Tiny gifts that keep on giving.

After a few years of homeschooling, it becomes more than a weekday activity and turns into a way of life.  It’s like Christmas in June every year when the curriculum comes in the mail; opening packages from art supply places, new packages of sketch books, and little stacks of books all waiting to be read.  Beyond the art supplies are art kits, where you can build anything from a catapult to a tiny brick building to creating beautiful friendship bracelets for your friends!   I like to get the most bang for my buck, so I often pack the best of these away for birthday and Christmas gifts!  New drawing pencils end up in the stocking, new sketchbooks end up under the tree tied with ribbons and perhaps a chapter book tucked in on top.  Education is a 24/7 thing around here!

Here is a list of educational gifts that I think would make wonderful Stocking Stuffers for some always learning kiddos. 

FOR THE YOUNGEST - ages 2 - 6

My children like to use playdough or clay when I am reading chapter books.  I have found that it helps with their dictations later if they are listening intently while working creatively.  Homemade playdough is cheap, easy and modifiable in SO many ways.  Add a little essential oils to your playdough and you have a whole other sensory experience for your little one!  Lavender for relaxation, orange for uplifting and alert… so many possibilities! 

Here’s a few that we love:

Gingerbread Playdough recipe - Smells awesome!  It may inspire more than a playdough baking session.  Just a warning!

Candycane playdough recipe - I haven’t done this one, but I have made peppermint!  That is uplifting and always makes me feel clean afterwards.  Even when the playdough is still under my nails.

Pumpkin Spice Playdough recipe - Smells like pumpkin pie.  Are you hungry yet?  Seriously, this stuff is awesome! 

If you are not up for making your own, my personal favorite for my kids is Mama K’s Play Clay!  The aromatic smells that Mama K uses in her clay are amazing! 

Enjoy some fun pattern recognition games with the Pluck Carrot Play Set!   Who wouldn’t want to see this tucked in a stocking with a sweet little bunny puppet or two.

 

And speaking of puppets!   What a great learning tool!  They create a space that is a bit removed from being human, so even the quietest of children will start talking when handed a puppet.  Besides, there isn’t anything cuter than a stuffed face sticking out of the top of the stocking on Christmas morning.  Why not make it one they can learn with?

FOR THE MIDDLES - Ages 5 - 11

If I had to pick ONE toy for children this age it would be playsilks!   They can be a covering for a fort under the table or a silken robe for a Greek warrior.  They have so many incredible uses that each  time your child picks them up they can create a whole new world!   The best variety for the expense has got to be Esty.com.  There are tons of different vendors that make some of the most beautiful playsilk creations!  (Another great thing about playsilks is they fold up into TINY parcels that can be stuffed into a small toybox, or *gasp* a stocking.   

Taking the silks one step further is dress up.  They can create whole worlds for themselves with a simple dress up frock and a wooden sword. Nova Naturals has a great selection of earth friendly gifts that can complete any dress up wardrobe for a little knight or fairy that you may know. 

Gift your kids even more imagination play with wooden and felt food!  Have your little girl make you up a tea party, or your son cook you up a pizza!   This felt pizza from Mellissa and Doug looks like tons of fun!

 

FOR THE OLDEST - Ages 11 - 18

As the kids get older, educational gifts get harder to find that are not electronic.  And if it needs a cord or batteries, it’s probably expensive!  Here are a few gifts that you can tuck into those stockings with out breaking the bank for the oldest kids in your clan. 

Start off the new year right with some creative Writing Prompt Cubes!   These fun story starters would be great to have a sit-in with my teen and tween and just listen to what comes after “One day I want to visit…”

Learning a handcraft is a great TV free pastime for older children!   This felt ball set from Nova Naturals would be a great gift to keep any tweens hands busy and felt balls are wonderful for the youngers.  Perhaps they could make them for their younger siblings?  (There are many more in the ‘crafts’ section at Nova Naturals that would make a great gift for any kiddo with busy hands.)

Magazine subscriptions - online or in paper - are a great stocking stuffer for older kids and teens. 

New Moon is a writing magazine for teen girls written by and even edited by other girls around the globe!

Zoobooks - All my kids love reading the fun facts that are in the Zoobooks magazines each month.  Grandparents in our family have paired Zoobooks with a NorthWest Trek membership for the past few years and I have watched the kids pour over each magazine multiple times. 

