Monthly Archive: August 2012

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Preschool Science: Living, Nonliving

We’ve been having a discussion of what makes something living. Living things eat drink (need water) breathe grow reproduce We’ve been observing mealworms for the past couple weeks.  We saw evidence of their growth because they shed their exoskeleton. Yesterday we noticed they had transformed completely into darkling beetles! We’ve been keeping track of the growth of three sunflower plants out in the garden. Our sunflowers have grown an inch...

Aesop’s Fables – Free Book, Free App 0

Aesop’s Fables – Free Book, Free App

In our daily biography a few days ago we learned about Aesop, a Greek slave and story teller who is said to have lived 620-565 BC. Each fable contains a cautionary, ageless moral. And just in time for us, the Library of Congress released Aesop’s Fables Interactive Book. When you click on the link you can either read the fables on your computer or you can get the app for...

Last Year’s Homeschool Plans (Grades 1 and 3) 0

Last Year’s Homeschool Plans (Grades 1 and 3)

Yesterday I laid out some of the plans we have for this year. For those who are new to my blog I thought you might be interested in looking at some of the plans I had for last year (Fall 2011). Our focus in geography/history last year was on the USA and (some) American history. There was a lot of material that we covered that weren’t in my initial plans/post...

Our Homeschool Curriculum (Grades 2 and 4) 6

Our Homeschool Curriculum (Grades 2 and 4)

Lots of people have shared their school plans for this next year in the not-back-to-school blog hop: curriculum week.  In fact, I shared our preschool curriculum plans several weeks ago. Now finally, here are our basic plans for DD and LD this next year.  While they work on their own levels for math and language arts, we do most of our other units together. As you’ll see, much of our day...

Organizing Our Homeschool Room 6

Organizing Our Homeschool Room

I’ve spent a lot of time reorganizing our homeschool room this year.  I know lots of other homeschoolers are sharing pictures of their learning spaces in the not-back-to-school blog hop.  I thought I’d share some photos of our homeschool room as well. In the picture below you see our 3-ring notebooks, the craft table, LD’s writing desk, a bookshelf and DD’s desk (back by the window). A lot of our...

Clutter and Organization vs. the Sentimental Heart 1

Clutter and Organization vs. the Sentimental Heart

The past month I’ve been trying to organize and tackle various parts of the house. Professional organizers have all kinds of hints for getting your life in order. Things like only handle paper once don’t organize clutter if you haven’t worn it for a year, get rid of it if they haven’t played with it for six months, box it up, if they don’t ask for it for another month...

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Ten Books My 4 and 6 Year Old Love

It’s been a while since I talked about the books we’re reading.  We have lots of books around, plus we check out lots of books from our local library (50+ at a time!). I thought I’d highlight ten books that have been on the repeated request list. While we’ve read other books in the past couple of weeks, these are the books that I have read again and again (and...

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A Great Science Activity: Working with Mealworms

The science curriculum I’m using this year suggests letting the kids observe and work with mealworms. This is part of our discussion of what makes something living or not living.  I purchased some from a local pet shop and came up with a few activities for the kids to do as they observe and learn about their mealworms. Before I even uttered a word, I simply handed the kids their...

Tomato Hornworm with Wasp Eggs 3

Being Eaten From the Inside Out

In the garden last night we found another tomato hornworm which had left a trail of destruction as it ate through much of one of our plants. This time it wasn’t doing so well as wasp eggs had obviously hatched and was eating it from the inside out. Braconid wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillar. As they hatch they eat their way out, killing the caterpillar in the process....

Creepy Concoctions 0

Creepy Concoctions

We had some free-form science play for a couple of days earlier in the week. The kids made a number of slime concoctions using various recipes from a science experiment book LD has. I’m not quite sure what the kids learned from this, but LD made a bit of “dragon’s blood” yesterday by mixing various ingredients (corn syrup, peanut butter, dish liquid soap, dye, etc.).  Maybe a bit about viscosity?!...

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Addition and Subtraction Sheets

My daughter was standing right next to me when I made ED’s domino sheet (the ones I shared last week). She wanted her own math worksheets where she could create her own problems. Together, she and I designed simple addition and subtraction sheets. She rushed right over and put them in her math workbox!  They can be used with dice; DD used 12-sided and 20-sided dice. Download the free Addition-Subtraction...

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Domino Addition for PreK-K (Free Domino Sheet)

This week we’ve added in a bit of domino math to ED’s math time.  I know there are lots of domino math sheets out there including the domino mats and cards from mathwire.com, at Making Learning Fun (domino addition, subtraction or multiplication),  and a domino worksheet made by Erica over at Confessions of a Homeschooler.  I needed one that wouldn’t overwhelm ED, though.  I wanted just a few problems on the...

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Learning from Life: Archaeologist’s Visit and more

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about finding an ‘arrowhead‘ (really a hafted knife point) in the woods right behind our house. Yesterday morning we had the county archaeologist over to survey the site where we found the hafted knife. He examined it closely and said it was most likely a Piscataway Stemmed Point.  We then took him into the woods to show him the site where it...