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The day before Halloween we made lanterns on glass baby food jars and tissue papers. We placed small candles inside and they looked quite cute. You might want to check out some of our other Halloween Posts: Halloween: Freebies (Math, Writing), Homemade Candy Corn Recipe and More!! Free Letter W Printables Halloween Party Games! Free Printable: Homemade Candy CornRecipe: When we lived in Australia (when the kids were little), we...
Aside from the crafts and trips out and about, I wantedto share some of the things we’ve been doing these days athome. Except for ED’s activities, these activities allappeared in their workboxes this past week. I just loveworkboxes because it lets them choose things when theyhave an interest. They get very excited by some of thethings I put out for them and we’ll often get wrapped upin activities for an...
I think I mentioned that LD started a new short lapbookunit on carnivorous plants. He’s been very interestedin the venus fly trap. I found a free lapbook athttp://dynamic2moms.webs.com/carnivorousplants.htm(didn’t I mention that the other day?). And LD’s been doinglittle bit of work on it each day. We’ve been having himdo the cutting this time as there isn’t as much writinginvolved. (Often I cut things out if we’re doing a longerlapbook that...
I know I’ve mentioned a number of times that we usethe Right Start Math curriculum. I really, really like theprogram (and so do LD and DD)! We progress prettyslowly partly because (as you probably have noticed) wedo lots of other math activities/games as well. But, RightStart Math really impresses me with its use of manipulatives,games and its emphasis on truly understanding basicmath concepts. So, pictured below we’re doing a couple...
The kids have really been enjoying these math DVDscalled Mathtacular. It’s a DVD about math–addition,skip counting, place value and things like that. The kidsare really engaged by it and it covers so great mathconcepts.
This week, LD has been reading a Scooby Doo chapterbook aloud to me. I asked him to choose one picture fromthe book for me to photograph, but he couldn’t decideand insisted I include all of these photos — so here you are!
The kids play really well together — and I snapped apicture of their set up of haunted houses and transformers.It was an involved game that lasted more than an hour!I’m always impressed at how creative the kids are intheir free play and find that a valuable part ofhomeschooling. The houses, by the way, are called “Sweet Streets” andwe got them used from another family for an amazingbargain!
We all LOVED making and eating candy corn today. It is not sold here where we live. We visited http://www.homemade-dessert-recipes.com/candy-corn-recipe.html for instructions. It was easy, the kids enjoyed helping me and LD was impressed. “Wow Mom! YOU knew how to make real candy!!!” We halved the recipe which made more than plenty. As you can see, I added baking chocolate to make brown candy corn. Also, I made pumpkin balls...
This morning LD and I decorated skulls. I got this ideafrom artprojectsforkids.org. First, he traced the outlineof a skull from a skeleton puzzle we have. Then he drewthe eyes, nose and mouth. We decorated it symmetricallyand cut it out. Then we put it up on our front door. Ourback-drop paintings are from the paint popping activity we dida few weeks ago.
Another project from artprojectsforkids.org wasthe pasta skeleton . All the kids really enjoyed thisincluding ED who carefully used all of her pastaand beans!
Today we were very fortunate to have the opportunityto visit a scientist who works for our local museum. Hehas been working lately on cleaning up some fossils, thoughhe also does taxidermy as well. When we arrived, the kids showed him some of the fossilswe found a couple of months ago. (I’ll post a quick pictureof that below this.) Then Mr. I showed us around hislab. In the second picture below...
These are the fossils we took over to show the scientistthis morning. LD and DD selected their favorites andwere excited to be able to show him their finds. Theyhad a large tray of fossils just like these on one of thecounters in the science lab! I also posted a pictureof where we were when we found the fossils– againthese pictures were from June (not from today!)
Mr. I let us take a look in the “container,” a sealed roomthat was VERY VERY smelly. These are some of theanimals and critters he has preserved. Some of his specimensare on display in the museum. He and some otherscientists worked hard for 7 weeks (8am-midnight) to setup the display at our local museum (which we went to lastweek if you want to scroll down aways). He said he’d liketo...
