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A year ago this week, we said goodbye to the outback. It was bittersweet for us. We were ready to come to the US and live nearer to our family, but we loved our twelve years over in Central Australia. The kids were all born there. In no particular order — here are some photos from the Outback (animals and other stuff). For many, many more — click on the...
LD has been reviewing his punctuation and capitalization rules this past week or so. Here’s a new sheet he did about our family holiday a year or so ago (or go to my downloads page). The playground we went to was amazing!! The kids still talk about this playground. You probably won’t care that much about LD’s worksheet, but I bet some will be amazed by this public playground! I’ll...
Today’s my birthday, so this post is about… well me! I am so happy! Not that I wasn’t happy in Australia, but I was ready for a change and boy is life wonderful here! I’ve managed to find a musical outlet here (I played the oboe in a wind ensemble for 10 years in Australia). Here I’m singing in my church choir and have had the opportunity to play the...
LD pulled out his microscope this week and has been using all the science slides and rushing outside to bring things to look at. “MOM!!” he shouted at one point. “You’ve gotta check this out.” “Wow. What is it honey?” “My booger. I never knew it would look like this.” “Umm… yeah. Neat.” Glad to know he’s so inquisitive, but yucko. (I made HIM wash the slide and slip cover!)...
I’ve been having a thoughtful discussion with a blogging friend of mine. We’ve been talking about the reality of homeschooling… how it really works with a three year old in tow, what curriculum we use and things like that. I would love, love, love to hear your comments about how your day goes — and how you arrive at your homeschool curriculum decisions!Here’s part of my email letter to my...
I’ve made a few worksheets to go with our language and spelling lessons, but only just started writing them on google docs. I’ll post them in my Free Downloads area if anyone is ever interested. They’re plain old worksheets, but this seems to work really well for my son to help review language rules with an absolute minimum of writing (which we do in other areas of our homeschool day)....
Here’s the reading update on DD, age 5 1/2. The past couple of months, DD has been doing lots of independent reading. We came to the end of her phonics program (we used Bob Books and then the Primary Phonics storybooks, sets 1-6) and it was time to set her free with the books we have on hand. I did this with LD as well and I can’t recommend independent...
We continue to love the activities in the Junior Master Gardener Curriculum. I love that all three of the kids can be fully involved in these activities! This week we continued to look at monocot and dicots, studied plant roots and looked at the age of trees. In our first activity the kids gathered flowers from our yard. Then they had to determine whether the plants were monocots or dicots...
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...
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...
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:
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...
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...
