Monthly Archive: November 2011
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 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...
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.
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
To go along with the build-a-sentence pack I made, I put together some free writing prompts. I’ll share it here in case some of you find it helpful for your emergent writers. It is 18 pages.Click here for the Free-Writing Prompts Pack
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...
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,...