I hope this post got your wheels turning about what you can give to those little learners in your family.  If you have any other great learning gift ideas, please pass them along in the comments! 

Blessings for a wonderful holiday!

7 lies about homeschoolers - debunked!

Ll is for Lego and Mm is for Monsters

I haven’t been taking pictures of our preschool curriculum through the holidays.  Things just got overwhelming and keeping up with the pictures was just more than I could do for a while.  We have been plugging along through the alphabet and we are now happily on Ll and Mm just in time for Logan’s Monster 5th birthday party! 

There are SO many resources for curriculum that has to do with Legos and Monsters for the letters Ll and Mm that I couldn’t help but post for your enjoyment, even if I didn’t take pictures of our lego and monster adventures for this week. 

Ll is for Lego resources:

Lego Lapbook from Walking by the Way

A great lego counting idea from Pinterest

This great starting early addition and subtraction worksheet from The Kent Chronicles (If your child isn’t there yet, you could possibly make your own using lego blocks and a scanner.)

Here is an awesome set of Lego Bingo cards from BigDandMe.

Lego.com has a new set of instructions for a cool project that they post each month! 

Mm is for Monsters resources:

Blow paint monster idea from Pinterest.

We used a ton of the pages from this free Monster unit study pack at Oopsy Daisy.

Here are some instructions on how to make your own monster toy from Fiskar Crafts.

How to make a Monster Bean Bag Toss from Lil Luna.

Wonderful ideas from Primary Graffiti for having the kids make their own monster and working with descriptive words.

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Enjoy! 

We are traveling around the world for Christmas!

This year we are traveling around the world for Christmastime!  I am excited to see what types of traditions happen in other cultures during this magical time of year.  For some (Northern Hem) it is the coldest darkest portion of the year, but for others (Australia) it is mid Summer!  The traditions are just as varied as the weather this time of year and I am excited to share that with my kids. 

Our Christmas Around the World advent list:

1. Put up lights with daddy

2. Pagoda Manger & Fried Wonton cookies (China)

3. Fish tree ornament (Japan)

4. Metryoshka doll Christmas card (Russia)

5. Pamander oranges & put your shoes out for St Nicholas Day (Great Britain)

6. *Small gifts left in their shoes overnight* Christmas Party Crackers & Wassail (Great Britain)

7. Straw Ornaments and hidden bean cake! (Scandinavia)

8. Gingerbread Manger Scene (Germany) *only cooking and cooling*

9. Gingerbread Manger Scene (Italy) and making a St Lucy Wreath

10. Getting our Christmas Tree

11. Journey to Bethlehem!!

12. Shopping with daddy

13. Write love notes to parents to open on Christmas Eve (Greece/Italy)

14. Make a Christmas drum (Africa)

15. Make Christmas Stars out of whatever we can (sticks, straw, beads and wire... all kinds. Philippines.)

16. Celery Rose print wrapping paper & making S’mores (Australia)

17. *This starts the weekend of lights that leads right up to Hanukkah* Zoo lights w/ hot cider

18. Fantasy Lights w/ cocoa

19. Driving through Gem Heights looking at lights w/ warm honeyed milk

20. *Happy Hanukkah!* Dreidle for Chocolate coins and Challah bread. (USA)

21. We are sending a Christmas tree to a friend! (Canada) *cookies to neighbors*

22. Making paper poinsettias (Mexico)

23. Sawdust Ornaments (Guatemala)

24. Family Christmas Movie

25. Open Stockings!!

We got some ideas from our curriculum “Children Around the World” from Winter’s Promise, but many other great ideas come from free websites.  My two favorites:

http://www.whychristmas.com/cultures/

http://www.teachingheart.net/worldmas.html

Links for Star Wars Unit Study

Online Games

Star Wars games online free

Star Wars Trivia Game

Online Star Wars Word Search

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How to Draw

How to draw R2D2 (easy)

How to draw a Jawa (Med)

How to draw Chewbaka (not so easy)

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Printables

A whole slew of Star Wars coloring pages

A printable Darth Vader paper box craft

Jedi Printable Word Search

Printable Star Wars Masks

Make Luke and Leia paper dolls

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Books

Star Wars Crafts

The Star Wars Party Book

Wookiee Cookies: A Star Wars Cookbook

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Food Crafts

Star Wars rice crispy treats

Han Solo in Jello-ite

Star Wars Week ~ Day 2

Between National Star Wars day (‘May the 4th be with you’) and today (National Astronomy Day) we have found some really wonderful resources for Star Wars week.   Today was ‘droid day’ and we got to study robotics.  There was a robotics class at the library this afternoon from 1 – 3 and the older kids got to make a robot and try to get it to follow the program that was intended. 

