TOS Crew Review: Children's Bible Hour

As a member of the Crew, CBH Ministries sent me four different books/CDs from their Seasons of Faith series.

Each book is a 10" x 8.5" paperback book and it comes with a CD. The reading is interesting to hear and my kids all enjoy the stories. Of course, my kids love story CDs in general!

Each title is $10 and you can buy the complete set for $40.

Braving the Storm is a story about a boy who has to leave his home for a strange place and despite being surrounded by family members, he is quite lonely. It's a story about relying on God to get you through difficult times.
Seventy Times Seven is a story about forgiveness involving neighborhood boys playing baseball and meeting at a favorite ice cream shoppe.
You Can't Come In is a story about two boys who build a treehouse fort and one asks the other about God and Salvation.
Race with Midnight is a story about a girl and her cousin spending time on the cousin's horse farm. We find out how the girl will share her faith with her cousin.
The stories are well read and have stories that most kids can identify with. If you are looking for ways to amplify the time you spend with your kids applying Biblical principles, then these will make a fine addition to your home library.

Fun with a Certain Hungry Caterpillar

We've been having fun with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The hospital where three of our kids were born gives this book out in the baby pack you take home. We had a copy from E11 and we once got to meet Eric Carle himself (at the anniversary celebration of the First Book program that funded the books at the hospital) and we took a regular hardback book for him to sign. So, we have no less than 5 copies of this book in our home!

I found some fun resources for the book and we've taken full advantage of them. This will be the first of a couple of posts on the topic.

At Confessions of a Homeschooler, she has some activities for the Caterpillar which is where I found the graph. Here J4 is sequencing the story by putting the story cards on the string in the order that I read them.



Today he did some story sequencing with the small cards. That was just before he colored the life cycle of a butterfly. He set it up and then told me the events. J4 likes to sequence. The sequence cards are from DLTK which I found through Homeschool Share.
Finally, I used the alphabet cards found at 1+1+1=1 to have J4 match his letters up. This was the day I had my phone out for taking video. Wanna see? You have to click in just to see him do lightening letters!



We did some fun science and art with the Caterpillar today...I'll share those tomorrow.

Graphing- Family Style

Last week I decided to work on line graphs with the older kids for math. I also thought it would be a fun day if the younger two joined in the graphing fun. I found some simple coordinates for I7 to plot so he actually did an "artsy" line graph practicing putting a dot at an intersecting coordinate. J4 worked on a Very Hungry Caterpillar graph. I wanted to share this lesson because it shows you how math goes at our house. Several times a week we do a family lesson like this one and then the other days I work with each child on something that is new to him/her. Also, everyday they do their "5-a-Days" which are 5 math problems in rotation (which I choose) to practice their skills.

J4 did a great job counting out his caterpillar bar graph. He's been working on some caterpillar school this week.

I7 does a spring themed coordinate graph.

I love the Family Math series of books. This day I pulled out the middle school book so that E11 could graph some equations. I found a very cool lesson or series of lessons on making the x and y columns in the table they were to graph using different equations related to x. For example, one they graphed was x, y=2x. This way the kids got to see how a pattern would form and how the graph would look as a result. I had them do about 4 equations that I gave them and then they got to make their own.

R9 especially enjoyed this lesson. She decided to color each line a different color. Very nice.

E11's lines. It was cool for them to predict what the lines would look like as well. Here you can see the tables they filled out before they graphed. I used graph paper from the Family Math book which was nice because it was already labeled with numbers.

I just want to say that switching from a traditional text to Math on the Level and sort of doing my own thing just building the skills and showing my kids how to use math is going extremely well! It was one of the best homeschooling moves we've made so far. It takes more time to make sure the lessons are ready and you have to have some sort of math vision for your family, but it's like I always say...homeschooling, like parenting, is not meant to be a time saving endeavor.

Bloggy Changes

So, it has been a long time since I've fussed with my blog. A really long time. But some folks out there have been asking for a while what I can do to get rid of all those book titles in the left hand side bar.

Good news! Blogger just added a new widget. I LOVE widgets. It means I can do beautiful bloggy things without knowing any html whatsoever. I like that.

