Author: Liesl - Homeschool Den
As I’ve mentioned before our house is nestled down in the woods. The former owners cut up logs and threw them into a huge pile which is now happily decomposing. We’ve used some of this mulch in our garden areas (well away from the house). Here’s some of what we’ve observed from this decomposing pile! We found lots of these large beetles in our mulch pile. My best guess is...
DD is feeling a little bit better and wanted to do a leprechaun craft too. She wanted to do something different than the other kids. Last evening someone shared a new art website that had lots of elementary art lessons. I took a quick look and the bottle dolls caught my attention. When DD asked to do a craft she agreed that the bottle doll might be fun. She and...
DD made a sunflower lapbook. I finally have a few minutes to share her work here. She colored the front page and decided she didn’t want a title on the front cover so I added it into the photo digitally. I purchased this Sunflower Unit Study/Lapbook on currclick. It was $1.00 (USdol) — and was totally worth it since both DD and I learned a lot of new information. You...
Confession Time: One thing that I have not done well these past couple of years is to include activities that show word family patterns. Both LD and DD learned to read easily and early. Once they were off and reading, I guess I never saw much “point” in going over these kinds of things. But then… then I saw LD struggle as a writer. He has worked hard on the...
Today we did some shamrock fishing. I made three different activities to be age appropriate for my 7, 5 and 3 year olds. LD is working on his multiplication tables from 2s through 6s. His shamrocks had various problems whose answers fell between 20 and 29 (such as 4×5, 5×5 and 3×7) and other problems whose answers fell between 30 and 39 (3×11, 6×6, etc.) DD’s shamrock fishing was addition-related....
Today we made this leprechaun craft. For the hat, I had some round rubber gripping pads from the dollar store and cut them into a hat shape. The kids then used a large embroidery needle and yarn to make the buckle shape in the hat. This is ED’s finished leprechaun to the left. LD had me on the floor laughing with his crazy leprechaun hat!!! Kids come up with some...
There are such wonderful resources out there for those of you planning to do some St. Patrick’s Day activities with your kids. Here are some of the free St. Patrick’s Day units and printables I’ve come across this past week: Irish-themed letters (lower and upper case), numbers (0-20) and phonics cards; Powerpoint Explanation about St. Patrick and how he brought Christianity to Ireland Musings of Me — St. Patrick’s Day Teacher’s...
We have been having so much fun lately that I haven’t felt like blogging. The kids have thrown themselves head-first into a gardening/plant/sunflower unit. We’ve been working on our outdoor garden, planting seeds (indoors), lapbooking, reading lots of books about plants and gardens… and so much of this is directed by the kids that I’m just along for the ride! Anyway, all is well here — just busy (in a...
For the first time in months, we had our music classes. We took a long break because of the holidays, sickness and house problems. It was so wonderful to catch up with our friends again. We are continuing on with our studies of Europe and the music of Europe. First, we reviewed the seven continents (to the tune of Frere Jacques). Europe, Asia, A-fri-caa, North America South America Then there...
Another quick update: R had surgery (one of many, many he’s had in the past week) a couple days ago to attach the muscle to the bone. Apparently it was very painful. That coupled with the fact that they found a blood clot in his lung, R is having a tough time. My prayers, love and hugs to R.————- I wrote a short post about my cousin’s son who was...
I have been reading a lot of books about gardening and food. Oh my, I’ve learned so much about our food sources… I went on for so long, I pushed my thoughts/rants down to later in this post. Anyway, I told LD that he could have his own plot in the garden and he could choose whatever seeds he wanted to plant. He is SO excited and wanted to start...
I saw this wonderful clock idea at Suddenly 2nd Grade — http://mrsnielson-2ndgrade.blogspot.com/. The blog appears not to be up and running any more. Anyway, LD has been working on time in intervals of 5 minutes. This idea and the clock printout made by Mrs. Nielson is great. She has the bottom sheet available to print out too, but when we made it I felt it’d be better for LD to...
LD continues to work on his first multiplication tables from 1s to 6s — with lots of skip counting along the way. Today I had him working on 4s mostly. It has been quite a long time since we’ve done active math games outside and we had a reprieve in the weather. So we set up a chalk math snail again. LD had to multiply each number by 4. DD...
Goodness, I’ve been completely stumped on a title for this posting. Maybe I should have just left the title blank because that doesn’t seem quite right. I have always been extremely close to my cousin. We’re three weeks apart in age and that made us have a very special bond/connection growing up and on into adulthood. She had her kids at a young age and I had the privilege of...