The library lady told me about the class when I went to pick up all the Star Wars books I had on hold.  Perfect timing huh? 

It was supposed to go across the floor, pick something up, and then bring it back by remote control.  They got as far as getting it to pick stuff up by the time their hour was up!  I was impressed!  (and they had a blast!)

After getting back home I had them do a little Star Wars Trivia, and then some of their other school work (math, and reading).  After they were done with that, they each got to listen to more of Star Wars radio.  This time, I had Cyan color a droid coloring page and Alex color an X-wing while taking notes (because the radio story is different than the movies) on the radio version of Episode 4.

Then I had each of them do an online Star Wars puzzle on StarWars.com.

After this, we had a bit more robotic fun with the Snap Circuits.  This time it was Cyan’s turn to choose a set and do it:

It works!

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Day 3 is Monday because tomorrow instead of Star Wars day we are celebrating Mother’s Day!  ;)  Happy Learning!

Star Wars Unit Study ~ Day 1

We started our school day out with a lunch fit for any Star Wars fan!

Top row: moon of Endor pesto pizza, blue Bantha milk, "That's not a moon!" pizza

Bottom row: carrots (yeah. They're just carrots), white chocolate snowflake from the planet Hoth, "Banana The Hut"

Then we moved on to school work.  This is set up as a workbox system unit study.  6 to 10 boxes per day are dedicated to our Star Wars study.  The other boxes have their regular school stuff in them.  These are the Star Wars bits.  :)

Day 1 for Cyan (grades 2 – 5)

1. Star Wars easy wordsearch (Feel free to copy and print the picture for the wordsearch.  I still have not been able to figure out how to attach a PDF file.)

2. Story Starter *Moving to Hoth* – This was split between three boxes.

Your mom and you are moving to the planet of Hoth. You don’t want to go but are trying to make the best of it. Your mom says you can bring one pet. What would it be? What supplies would you need to move it to Hoth? What would happen if I changed Hoth to Endor? How would it be different?

• a. Hoth = Antarctica
• b. Endor = Northern CA Forest
• * I printed out three sheets of lined paper appropriate for her writing level from Donna Young and printed the ‘Moving to Hoth’ story starter and stapled them all together. 
• * Today we were focusing on Hoth.  (Endor will be tomorrow)  I had Cyan watch the Brain Pop on the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the Tundra.  This is what the planet of Hoth was based off of.  The movie was shot in New Zealand and so I focused on the Antarctic animals with my examples but she could pick any cold weather critter she wanted. Then I had her pick an animal that was suitable for living in those conditions out of the Animal Encyclopedia.  She chose an Ermine. 
• * After she had picked her animal I had her write out the story.  She could illustrate if she wanted (she wanted).

3. We got the copy of the original Star Wars radio show for them to listen to while doing our craft for today.  Cyan’s craft was to cut out a Leia paper doll and her outfit from Hoth. 

 

Day 1 for Alex (grades 6 – 9)

1. I printed out a premade word search for this one.  It can be found here.

2. Story Starters *Robotic Hand* – This portion was two workboxes.

You wake up and you realize you have a robotic hand. How does it feel to have a robotic hand? As you lay in your hospital bed being looked over by your medical droids, things start to come back to you slowly. Who are you and how did you lose your human hand?

Of course, with Alex being so much older, I required much more of him for the writing assignment portion of the lesson.  I gave him the more abstract Story Starter and I also gave him quite a bit more leeway to put in what he wanted.  I made it due at the end of the week (Monday for us) and just required that he write it in cursive (something he has been working on).  I did have him watch the Brain Pop on robotics and robots to get his mind working in the right direction. 