The new widget is....TABS! So, you'll notice (among other things) that I have tabs at the top of my blog now. I know not how to make them look fancy and use javascript for a drop down list rather than a static page of links, but no matter. It makes it easier for people to find what they are looking for and reportedly it will cut down on page load time.

You'll notice I've cleaned up my sidebars, moved some things around and I even checked my links (and some were indeed bad).

The most notable thing is likely to be the black page background has been made white! I've always wanted to do that. I chose Rounders 3 because of the other column colors since I didn't know I could change them myself back then. Then I could change all my colors and I even gave my blog a third column (surely by some miracle), but still did not know how to change that black page.

However, in my 3 years of blogging I've learned a thing or two about html and I knew that background color had to be embedded in that code. Somewhere. I set out to find it today and didn't (I couldn't recognize which label the background had) so I did what I should have done like- I don't know... years ago and I posted a question in the help forum at blogger. 15 minutes later I had my answer...a simple change in the code and where I could find it! Eureka!!

So, I feel like I've opened the curtains on my blog and the bright, warm sunshine is pouring in. I hope you like it as much as I do....(on the chance that you don't well I think it's here to stay since my labels didn't show up well on the black).

Thanks for reading!

*And if any of you readers out there want to pass any other tips my way, please leave a comment. You know like...how does a girl like me get a professional-looking blog with no financing available and little knowledge of how to tweak things myself. Suggestions welcome, but they have to come with directions!*

Hand Sewing Box

I have a post in mind to update you all on our workboxes- one year later, but while that topic is just in the idea stage, I thought I'd tell you about one of R9's boxes. If you've been a reader for a while, then you know that R9 is an accomplished seamstress. While she loves to work with the sewing machine, we've been working on hand sewing skills as well. Everything she tries, she will enter into the 4-H Fair this summer. She loves the fair!

One of her workboxes always has a hand sewing project going. This is the project from the Hearts and Trees Winter and Spring Kit.

One of the really nice things Amanda at Hearts and Trees has done for this kit is to provide some video and pdf tutorials for the kids. Check the link below for her easy instructions. R9 watched those the other day and did really nice job on her split stitch and blanket stitch. I thought it would be fun to show you some videos of R9 working on her owl.

Hearts and Trees Kit Help

The finished owl! She has some floss to trim, but her stitches are starting to look a lot better- much tighter than this time last year when she was working on a pincushion. This project was finished in two sittings just to give you an idea.

I7 would like to make his own owl, so I'm setting up a box for him with the pattern and felt. Next up for R9 is felt food from Bugga Bugs. She wants to start with prize winning pies. We have all the materials necessary to complete this. We were studying the instructions together yesterday. These all require a combination of machine and hand sewing and some new things to us like darts. Looks like it will be a lot of fun!

Story Starters- More Adventures in Writing

Recently, I was inspired to pick up Story Starters by Karen Andreola. The subtitle reads, "Helping Children Write Like They've Never Written Before."

Basically, Karen gives you tips on how to work with these story starters with different age and ability kids. She has written short stories without endings and the kids have to finish the story. She gives you really good suggestions for getting the kids to look over their work when they are done the initial writing. For example, one of her checklist items might be to check verbs. The kids have to decide if they are using descriptive action words. When you read the kids' work below you'll see fairly good use of verbs and they didn't really need to change them when given the opportunity. R9 used the word "scurried" on her first time through. What a great word.

This day our story was about a boy who cared for chickens and how he had an especially good, prize-winning hen. On a winter evening, he misses a few chickens when he puts the rest in the hen house and as you can see from the picture below, a fox takes off with his chicken. The kid were left to decide what happens next. So, the story text and the detailed pictures draw the students in and then they get to provide the ending.


E11 loves to write. He typically tells an imaginative tale. I was curious to see if he would enjoy finishing a short story. The results were pretty good.
"Oh no!", thought Walter as he ran outside to see what the noise was. "Maybe a fox caught one."

As soon as he set foot outside, he ran toward the cause of the commotion. There were two chickens on top of the snow mound he had shoveled, trying to escape a starving fox. At this point, the fox was trying to climb up the mound, but every time he tried snow came sliding down on top of his head.

