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I really try to make sure the kids spend time outdoors. We don’t have a playground, but they manage to find things to entertain themselves. It’s been a funny winter here with lots of mild days and only a bit of snow now and then. A couple days ago the kids decided they wanted to do some “hard work.” (I kind of wonder if that is because of all the...
Our next topic was the Louisiana Purchase. Prior to 1803, the United States territory went only as far as the Mississippi River. Napoleon Bonaparte, the ruler of France, needed money for his wars in Europe and sold the Louisiana Territory to the U.S. for $15 million (3 cents an acre!). This nearly doubled the size of the United States. We’ve been using a map that shows the Louisiana Purchase and...
I came across a Valentine’s Boggle Game at Teacher’s Pay Teachers. I printed it out and much to my surprise both LD and DD loved it. They did it both yesterday and today and then complained that it was too easy the second time. I promised the kids I’d make a new word hunt for them and just finished it this evening. My version is not as cute as the...
So yesterday I managed to get my Twitter account sorted out. I’m so excited to see 15 people following me already! This evening I managed to sort out my new Facebook account too, though I’m not quite sure how to add the like button in. I’m so excited to start chatting there! I even posted my first question for y’all… do you manage to get time to yourself during your...
Hi! Nice to meet you! As you may know, we will be joining the Parent’s blog team pretty soon. Our family decided we’d like to share a couple of photos of the family behind this blog. Here’s my photo for what it’s worth! (Ugh… don’t mind the fly-away hair!) When we transfer over we’ll have a photo of me and the kids to share with you as well. Do you...
Valentine’s Day Division Cards I made a Valentine’s Day set of division cards to use with LD over the next week or so. We use these cards to play a game called Fast Track — an idea we got from Peggy Kaye’s Games for Math. To make the board you need a large piece of butcher paper or poster board. There are three win spaces, three start spaces and various...
ED has been working a lot on letter sounds and simple -at and -an words. I made this Valentine’s themed word matching activity for her to work on over the next couple of weeks. She has to attach the clothes peg to the matching word on the wheel. It took some cutting pasting to put it together, but if you’d like to make your own you can download the pages...
While the other kids are working on their things, ED has lots of preschool activities in her workboxes. Here are a few things she’s done this past week or so: We played memory using -at words. We are going through “My -at book.” ED says the initial sound and then I help her smash the sounds together. This is definitely an activity we do together as she is not reading...
DD is just now learning to skip count by 3s. I made a unicorn and dragon themed game to help her practice. The game is pretty straight forward. Each player takes a turn drawing cards from the file until they get a dragon (STOP!) card. The player then sorts her cards and places them in skip counting order while the other player is drawing cards. The object is to be...
As I mentioned last week, this semester we are studying the American West. We picked up where we left off last semester when we talked about Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. (To the left is Davy Crockett’s birthplace cabin in Tennessee which we visited last Thanksgiving.) We talked about the Ohio Valley settlement and how as settlers made their way west they used the rivers for transportation. We learned a...
A few days ago our first aid topic was on snake, spider and tick bites. First we went over the venomous snakes in our area and then went over some other venomous snakes they might encounter in America. Then we went over some of the basic first aid measures you should take if bitten by a venomous snakes. In the picture they are trying to take off my ring. We...
Fire Safety We were quite overdue for a review of some basic fire safety rules. Even though we’ve lived here for a year and a half, we hadn’t made a family meeting spot outside in case of emergency. Nor had we gone over in detail how the kids can escape from their room in case of emergency. We talked about what to do if your clothes or hair catches fire....
Not out of the house, we’re here to stay for a while yet… but the Homeschool Den blog will be moving. A couple of months ago one of the editors of Parents contacted me and asked if I would like to come under the Parents umbrella as one of their bloggers. I was honored and thrilled to join such a great team of people. So in just a couple of...
The girls got a new game for Christmas called A to Z, Jr by Discovery Toys. What a great game! The game itself is the perfect age for DD and LD (ages 6 and 8). It’s similar to the game Scattergories. Each person rolls the die and picks up a card. Then he/she has to name as many objects as they can for the category they rolled. Categories might include:...
