were “beauuuuu – ti – ful.”   Hope someone else can use them. Click here to view and print out the addition cards. If you want to print out...

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World Music Class: Games and Music of Mexico and South America

Since my kids are learning a bit about the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas we decided to jump to South America with our world music class.  We are enjoying music, geography and games from Mexico and South America. Here’s what we’re covered with our friends the past couple of weeks: *We all sing hello and each child chooses a movement for the rest of the group to follow. *I pull out...

Looking Back at Our Activities and Units 2

Looking Back at Our Activities and Units

I’ve been trying to pull out a few photos which highlight some of our activities this year (and in general). You’ll notice them in the sidebar to the right.  If you’re interested in seeing more you can click on the photo and that will bring up posts from that particular unit.

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Looking Back — A Year Ago This Week we Left the Outback

A year ago this week, we said goodbye to the outback. It was bittersweet for us. We were ready to come to the US and live nearer to our family, but we loved our twelve years over in Central Australia. The kids were all born there. In no particular order — here are some photos from the Outback (animals and other stuff). For many, many more — click on the...

Punctuation Practice 2

Punctuation Practice

LD has been reviewing his punctuation and capitalization rules this past week or so.  Here’s a new sheet he did about our family holiday a year or so ago (or go to my downloads page).  The playground we went to was amazing!! The kids still talk about this playground. You probably won’t care that much about LD’s worksheet, but I bet some will be amazed by this public playground!  I’ll...

My Special Day 2

My Special Day

Today’s my birthday, so this post is about… well me! I am so happy! Not that I wasn’t happy in Australia, but I was ready for a change and boy is life wonderful here! I’ve managed to find a musical outlet here (I played the oboe in a wind ensemble for 10 years in Australia).  Here I’m singing in my church choir and have had the opportunity to play the...

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I Don’t Know Whether to Be Grossed Our or Proud

LD pulled out his microscope this week and has been using all the science slides and rushing outside to bring things to look at. “MOM!!” he shouted at one point. “You’ve gotta check this out.” “Wow.  What is it honey?” “My booger.  I never knew it would look like this.” “Umm… yeah. Neat.” Glad to know he’s so inquisitive, but yucko.  (I made HIM wash the slide and slip cover!)...

Designing Your Homeschooling Curriculum — Balancing it All 8

Designing Your Homeschooling Curriculum — Balancing it All

I’ve been having a thoughtful discussion with a blogging friend of mine. We’ve been talking about the reality of homeschooling… how it really works with a three year old in tow, what curriculum we use and things like that.  I would love, love, love to hear your comments about how your day goes — and how you arrive at your homeschool curriculum decisions!Here’s part of my email letter to my...

Language Worksheets 6

Language Worksheets

 I’ve made a few worksheets to go with our language and spelling lessons, but only just started writing them on google docs. I’ll post them in my Free Downloads area  if anyone is ever interested. They’re plain old worksheets, but this seems to work really well for my son to help review language rules with an absolute minimum of writing (which we do in other areas of our homeschool day)....

Reading (DD, 5 yr old) 8

Reading (DD, 5 yr old)

Here’s the reading update on DD, age 5 1/2. The past couple of months, DD has been doing lots of independent reading. We came to the end of her phonics program (we used Bob Books and then the Primary Phonics storybooks, sets 1-6) and it was time to set her free with the books we have on hand. I did this with LD as well and I can’t recommend independent...

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Garden Science: Studying Plants

We continue to love the activities in the Junior Master Gardener Curriculum. I love that all three of the kids can be fully involved in these activities!  This week we continued to look at monocot and dicots, studied plant roots and looked at the age of trees. In our first activity the kids gathered flowers from our yard.  Then they had to determine whether the plants were monocots or dicots...

Busy Week 0

Busy Week

We had a really busy week this week. Among other things we went to a museum with friends.  The kids absolutely loved the hands-on portion. Since the kids had their gymnastics as well that day, they practically fell into bed that night!      

Math Game Board 1

Math Card Games and Gameboards (for my 5 year old)

A pack of Crazy Eight cards from the dollar store comes in handy for doing math fact games. Addition Facts Game: Each player started with five cards. There’s a discard pile and a draw pile. Each player takes a turn drawing or picking up a card from the discard pile. The first time we played, we used the numbers 0 through 6 and set the other numbers aside. We had...