Walter ran toward the fox waving a stick and yelling, "Shoo fox, shoo!"

In one swift movement the fox ran up the mound, grabbed a hen, and ran off into the night.

Walter arrived at the chicken coop panting hard. He checked to see which hen went missing. The missing chicken was Hilda! Walter couldn't believe it. He searched and searched but couldn't find her. Miserably, Walter ushered the last chicken in and closed the door. Then Walter went inside.

As Walter entered the house, his father and sister asked him at the same time, "What happened?" He told them and went to bed.

In the morning, when he went to feed the chickens, there was one chicken who gobbled up a lot more than the others.

"Hilda!", exclaimed Walter. He wondered how he had missed her.



R9 loved this approach! The story takes you in pretty far before letting you go with your own imagination. She wrote the rough draft and they both shared it with us before doing the editing on another day.

Walter jumped out of bed and ran to get Dad. He realized Dad would stop him from going out, so he went out himself.

His sister looked outside and saw a fox. She ran to get Walter. He was not in his room. She looked out the window again. This time she saw Walter pick up a stone and hurl it at the fox, but it missed.

Walter began to run, but the snow slowed him down. His sister ran out to help. There were no sticks, no stones- nothing to throw. Just snow- snowball snow. Walter made snowballs and threw them. The fox was startled. It dropped the chicken and scurried off.

Walter put the chickens in the safety of the hen house. He and his sister went to bed and they never said a word to anyone about it.

Homeschool Science Fair

Our local homeschool group science fair was on Saturday night. It's just a chance for us all to come together and share what we've been doing in our homeschools.

We decided to pull together a summary on our study of caves. The kids did a great job! It was a good review of the material for them and it was nice to see all the other projects.

We gathered some spelunking gear and we had my laptop showing the clip of the fun cave exploration on Dragonfly TV. Plus, we shared the books we read that had caves. Of course, we shared our cave facts.

When a parent came to look at the map of cave locations in the US, she commented on how funny it was that they were clustered together to which R9 commented, "Well they are all together like that because that is where the limestone deposits are." I love it when they learn!

We have turned our attention to volcanoes as we've been studying Italy and reading Red Sails to Capri which has us transitioning from caves to volcanoes (there's a beautiful cave on this volcanic island- I know....smooth on the hand off!) as we continue our earth science focus this year.

Homeschooling Joy

Where else can you read in a tunnel?

Or do geography wearing your loaded Batman gauntlet?

Angelo: Vocabulary

Sometimes when there is a big list of words for a book or study, I type them up and cut the words and definitions into strips. Then the kids can spend time trying to figure out how they match up.

The older kids are pretty good at doing them without help. I7 got some dictionary lessons this time so he could look up the words he couldn't match.

I7 matches up his vocabulary.

Sometimes we put them in pockets as pictured above and glue the pockets into the notebooks. Other times I have the kids glue them down matched onto paper to put in the notebook. There's value in both. If you leave them loose it makes for a nice review to do it again.

How do you handle vocabulary at your house?

Monopoly Math

My kids have been playing an extraordinary amount of Monopoly lately. It wasn't so long ago that we pulled it from the shelf of games reserved for "grown ups". Dan and I have a shelf of games from when we were first married with no kids. Monopoly was there along with Scrabble, Clue, Pente, and Master Detective. These were the games I brought with me from home when we got married. We didn't play them much aside from Scrabble. Then there are our group type games like Pictionary (Ok those were mine too) and Trivial Pursuit stuff like that. Now they are old enough to start enjoying those older "kid" games and we pull them off and introduce them now and then.

Our kids love Monopoly, Jr. We have a dinosaur version, but one day we thought you know...they are ready for the real deal and we pulled out the Monopoly game. This one was mine when I was their age so it's the a 1980s version of the game. Nothing fancy...you would not believe the versions you can get now.

They play this so often that if they are left idle for more than a few minutes, someone suggests playing a game. Did you know that you can auction off properties if someone lands on them and doesn't want to buy it? This gets the properties sold really quickly allowing you to get down to real estate business. R9 is a formidable foe. Girl can play the Monopoly! The game pictured above was begun before church this morning and is still there waiting.

