Activities for the Boxes

I thought it would be fun to feature some of the items I'll be using in my boxes. We've been homeschooling for four years now. You know it seems a lot longer than that somehow! E10 is a little over half way through 5th grade and we brought him home half way through 1st grade back in 2005. Over the last four years we've accumulated some fun stuff what with three siblings following in his footsteps to be homeschooled. Since part of my purpose with the boxes is to make sure I'm using all my resources, I'll start featuring some of them and I'll add a link in my sidebar so we can have a running list. So, here we go!

The Silly Sentences Game inspired me to find a few more. This one is Silly Rhymes and I hope it will help I-6 with some word family practice. Plus, it's great practice to read the words without the reading cues found in Reading Made Easy. He's up to the part of the program where the visual cues begin dropping out of parts of the lesson. Emerging readers get better when they read and read some more!

I found out about this one from the FIAR forums. I find out about a lot of fun things on there. This little $5 game is for practicing mental math. You toss the 12 sided dice and multiply them together. That is your target number. Then you roll the regular dice and use any combination of them to get the answer closest to the target number. You are supposed to do this in your head, but you can make the game easier with lots of variations like adding the 12- sided dice together so your target number is between 2 and 24. That way kids with the basic addition and subtraction under their belts have a chance to do well. You can also allow them to use scrap paper. What a great little game for a box activity. Don't you think?