Author: Liesl - Homeschool Den
Math Card Games and Gameboards (for my 5 year old)
A pack of Crazy Eight cards from the dollar store comes in handy for doing math fact games. Addition Facts Game: Each player started with five cards. There’s a discard pile and a draw pile. Each player takes a turn drawing or picking up a card from the discard pile. The first time we played, we used the numbers 0 through 6 and set the other numbers aside. We had...
Hope You Had a Lovely Mother’s Day
I was treated like a star on Mother’s Day. The kids brought me breakfast in bed complete with homemade cards and crafts. I looked like a queen with the bright yellow crown DD made for me! Later in the day, hubby rounded up all the nuts, bolts and parts and put together my favorite swing — a Mother’s Day Gift three years ago! (We disassembled it to bring it back...
Listen to Frog and Toad Calls
I was so excited to find this website — enature.com. It lets you listen to the sounds made by frogs and toads. Since we have a symphony of frog calls at night it’s pretty neat knowing which one’s which! Here are the frogs and toads we’ve come across (in the hundreds) here in our neck of the woods: Pickerel Frog: Fowler’s Toad: Northern Cricket Frog: Cope’s Gray Treefrog:
Our Backyard Classroom
The past week we had a wonderful time with our friends. We took them on a short hike through the woods and spent a lot of time looking for frogs and things. LD couldn’t get enough time down at the creek and spent a couple hours each afternoon hunting things down. We found a bunch of new (to us) critters! How exciting! I think this little guy is a Northern...
Arts and Crafts This Week
You can never go wrong with paper plates, paint and glitter, right?!! The kids chose these paper bag puppet designs from DLTK’s Paper Bag Puppet ideas page. They had fun making them and tossing them over the banister upstairs to watch them “fly” to see whose traveled farthest! LD chose to do the Phoenix because of the book series he’s reading called Beast Quest. He’s so into these books he...
Math Activities for DD (age 5)
DD has enjoyed math so far this week. In addition to a bit of work in her math workbook each day — here are some things we did together: Place Value: She is finding the numbers 500 90 and 7 and stacking them on top of each other (bottom left of pic) to make 597. These plastic place value cards are from our Right Start Math curriculum, but can be...
Quick 3-yr old activities for ED
Here are a few things in ED’s workboxes as we get back into the swing of things. Using tweezers to sort colored pom-poms (I have a sticker with the appropriate color for each section.) Placing erasers on the end of a pencil. Since ED is past dropping things through a hole, this is a good skill for her — both lining up the hole in the eraser and having to...
Garden Science Activities – Where Does Food Come From?
One of our activities before our holiday had us thinking about the ingredients of a hamburger and where each ingredient originated (and how everything, even the hamburger itself, tied back to plants). It was time to use some of our Montessori sorting cards again since they helped the kids contemplate where their food comes from. Where Does Food Come From? From Plant to Food (Montessori for Everyone): This set had...
Plans for the Next 5-7 Weeks
While on holiday it was time to think through our homeschooling plans for the next 5-7 weeks or so. I always have a running plan in my head, but sometimes it’s useful to put it down on paper, so to speak. As you will see, I am trying to include a lot more Newberry honor and medal winners now that DD is a bit older. I’ll continue to read lots...
Other Things We Did While on Holiday
Lots and lots and lots of rides… including “It’s a Small World” (left) Checking out the alligators. A bit of mini golf. A wonderful children’s science museum type place called Wonder Works. The kids LOVED the ropes course at Wonder Works. Kennedy Space Center — we were SO sad not to see the launch (which was postponed to four days after our visit instead of while we were in...
Check out the garden now!
DD checks out the gardens… but sadly it’s not ours. Any guesses as to where we are? Here are a couple of other hints. Yes, the past 10 days or so we’ve been down in Florida with Grams and Gramps. (Posts were set to go off automatically during that time.) We had such a wonderful time! We were all healthy and enjoyed getting away. Best of all I feel...
LD found a turtle
Today LD found a turtle out in the yard. We think it is an Eastern Box Turtle. We learned quite a bit about these critters: *Turtles can live 50-100 years.*Turtles as a species have been around for 250 million years.*Turtles eat insects, earthworms, millipedes, beetles, caterpillars, fruit, mushrooms, berries and vegetables.*The plastron or lower shell of the turtle can help identify its sex. Male turtles’ lower shells are concave (goes...
The Human Body (Preschool Unit) — bones/the skeleton
ED has been doing a new unit on the human body. I’m using Everybody Has a Body: Science from Head to Toe (affiliate link). It has such a wonderful array of hands-on activities for preschoolers. DD has been enjoying them as well. ED has been putting this skeleton puzzle together for several days now. This puzzle was called Look Into Your Body All About You From the Inside Out with Floor Puzzle...