I think we can all agree that Monopoly is a great way to practice math skills. But which ones exactly? Well, I decided to put our older kids to work to give me the list. We did a math journal entry on Monopoly Math.

E11's list

R9's list

What sorts of math skills do avid players use?

• addition and subtraction- check the list for specifically when and how these skills are used
  
• multiplication and division- used in a few ways. Check the list
  
• using percents- when calculating the interest owed on un-mortgaging property

A month or so ago, my kids had the chance to play Monopoly Electronic Banking Edition with some homeschool friends. Did you even know this game exists?? It uses modern icons for playing pieces- one is a Segway! You deal in millions of dollars and use a debit card only. You purchase things like stadiums. Instead of Railroads and utilities, you have airports and internet/cell phone providers. All pretty slick, but with the use of the banking machine there is a lot less math going on.
Do your kids play Monopoly? What is a game your kids play often?

TOS Crew Review: Pandia Press

As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, I was given a copy of Pandia Press' Chemistry Curriculum entitled REAL Science Odyssey- Chemistry. I had a choice of biology, earth science or chemistry and I let the publisher choose outside of biology (just because that is what my certification is in). So, chemistry it is!

The program is set up to have a read aloud story which presents a concept followed by 1-4 (or more) hands on activities to help develop the concept. Each lab exercise emphasizes the scientific method and comes with worksheets.

Topics Covered in REAL Science Odyssey- Chemistry include:

• What is Chemistry?
• Atoms
• Periodic Table of Elements
• Molecules
• Matter
• Chemical Reactions

Each of those topics has many sub-topics to fill the big picture of each concept. On this page you can see a listing of the activities and the materials list.

This is chemistry level I and is best suited for grades 2-5. Each year is a complete one year science curriculum.

Chemistry Level I is available in print form at Rainbow Resource for $38.50. The ebook student pages are available through the Pandia Press site for $38.99 and provide interactive fields for use with the computer. The ebook is intended for those who already own the manual.

I think this is a terrific curriculum! It is very similar to the way I taught physical science to 6th graders. We used to see what the kids knew about a concept through labs, develop correct conceptions with more labs, and finally we applied the new knowledge in still more labs.

It is designed to be part of the classical approach to homeschooling providing a one year discipline experience. I would use this as I need it as another tool in my science teaching toolbox. There a lot of fun hands on activities in this program with easy to follow instructions which typically yield good results every time.

If you want a full year long science curriculum or just want to add to your science arsenal, you cannot miss with this program. It gets my certified science educator seal of approval and I'm looking forward to using it with my kids!

TOS Crew Review: Olde World Style Maps

As a member of the TOS Crew I was given two free downloads of Homeschool in the Woods- Olde World Style Modern and Ancient World Maps. The World Maps download is sold for $18.95 and the US set is also $18.95. If you buy a combo download then the cost is $28.95.

The World Map download contains over 130 maps and over 40 bonus notebooking pages. What kind of notebooking pages?

• explorer pages
• geography fact sheets
• color flags
• geography terms
• flora and fauna sheets
• world graphics
• history timeline
• holiday page
• itinerary page
• languages
• recipes page
• map keys
• missionary pages
• religious history
• report pages for country and generic
  
• 7 Ancient Wonders
  

The US Maps include 180 maps and a state fact sheet for each state.

• The state fact sheets have items to color and research.
• State flag in colors
• US Historical Maps

Each map whether it's US or World come several ways. There is a completely labeled version with physical features, there's a map with no labels which includes physical features, and there's a plain outline map.

I love the products from Homeschool in the Woods and this is no exception. I will use these maps with enthusiasm and I encourage you to check them out for yourself!

TOS Crew Review: Homeschool Library Builder

Homeschool Library Builder is an online resource for purchasing books to match any literature based homeschool curriculum such as (our favorite) Five in a Row, Sonlight, Tapestry of Grace, Ambleside Online, and Beautiful Feet, etc.

You can line your bookshelves with your favorite books at a low cost. It's easy to scour the online shelves by curriculum

Membership to Homeschool Library Builder is free and it has benefits. For every purchase you make at HSLB, you earn book points. 15 book points is equal to $1 in your account which you can use toward future purchases with HSLB. In addition, with their referral program you can earn extra book points just by telling your friends about the site.

