Monthly Archive: October 2011

Our General Homeschooling 4

Our General Homeschooling

I’ve been itching to do a posting about our general homeschool schedule/day. What things we cover aside from the units I so often post about. Reading: Both DD and LD are good readers now.  DD is reading easier chapter books while LD is on longer chapter books now. They both get up in the morning and read while eating breakfast. I always sprinkle our dining room room table with books...

2

Halloween Festivities

I organized the Halloween Party this year.  We had quite a lot of games and I think everyone had a great time. The youth organized a haunted room and another adult set up a spooky cake walk with black lights and so forth which was a huge, huge hit! The kids also loved the skeleton scavenger hunt where teams competed to find the various parts of the skeleton (we took...

Desert Unit (USA) 3

Desert Unit (USA)

This was a unit I thought would mostly be fore ED, but all the kids jumped excitedly into it!. My kids know very little about the American deserts of the southwest, though they could tell you heaps about the Australian desert (they were born in the Outback and we moved back to the US about a year and a half ago).  So we focused on features and animals of Texas,...

5

Human Body Eggsperiment: Protect That Brain!

Our last brain-related activity was to design a helmet that would protect our egg pilot in a fall. The shell, I told them, was his skull; the egg white and yolk was his brain. Then I left the kids to it! LD designed a balloon-encased egg protector.      DD designed a construction paper protective cloak: Mom designed a cotton ball-play dough helmet: I took the photo before covering it...

2

Human Body Unit: The Brain

We have been studying the brain in fits and spurts the last couple of weeks. For some reason, we’re only getting to it about twice a week. But here’s what we’ve done. We talked quite a bit about the functions of the brain (not the senses as we’ll do this later), but things like memory, thinking, sleep and thing like that. MEMORY: First we talked about the difference between long...

Math Games (DD, First Grade) 5

Math Games (DD, First Grade)

Sometimes DD and I just play games and don’t work in her textbooks.  I thought I’d share what she’s doing for the next few days or so for addition. She’s working on sums of 11 and 12. I printed out gameboards and partner worksheets from The School Bell, Kathy Gursky’s website. Before we started playing the game, though we went over the T-bar sums (0+11, 1+10, 2+9, etc.) We used...

6

Pumpkin Craft

The other day ED wanted to sit down and do another sewing craft.  Here’s the little jack-o-lantern she made. She did much of it on her own this time.

8

Pumpkin Muffins

We love these muffins so much that by the time I got around to taking a picture, there were only two muffins left!  These are pretty easy to make and my kids love them.  It’s the season for pumpkins, so it’s the perfect time to share this recipe. You need a very, very large mixing bowl. This recipe makes 24-30 muffins. 4 eggs 3 cups sugar 1/2 teaspoon baking powder...

Collection — Our Morning Circle Time 0

Collection — Our Morning Circle Time

 Our mornings have been really lovely this semester. I tried to change things up a bit and I’m really enjoying the flow of the day.  Usually ED and I are the first ones up.  Since the weather has cooled down and we still haven’t turned on the furnace, I have been lighting a fire in our wood stove in the homeschool room.  ED and I snuggle up and read while...

Our Monthly Family Meeting 6

Our Monthly Family Meeting

We started something new in our family this year.  We decided the kids were old enough for a monthly family meeting. Here are some of the things we do in our family meeting: We gathered and went around the circle and said one nice thing about somebody else at the table. We brainstormed on something fun to do together as a family after the family meeting.  We wrote down our...

Cinnamon Rolls 4

Cinnamon Rolls

These are wonderful! We make these at Christmas and Easter, but I made them a couple weekends ago after running my first half-marathon in many years. (I kept forgetting to post this, it’s been in my drafts for ages.) Ingredients: 1/4 cup water1/4 cup melted butter1/2 package instant vanilla pudding mix (1/4 cup)1 cup warm milk1 egg, room temperature1 tablespoon white sugar1/2 tsp salt4 cups flour (I used 3 cups...

Math Update (LD, 3rd grade and DD 1st grade) 0

Math Update (LD, 3rd grade and DD 1st grade)

Life’s been rolling along, but it’s been hard to find time to post. Partly because odd jobs have taken up my spare time — painting a hallway, cutting wood for the wood stove in our homeschool room, creating a new garden for some more blueberry plants, mountains of laundry and trying to clean and catch up with the house. It’s left little time for the computer. One thing I haven’t...

Long A Words — Worksheet 0

Long A Words — Worksheet

Long a Words — Spelling Practice SentencesWe have gone over the long a words such as a (able, acorn) ai (sail, maid) a–e (cake, mate) ay (day) eigh (weigh, neighbor)ea (steak, break) ey (they) aigh (straight). This sheet uses these long a words in a sentence. They should be able to figure out the word by context, but if not you can tell them the word to write. Click herefor...