Bookmarks!

After looking at how pricey cute bookmarks are at the bookstore we decided we could do it ourselves. We had our handy dandy laminater, scrapbook paper, ribbon and beads. What more could you need.
Now let me tell you a little secret sometimes I think I'll make cute little posts with nice neat pictures of all the steps involved in a project....... but in reality let me show you what doing crafts with six kids looks like in our house.

 What you want to know what that huge pile is behind my child?? Well that's clean laundry that I haven't had time to put away.... how's that for keeping it real?

So you can see there was no opportunity for cute clean little step by step pictures. Honestly my school table is so covered in ummmm artwork that I couldn't take a nice photo on it if my life depended on it.

Anyways..... we managed to make a whole lot of bookmarks, have fun and didn't spend much. Although, I am thinking perhaps we got slightly carried away....

I'm thinking we have enough to share ;)

Postcard Project Update....

Here is our map so far

First I want to thank everyone who has sent us a postcard. My kids have absolutely loved this project and I am happy to report both of my third graders now know most of the states. My little girls know a fair amount as well, even my 3 year old. We have thus far received SIXTY TWO postcards!!! Unfortunately we're still missing quite a few states, many of the sixty two are duplicates or triplicates lol but we love them all regardless.
Also as a side note if you sent us a postcard and did not receive one back please let me know. My kids were putting these in the mailbox as they wrote them and apparently at least one ( which I'm sending out TODAY sorry for forgetting about that Annika)didn't make it to it's destination. We hopefully have sent out a card to everyone who committed to sending us one.

OK the states we still need are......

Washington, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Philadelphia, New Hampshire

If you missed the project the first time here's what we're doing. We are trying to receive and send a postcard to each of the fifty states for a geography project this year. So what we need is a postcard from your state and your address so we can send you one back!

Thank you so much for all of your help with this project.

Edible Oasis

We are studying the Middle East in history right now and one of the recommended projects was to make an edible oasis.The kids were very excited about this project. Probably largely in part to the fact that they got to eat the Oasis they made later.

 Here's the finished creations. Some of them even have little boats in their water... how the boat got to the Oasis was never answered ;).

They all even waited to eat them until after they showed Daddy and Big brother!

Sand Art

We are studying Middle Ages this year in history. Last week we were learning about India and the Frescos they once made on their cave walls. We decided to try out own hand at this. Let me tell you creating art with sand... not as easy as you might think. Forget about detail, you can also forget about walking barefoot through your kitchen for the next year. Unless that is you enjoy the beach feel ;).

Hard at work.

 Their Creations..

Counting Bears... a Kindergarteners best friend!

Can I just say counting bears are the BEST manipulative for the little folks. They can sort them by color. They can sort them by size. They can make patterns with them. They can play with them, AND they can of course count them. I'm sure there's plenty of other things I'm missing. These are definitely our most loved math tool though.

Old Fashioned Fun

Amelia had the opportunity to spend the day learning at a one room schoolhouse with our homeschool group recently. She was extremely excited seeing as how she believes she IS Laura Ingalls. She picked the fabric and told me how to make her outfit... then wore it for over a week straight. She also was the 3rd to last kid out in the spelling bee.. the other 2 kids left were MUCH older than her(the little brainiac ;) )

TOS Review- Expedition Australia

This week we reviewed This Old Schoolhouse's down-loadable E-book

Download and Go: Expedition Australia!

This is an E-book that you download to your computer, then print out the student pages as needed. It includes information on Australia's Climate, Culture, Wildlife,Language, topography, landmarks, cities and history. The e-book guides you day by day in a one week study of the land down under. It also includes links to videos, articles, pictures, and coloring pages. Included in the e-book are ideas for fun activities and ideas to enhance your study even more.

I think this is a great and very affordable option for Geography unit studies. I was unsure at first of what my kids would think of this but I am happy to tell you though they LOVED learning about Australia. I really enjoyed having the information in the e-book format. It was so easy to watch the video links included, look up facts and even hop on over to you tube to watch the Aboriginal didgeridoo being played. After day one my son was asking if we could go on vacation to Australia!

The kids loved learning about the differences in language, culture and landscape. The e-book included a lot of details that I would have forgotten to include or simply wouldn't have known about. Everyone enjoyed this from the 2 year old to the 13 year old ( and maybe even Mom ;) ). The favorite thing for the kids was by far all the information on the animals.

The only thing I didn't love is that I felt it was too much information for a week. Some days we spent over an hour on it and still didn't get to everything. If I were to do it again I would probably split it up into a month and spend more time on each aspect so we could enjoy it more and not feel quite so rushed.

All in all this E-book is a fun, easy and inexpensive way to introduce your children to Australia.

TOS Review... Wanna Be Series. Firefighter

I had the opportunity to review some curriculum for a homeschooling magazine called The Old Schoolhouse.