To check out how the website works, I looked up a new world history book I'd like to add to our homeschool library. You can do a normal search by using the search "box". You can search by genre or you can search by curriculum.

While I think this is a great resource and I love that it's free, I couldn't find anything I was looking for- because likely it isn't there. The search is easy to use and I tried several avenues to get there all coming up with nothing. Just to be sure it wasn't me, I looked up some tried and true items in the Five in a Row category. This confirmed for me that it's a matter of volume. They simply do not offer everything you can think of.

Homeschool Library Builder is definitely worth checking out when you begin a search for books. The membership is free and you can earn book points good toward purchases. Just know that the inventory is not such that you will find everything and anything.

Bird Experiment 1: What do Our Backyard Birds Eat?

Do you get Homeschool Enrichment Magazine? They always have fun features like Inventions that Changed the World, Unit Study, Adventures in History and Try It! among others. This month in the Try It! feature they have an experiment you can do to find out about the birds in your backyard.




E11 took to the computer to make his data chart. He started with an excel type spreadsheet in Open Office and then decided to switch to a word processing version to make a table. Not sure why all of his table isn't showing...I'll keep working on that mystery. For now here's a peek. He has a grid for the whole thing though it does not appear that way.

Bird Experiment Spreadsheet


Then we put the food sources out in the yard. As you can see we spread them out and I threw in our crocus too. Yes...one crocus. But it is lovely.
We set this up yesterday morning and this morning the food was gone. Except for the bread crumbs. No one like those!

The only problem...we didn't see anything take the food. Since our data collection included details of which birds like what, this is a problem for our young scientists.

So, today we are regrouping and trying to figure out how to modify our experiment to get the observations we want.

We're also predicting what stole the whole suet cake. My money is on the crows. Today we should keep our eye out for an overly energetic crow which has a taste for apple suet. Maybe I need to spring for the suet cage at $1.47. Ahem.

Science at the Local Science Center

Our local science center offered a science class for homeschoolers last week and there will be another one next month. Nothing amazing really. They actually used materials from a department at the local university which has a lending lab. I've borrowed materials from there before though I hadn't known initially that is what they were using for this program.

I thought it would be fun to take the kids and have some time out. Interestingly, they seemed very concerned with what the kids took away from the time (and insisted on before and after sheets be filled out), but didn't really facilitate much during the lesson that would have changed answers on the sheet. I find that highly amusing and I'm still trying to decide whether or not to engage them on that issue. A fun little diversion I might pursue. On occasion it's fun to pull out the science educator in me. The one with a Masters degree in curriculum and instruction secondary ed with a focus on assessment. Clearly, their assessment is not going to yield the results they appeared to be looking for. I should leave it, but you know...it's going to BUG me if I don't say anything.

Probably the most valuable thing was using the spring scales.

The lab sheets- I wish I had time and energy for consulting with places like this to produce appropriate lab data packets for their kits. Really. I've borrowed them before and noticed that they could use an overhaul.

They gathered data and graphed the results.

After class we visited the museum.

J4 LOVES the water table in the 4 and under area...every soon he will be 5 and we'll be all graduated from this corner. How is that possible???

Our kids LOVE the discovery room which has kits to try out. This one is a magnet box.

I7 tried the fingerprinting.

E11 went with tangrams.

R9 loves to fold paper and found the origami box.

The lesson at the homeschoolers class was on weight and force. I wouldn't say it was new stuff for our kids, but the process was fun and that was great. One thing I really liked about the class time is that it wasn't all about them teaching the kids. It was about the kids discovering by reading the directions and following along (great for the kids...not so great when it comes to assessing what they learned especially given what they were asking. The group wants to find out how effective the class time was and I'm afraid it won't tell them much positive. Just sayin'.). They practiced good skills and E11 liked it because it was for a wide age-range and he was worried it would be too slow for him. The kids all worked at their own pace with only guidance from the volunteers helping out.

Next month is a lesson on density. We'll probably go and in the meantime I'll check out the lending library and see if there's anything else we can just try out at home.