Monthly Archive: January 2015

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The Kids Have Been Arguing Quite a Bit…

So at lunch time today when we were all calm and in good moods, I brought up the fact that they have been bickering quite a bit lately.  I asked them if they had any ideas on how to make it stop. “Well,” said LD, “maybe we should spend more time apart from each other.” “I  know,” said DD, “how about if LD and ED go to public school!!” “NOOooooo” the others...

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Exercise for Busy Parents – 2 New Pieces of Exercise Equiment

This post is a bit off topic in a way… I just wanted to share a little bit about how I squeeze exercise into our busy day.  If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that last year I had crazy ear/balance/dizziness/noise-sensitivity/vision problems all stemming from inner ear problems/ear surgery.  I wound up having 6 surgeries and in the end they had to remove my ear drum/bones/balance...

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Montessori-Style Addition Pages with Regrouping – Hundreds Packet

Not long back, I shared some of the Montessori-style addition pages that I made for ED. We have shared the sheets with no regrouping and some of the those include tens-ones, hundreds-tens. But this set has regrouping with hundreds-hundreds.  I’ll share them here if you can use them. Montessori Style Math -Hundreds-Hundreds- Regrouping There are 8 pages in this file. If you find these useful, I’d love to hear from...

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How to Make a Shake Table for Earthquake Studies

The next part of our Earth Science unit was earthquakes. Today’s post I’ll explain how we made our shake table, but before I do that I want to talk a minute about of some of the activities we did leading up to that. We used a lot of the activities from Engineering Adventures.  The kids’ first activity was building towers. Their first project was to build a tower of  index cards...

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Minecraft Themed Addition Worksheets with Regrouping – Subtraction Pages

ED is working on her addition facts and regrouping. I made these Minecraft Addition and Subtraction Worksheets for her this week. They are free to download if your kids can use them! Minecraft Addition and Subtraction Practice Worksheets If your kids aren’t into Minecraft, I also made these same sheets with some cute little Pokemon characters I drew a couple of years ago. There are two pages of these as...

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Homeschool Week in Review (Grades 1, 4, 6)

The biggest challenge this week? Just getting going each morning! This past week was our third week back since the break. In some ways, it was my toughest yet.  There are some days/weeks when we we dive into our homeschooling with enthusiasm and zeal, but other times it’s hard to get started, though once we do, we generally get things done. This was one of those weeks that was that bit...

Gelatin Volcano Activity - Hands-On Earth Science Activities 0

Earth Science – Awesome Gelatin Volcano and other Activities

We have two hands-on volcano activities to share with you today; the gelatin activity was especially cool once we realized our mistake!  Both of them help demonstrate how the release of pressure causes lava to flow. We had already spent a lot of time learning about plate tectonics.  Earth’s volcanoes are generally found where Earth’s plates are expanding or converging.  We looked closely at the parts of the volcano and...

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Writing Workshop MiniLesson #7 – Adding Details Exercise

This writing workshop MiniLesson really didn’t involve much writing, but boy did it drive its point home! It was all about adding amazing details. This is sometimes referred to as “Show, Don’t Tell.”  I wanted the kids to really understand how details not only add depth to the story, they can help drive the storyline.  That was my objective, though I didn’t tell the kids that when we started out!...

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Earth Science Activities – Volcanoes (Tissue Paper Volcano Craft)

I am SO excited to start sharing some of our hands-on Earth Science activities again! We did three or four different volcano activities and several fun Earthquake activities that we’ll share with you over the next week or two. And, of course, the long-awaited Earth science packet is just about ready to share as well. This first volcano craft is an idea I first saw over at Our Worldwide Classroom. We...

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Are You Just Starting to Homeschool?

If you’re looking for the answers to your homeschool questions, the new tab at the top of the page, “Starting to Homeschool” is the place to start!!  It has links to dozens and dozens of posts: How to find a homeschool curriculum? What about socialization? How do I know what to teach the kids? What does a homeschool day look like? How do I start homeschooling my preschooler? How many...

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I laughed so hard…

Today during math circles we had this mind bender:  Cut this magic carpet into three pieces and sew it back together to make a 6×6 carpet. DD and LD got it WAAaaaayy before ED and I did.  ED was sad that she hadn’t gotten it yet, so LD said Well, you are young and your mind is just developing. Mom’s mind is old and her mind is rotting! That had...

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Writing Workshop MiniLesson #6 – Alliteration and More

The writing workshop is more than just sitting down together and putting pencil to paper. This is also our time to learn about the writing process, to talk about different writing genres, and to  learn about different literary techniques.  During our writing workshop, we take the time to explore writing as a craft. About a year ago, I shared a number of writing workshop mini-lessons.  I wrote a series of...

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German Books for Kids

This semester we started back in our German studies with these two story books. We sat down together to read through the stories… and stop along the way to go over vocabulary.  The first book we read was Floppy Das Monster Ist Fast Auf Immer Verloren (German Edition) (The books in this post are affiliate links.) The kids did really well with both the story line and the vocabulary. The other book we are...

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Critical Thinking Activities – Math Circles

A few days ago, I mentioned that we started back into homeschooling with Math Circles rather than jumping into our “normal” math curriculum. What are math circles? From what I understand, they started in Russia where they hosted math contests.  Students competed to answer various word problems. The contest itself was designed to get students intrigued and excited about mathematics. There’s something similar here in the US called the Math Olympiad....