Making Homeschooling Hands-On, Engaging, Meaningful & Memorable! Be inspired by all the possibilities!! Check out our unit studies, packets and printables!
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...
Food in America (concerns) / Recipes / Science / Science: Garden Science
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 23, 2011 · Last modified March 22, 2016
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...
Active Math Games / Math General Posts
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 16, 2011 · Last modified February 21, 2016
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...
We’ve been reading bits of Castle by David Macaulay aloud together. It is a very detailed account about how a castle and the adjoining town were planned out and built. One section talked about how the castle walls were built. We tried to design our own walls to be as strong as possible. The drawing from Castle shows how thick the castle walls were constructed. We tried to do the...
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 10, 2011 · Last modified December 30, 2015
A place for everyone and everyone in his place: We have been studying the Middle Ages. We’ve read lots of books or snippets of books about castles, knights, the Church, and feudalism. This is an activity suggested in one of the books we checked out from the library. It’s called the four alls and talks about some of the roles people had in the Middle Ages. These roles were ‘fixed...
Science / Science: Earth Science Unit
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 9, 2011 · Last modified July 19, 2018
The most common types of mountains are fold mountains. Some fold mountains include the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps. This activity showed how plate movement creates folded mountains.When the two continents collide, the plates wrinkle and fold. Here’s our activity to show this happening. It’s the same principle as the damp graham cracker we did a few days ago, but this shows the “layers” of the earth folding/wrinkling. Showing how...
Science / Science: Earth Science Unit
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 8, 2011 · Last modified July 19, 2018
We were still talking about plate tectonics on Friday. We talked about how scientists theorize that the continents were once connected as one giant super-continent, Pangaea. I cut out South America and Africa and asked them to fit them together as best the could. When they didn’t fit together perfectly I asked the kids why the continents wouldn’t match perfectly after 250 million years? We talked about erosion and the...
Science / Science: Earth Science Unit
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 7, 2011 · Last modified July 19, 2018
We looked a bit more closely at what happens at fault lines where slight shifts in the crust cause earthquakes. First the kids all made their own layered crust. ED especially enjoyed this! Then we placed an index card in a larger container and created layers on both sides of the paper. We moved the index card back and forth and watched as the grains of rice shifted and moved....
Homeschool: Useful Resources (websites books etc) / Math General Posts / Math--Addition
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 6, 2011
I’ve come across a number of beautiful Valentine’s Day math activities that I plan to use this week with DD. They are so pretty and well done, I just had to share in case someone else might want to incorporate them into their week! I wish I had the time (and health!…I still have a vicious cough from the pneumonia.) to be making such beautiful things, but at the moment...
Science: Obviously we’re working on our Earth Science Unit and that will probably continue for at least another month. We are also working through the Real Science-4 Kids Chemistry book Pre-Level 1. I really like these books and recommended them to my sister (they homeschool) back a couple of years ago. Her kids are older than mine and she went through the Pre-Level one books and then continued on with...
It turns out that DD has pneumonia and an ear infection as well. She’s been sleeping LOTS these past 10 days. Only today did she show interest in resuming work on her penguin lapbook. But she’s been pretty amazing — and has kept up with her reading and math most days despite being sick. She’s to the stage that she picks up books to read on her own as well....
ED turned three this week! Happy Birthday Sweetheart! ED still enjoys this math activity. She does it with snowflakes and Christmas trees — now I’ve made up the same activity with heart stickers and beautiful heart erasers from Oriental Trading. She really gets the one-to-one correspondence now. We play many, many rounds of Cariboo together. This game is just perfect for her. Each card has a shape (triangle, square or...
Do you believe education can be exciting, inspiring, and full of joy? We do too!
I love the quote by William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." It's about getting the kids involved, engaged, and fired up about learning (while juggling the rest of life too!)
A bit about me: I have my Master's from Brown University. I have more than 20 years of teaching experience. I was a high school teacher for many years both in the U.S. and internationally and also taught for the University of Maryland before leaving to homeschool my 3 wonderful kids.
To read more about us CLICK HERE.
Click on the image to find out more about the units and packets we have available.
This post has links to dozens of posts and resources both for new and veteran homeschoolers for everything from finding homeschool curriculum to general homeschool advice and encouragement.
Click on the image above to see the History Units we covered in our homeschool.
What science topics could I teach my 5-7 year old - Homeschool Science Curriculum
Click on the image above to see the Science Units we covered in our homeschool from elementary through middle school (and beyond!).
A list of the books we've used most in history, science, math, language arts, etc.
Click the image to check out our packets on Earth Science, Rocks and Minerals, the Atmosphere, Weather, Energy and More!
Units are also sold separately.
This is one of our most popular units. It covers the Layers of the Earth, Plate Tectonics, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and More! It is included in the Earth Science Bundle (see the picture/link above).
Click the image to see our Biology Units on Animal and Plant Cells; the Biology Unit on Biomes, Food Chains, Symbiosis; Scientific Classification & Taxonomy (Domain/Kingdom/Phylum/Class, etc.); Botany - Plant Kingdom and Oceans and Oceanography.
Click on the image to see our Animal Bundle - including the Animal Unit, Life Cycles, the Rainforest, Winter (Polar Animals) & Hibernation, Chameleons, Wolves, Cicadas and more!
The Human Body Systems, Skeletal, Digestive, Circulatory, Muscular, Nervous, Endocrine Systems and More (with lots of hands-on activity ideas)! We usually study a different body system each year.
Click on the image to see our units on the States of matter, Properties of Matter, Electricity & Circuits, and the Chemistry Unit (Get to know the Periodic Table in a fun way!)
This is a free checklist I put together of the various science units I hope to cover in the elementary and middle school years.
Do your kids know the 4 largest countries? Which countries have the most people? The longest river? This packet covers basic world and U.S. facts and also covers geographic features and land forms.
Click on the image to check out our 100-page unit on World War I.
We have used AAS for 6 years! AAS is an affiliate link.
Dozens of posts about how to create a homeschool writing workshop.
Click on the image to check out all of our fun K-2 Math Packets.
This is one of the best values we have... more than 20 PDFs with games, activities and worksheets to learn/practice the multiplication facts ($7.00).
Click on the image to discover some of the pages, posts and homeschool resources within our blog that might be the most useful for you including a long list of our freebies!
Click on the image to check out our 100+page Rocks and Minerals Unit.
This is a fun, hands-on unit for early elementary students!
How the body is organized from cells to tissues... organs to body systems
Click on the image to check out some of the Spanish worksheet bundles we have available!
Click on the image above to check out our German worksheets.
Click on the image to find out more about our units and packets.
