Monthly Archive: November 2011

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PreK Dinosaurs Activities

Two weeks ago, I read The Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark  (affiliate link) to ED.  This inspired a short themed unit on dinosaurs. Here are a few of the things we did, plus other dinosaur books and dinosaur puzzles that I don’t have pictured below. Last week we were lucky enough to top our theme-time unit off with a visit to the Gray Fossil Site in east Tennessee on our...

Forest Animal Sort Cards 5

Forest Animal Sort Cards

Forest Habitat Animal Sort – Vertebrates-Invertebrates ED’s next habitat study is on the forest. I made a set of cards for the kids to sort through. We’ll be sorting them by vertebrates-invertebrates  and also into the five animal kingdoms:  ( fish), amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Oh and by the way, I didn’t include any fish in this sort–I did include a photo of crayfish that LD found in the...

Long A Sound – Word Sort 0

Long A Sound – Word Sort

LD has gone over a lot of the different long-A sound word groups for spelling. I made this word sort to help cement in some of those families especially the trickier ones such as eigh — weigh, eight, neighbor, sleigh aigh — straight ea — steak, break You can download a copy here if you are interested.

Math Skip Counting Game: Speed! 23

Math Skip Counting Game: Speed!

We had the privilege of reviewing a math card game called Speed!  Oh boy is it fantastic! I would have to give it 5 stars for sure. I always try to include as many hands-on activities as possible in our homeschooling.  DD still has a lot of math games, but I’ve been less creative with LD lately as he is working hard on reinforcing his basic multiplication and division skills....

Blogs I Enjoy and Visit, Resources I Find Helpful 2

Blogs I Enjoy and Visit, Resources I Find Helpful

I finished replacing most of the links I lost and have my page up and running again with the Blogs I Enjoy and Visit, Resources I Find Helpful. If you’re interested you can now visit that page again. I color coded it as follows: Homeschool Blogs I Enjoy is the first section in pink. Next is Useful Homeschool Resources in light blue with the following subsections:  Great resources and printables...

Thanksgiving Freebies 0

Thanksgiving Freebies

I came across a number of free Thanksgiving activity packs and thought I’d share those for anyone who might be interested in the next week or so:  Thanksgiving Activity Pack from Itsy Bitsy Learners  Thanksgiving Fun Book from The Simple Homeschool   If you like this pack, you might want to pop over to The Simple Homeschool and register for their newsletter. From Dec. 1-12 they will be giving away...

Math Game: Stop the Clock 4

Math Game: Stop the Clock

 As I’ve been trying to find links and repair the “blogs I enjoy” page, I came across a clock game I used to have LD play all the time online. Now DD is learning time to 5 minute intervals and I’m going to have her play Stop the Clock for math time for a while.  She has to drag the digital time to the correct analog clock and do all...

Learning Letters:  Clothes Peg Activity (preschool) 6

Learning Letters: Clothes Peg Activity (preschool)

Back a couple of years ago Honey over at Sunflower Schoolhouse made a collection of clothes peg activities. I brought out this alphabet matching activity for ED last week. The plain letter matching was a bit too easy for her. Here’s the link to the Clothes Peg Alphabet, volume 1 (lower case letters)  (the link no longer works, sorry!) that you see in this first picture. Honey also made other...

Just one of those things… sigh 0

Just one of those things… sigh

This evening I wanted to go to one of my links in the “Blogs/Websites I Enjoy” section… I’ve been saving my favorite sites for my own reference for several years… and 3/4 of my links are gone. Ugh!  Even the cached version of the page doesn’t have any of the links so it must have happened some time ago.  Sigh… I’ve reconstructed some of it so far, but it’ll take...

Frontiersmen Unit 2

Frontiersmen Unit

This past week the kids all came down with colds. As a consequence we did a lot of reading aloud and a bit less of the hands-on type stuff. We’ve been studying Appalachian music and decided to study some of the early frontiersmen in more depth. We spent a lot of time reading about Daniel Boone (one of the first to cross the Appalachian Mountains and one of the men...

Math: Multiplication Word Problems 0

Math: Multiplication Word Problems

I mentioned this before, but these multiplication word problems are worth another mention. We’ve been doing three each day at the beginning of math time for LD (age 8).  1. If 1 dress can be madefrom 6 yards of calico, how many yards will it take tomake 2 dresses?         Solution. — For 2 dresses itwill take 2 times 6 yards, which are 12yards. 2. Mary has...

Morning with ED 0

Morning with ED

ED and I always get up an hour or two before the others.  We cuddle up in front of the fire first thing and read books. We often do a craft to go along with it. I loved this picture because Crystal, the kitten, was so hands-on with this activity!! We’ve also been playing lots of games together in the morning; Uno is her current favorite (though we usually play...

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Build-A-Sentence Creative Writing Pack

Over the weekend, I made a set of Build_A_Sentence-Creative-Writing-Pack    for my first-grader. Build_A_Sentence Creative Writing Activity Here are my plans for them: The first couple of pages are filled with ideas.  She’ll go through and create sentences (silly or not) to write in her journal. Next we’ll work together to brainstorm ideas for some of the other themed sheets. I made about twenty different themed sheets with topics such as friendship, aliens,...