The curriculum I reviewed was one of their E-Books called
Wanna Be Series – Firefighter.

This was perfect timing as my 5 year old daughter had recently decided she was actually going to be a Firefighter when she grew up... or a Mom, she wasn't QUITE sure she said ;).

This little E-book was really filled with fun ideas for ways to implement a unit study on firefighting.
There was a lot of information on the History of firefighting, how it works today, exactly what it takes to be a firefighter and more.
There were ample activities that we thoroughly enjoyed and opportunities to learn about fire safety and make an escape plan.
There were also worksheets and written work included. We chose to not do that portion because I have mostly younger children and we didn't feel we needed more of that type of work.

First we learned about the history which all of my children found very interesting. Then we had our very own bucket brigade and tried to fill a bucket. Let me tell you if our house is ever burning down I really hope there isn't a 2yo in the brigade.. she was NOT helpful.
I was so busy trying to contain the 2 yo I didn't get pictures of this but it was a sight let me tell you.

Next we learned about Fire Safety, made an escape plan and practiced it.

Going down the stairs while staying low (they liked this part)

Meeting at the Mailbox

Running back in to DO IT AGAIIINNN!!!

After that we learned about what it takes to be a firefighter today and made the Firetruck cake. Now before I show you our cake let me say this. The way our cake looks is in no way shape or form a result of bad instructions. It's simply a result of too much help in the kitchen and a mom that isn't talented in such things ;)

(It's okay go ahead and laugh... I did ;) )

If you have a little one who would enjoy learning about Firefighters the E-book is available here.

For only $8.95 it's a steal and packed with fun information and activities. I think it is well suited for almost any school age child and fun for the whole family.

Notebooks and Journals

Weylin needed several notebooks for his writing and poetry so we decided to make them interesting and unique... which led to everyone wanting to make journals of course ;).

It was a little chaotic at the end of the day but everyone is very happy with their new journals and notebooks which makes it all worthwhile.
I wish I had taken a picture of the insides (because they all have coordinating paper inside) but I'm too tired to go do it now.

Weylin's Notebooks ( the reason for this whole project, by this point his wasn't in the mood for his photo to be taken)

Peyton's Journal ( he want's you to know he added a Christmas sticker since this picture)

Amelia's Nature Journal

Audrey's Journal

Avery's Journal

And we won't talk about the mess this made....

Learning Geography by Osmosis

Endangered Species Project

Peyton had to make a poster of an endangered animal for Cub Scouts. He got up this morning and set out to do it "all by himself".

He picked out all the pictures and chose his information. Cut and glued and even sounded out all the words himself.

Then when he was finished he even cleaned up his mess... those of you with little boys know what an accomplishment that is ;).

Choosing Curriculum might just kill me

Seriously. There are just too many choices and not enough information. I have bought SO MANY things in hopes of the “right fit” for my kids and our family.
It is such a great disappointment when I spend hour upon hour researching and pick what I believe will work best and it gets here and it doesn’t work for us.
It has me wondering if at some point you have to just stop with “good enough” instead of constantly striving for “just right”.
How do you know when it’s time to be happy with good enough and quit searching?
The whole Language arts spectrum is my nemesis. I’m perfectly happy with the “good enough” we have going everywhere else. And I’m fairly happy with my elementary kids programs but when it comes to my 7th grader well….. I could cry big fat tears of frustration over his LA stuff. I’ve gone from boring to too easy to inadequate to too hard. WHAT IS THE ANSWER?? Whew… sorry to scream, I feel better now .
I suppose I’ll just keep trucking along until I stumble upon the perfect program… or at least one that’s “good enough”.

The sun's power

We are studying astronomy this year in science. Last weeks chapter was on the sun. For one of the experiments you are supposed to take a chocolate bar outside and melt it with a magnifying glass with the sun.
Well Peyton thought that was a little boring… so I taught him to light leaves on fire… as a side note, I think I need more supervision if I think teaching Peyton to light fires is a good idea, but at the moment it seemed like it was.
That they thought was great fun. We sat outside for a good while burning holes in leaves. Much to Peyton’s dismay (and my relief) he was unable to start any true fires.

Simple Lapbooks

I have been having the younger girls cut out their worksheets at the end of the week and making simple lapbooks with them. It’s a quick easy way for them to remember what we’ve gone over and it keeps up with all the pictures they don’t want thrown away.
I have found Avery more than once looking at her’s repeating what she’s learned to herself… which makes me very happy!!

Here they are all together ( please note Anna helped with Avery's with a green marker)

Avery's Front's Back's

Inside of Avery's books

Audrey's outsides ( she does all her own cutting/glueing now... can you tell)

Insides ( I did the cutting/glueing on the A book)