Monthly Archive: October 2014

Travel School: Homeschooling on the Go! 0

Travel School: Homeschooling on the Go!

Do you homeschool in the car and on the go?  Lots of family use time in the car to learn a new language, learn about history,  listen to stories.  Then you hear about the homeschoolers who do extraordinary things for extended periods of time. In the spring and into the summer I followed the adventures of a homeschooling family that hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. That’s 2,000...

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Free Halloween Math Practice Pages: Multiplication, Division, Fractions and More!

Fun Halloween Freebies (with links to free Halloween printables for younger kids too)! I have made the kids lots and lots of fun math worksheets over the years!  Below you’ll find free Halloween PDFs for multiplication and division and for fraction practice. They are free to download if you can use them. Plus, I’ve added in a dozen other Halloween and Fall Freebies you might find helpful… from addition and...

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Spooky Science: Dry Ice Experiments

A couple of years ago, we did some spooky science with dry ice. We’re going to do some of these activities again this week, but I thought I’d share some of the things we did then in case you want to try these activities with your kids. I went out and bought some dry ice and we did a number of experiments. You can see suggestions from Steve Spangler science and a...

6:45pm Tonight Watch the Antares Rocket Launch (East Coast, USA) 0

6:45pm Tonight Watch the Antares Rocket Launch (East Coast, USA)

If you live on the East Coast of the USA you should step outside this evening (6:45pm) to see the Antares Rocket being launched. This is a private rocket built by the commercial space flight company, Orbital Sciences. The launch is a commercial resupply mission for NASA. It will be bringing supplies to the International Space Station. It will launch from the Mid-Atlantic spaceport pad at Wallops Island (off the...

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Free Halloween Math Worksheets: Addition, Subtraction, Coins and Skip Counting

I have made tons of fun math worksheets for the kids over the years. Below you’ll find some free Halloween math practice pages for Addition and Subtraction Practice and for Skip Counting and Coin Counting. The first couple of pages are Halloween-themed addition and subtraction worksheets: Free Halloween Addition-Subtraction Practice Worksheets The other pages are on Halloween-themed skip counting and coins. (They are in a separate PDF.) Halloween  Skip counting...

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What To Do With That Halloween Candy? (Science Experiments, Donations…)

Halloween will be here really soon! If you are wondering what to do with all that Halloween candy, you can always do some science! This is an experiment I did with my kids a while back with Skittles in water. I think the results are fascinating: Floating Letters: Another fun thing to do with Skittles or M&Ms is to see if you can make the letters float on water.  Just submerge...

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Writing Workshop: What We’re Doing for Writing This Fall

In this post, I wanted to talk about writing in our homeschool this fall.  Last year, we shifted to a writing workshop model.  I had a reluctant writer and up until that point, writing was a chore for my son.  Well, after switching to a writing workshop… writing became one of his favorite subjects! So, what do I mean by a writing workshop? In brief this means: We have a...

Learning Sign Language for Older Kids (and Parents!) 0

Learning Sign Language for Older Kids (and Parents!)

Learning Sign Language for  Older Kids (and Parents!) Several of the high schools around here offer ASL as one of languages students can learn in school.  I have my own reasons for wanting the kids to learn American Sign Language with me… The past couple of months, I have struggled to come to terms with becoming completely deaf in one ear. I have been hard of hearing since I was in...

Make This Ghostly Game with a Box and Ping Pong Balls 1

Make This Ghostly Game with a Box and Ping Pong Balls

I saw this idea in a Halloween book and thought we’d give it a try! All you need is a cereal box or shoe box, black paint and ping-pong balls to make this Ghostly Game! Paint the box black, cut out a ghost, and glue it on. Have a parent cut holes in the box and push the tabs down. Once you’ve decorated your ping pong balls, the game is...

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Earth Science: Earth’s Geologic Timeline

We spent about a week learning about Earth’s four eons and most recent eras.  Today I wanted to share several of the activities we did to go along with this part of our unit. As you may recall, we reviewed the planets in the Solar System, talked about the age of the Earth (4.6 Billion years)  and did an impressionistic activity to show how short human history actually is compared to...

Do You Have Trouble Getting Everything All Done? 0

Do You Have Trouble Getting Everything All Done?

Sometimes our family is on such fast-forward speed, I have trouble getting to everything I want to.  I have a list of about 10 blog posts to write (we’ve done such great things in our homeschool lately!)… but somehow life gets in the way of actually putting pen to paper — errr… fingers to keyboard! Happily, it’s fun stuff that’s getting in the way these days (rather than all my...

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How Do I Get Started Homeschooling?

Please click through to this post (which has working links to the topics mentioned below): How to Start Homeschooling and visit this newer post as well: How Do I Start to Homeschool?! Help! These posts all exist, but we’ve moved from Parents.com (we were under the Parents umbrella for 3 years)… and I don’t have the links up and running! 🙂 Hope to get them together sometime soon! You can...

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Signing with Babies and Toddlers (Baby Sign Language)

Signing with Your Baby and Toddlers Baby Signing — Our family decided to sign with each of our babies/tots. Our children all had normal hearing, but I learned that kids could control their hands and fingers and could therefore communicate by sign much earlier than with speech. It seemed like a good idea and most of my friends were doing simple signs with their babies/tots too.  We were SO glad...

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Native Americans of the Northeast Unit (Part II, Iroquois Indians)

This fall we are doing a huge unit on Native Americans.  We started with a study of the Native Americans of the Northeast.  We learned about the two major language groups, the Algonquian (see this post for our activities) and Iroquois. Each of these groups consisted/s of a number of different tribes. Last week I shared some of our activities relating to the Powhatan Indians, a confederacy that lived in...