3. Snap Circuits – I had him do the first project in a borrowed copy of the snap circuits game. 

4. I gave him instructions on how to fold an Origami X Wing fighter to do while we were listening to the Star Wars Radio Show.

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More fun tomorrow!!!

Something for Halloween

Carve a Virtual Pumpkin

Planning a poetry class

I have been thinking about this all summer long. My kids and I had SO much fun with Small World's Wordsmithery lessons last year, that I took that inspiration and turned it into a class for our home school group! I am crazy excited about the way the classes are writing up.

If you haven't done the Wordsmithery class over at Small World, check it out! The lessons are clear and easy to teach, and each of the sessions have 4 mini writing sessions that you do through out the week that take a total of 15 minutes each, but turn out SUCH great results!

Anyhow... more on my class. As much of it is inspired by Wordsmithery, the lessons are set up in pretty much the same order. However, since I will only get the kids once a week (and can't expect a ton of homework to be accomplished) I am compacting the lessons into two hour segments. The first part will be the 'lesson' part where the kids get to hear about the rules of the day and the types of words we will be dealing with. The second is the 'project' portion of the class, where the kids get to do some of their own writing and a neat project that goes along with each type of word (very much like this Wordsmithery lesson).

I am CRAZY excited about it, and can't wait to share with you guys what we do for each day and some of the writings of this talented group of kiddos I have the honor to teach.

Idaho Day One

After testing today (which went much better than yesterday), we did our unit on Idaho. I talked about where potatoes grew, and why they were so prevalent there, and then we did our sheets from the USA book on Idaho.

For each state I used a mix of the book series in this post, and the worksheets in this post. These are the extra resources I used for Idaho in particular:

Video:
School House Rock - Earth

Books:
Hello USA series - Idaho
Eat Your Way Through the USA (Section on Idaho of course)

Websites:

Incredible Edible Idaho - Potatoes - A PDF file of the life cycle of a potato plant and potato nutrition facts. Even has a coloring sheet.

Idaho Dept of Agriculture Food of the Month - Includes all the different foods that grow well in Idaho and has a PDF file on most of them.

Recipes:

For the Idaho unit we made baked Idaho Russet potatoes for dinner with nitrate free bacon and herbs from the garden on top. We made fresh asparagus, because it is in season in Idaho right this second, which we smothered with the last of the cheese we got from the Tillamook factory (white cheddar pepper corn cheese).

Then Alex made Potato Chip Cookies:

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups crushed potato chips

1 cup crushed nuts

1 pound butter

2 cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

powdered sugar

1) Mix together all ingredients except powdered sugar.

2) Bake at 325* for 15 minutes. Cool.

3) Roll in powdered sugar.

We split the recipe in half (making it a math lesson as well) and then he made them. They are crunchy and VERY sweet... not considering they are made with potato chips, not bad at all.

Logan and Cyan making the asparagus:

Resources for California State unit study

For each state I used a mix of the book series in this post, and the worksheets in this post. These are the extra resources I used for California in particular:

Books:
This Land Called America - California

Videos:
Over California
Homeward Bound - The Incredible Journey

Websites:
Organic California Walnuts - History of the black walnut and the walnuts of California.

Castroville Artichoke Festival - We were ALMOST there for it. We left the day before the festival. But we ate at least 4 artichokes each in honor of the season. (Another quick food fact of CA, I have never paid less than $1.50 for an avocado... there that is SPENDY! lol! I was in avocado heaven!)

Oakland California's Gold Rush

Dairy Council of CA kids games - We saw a LOT of happy California dairy cows. It is amazing how much land they have!

Recipes:

(frankly, you could make just about anything and use ingredients from California. But these are the few we chose because we saw them when we were down there. In fact, we made lemonade down there several times from the Meyer Lemon tree in my mom's back yard.)

ARTICHOKE CRAB DIP

1 c. crab meat
1 c. fresh Parmesan cheese
1 c. Hellman's real mayonnaise
8 oz. can artichoke hearts, diced
1 sm. can water chestnuts
4 oz. sour cream or yogurt

Bake in shallow dish at 400 degrees until cheese bubbles. Serve hot. Toast - to go with dip: Sliced French bread (sliced finely), toasted; or English muffin, toasted in oven on both sides, cut into squares. Serve dip on toasts.

Strawberry Shortcake from All Recipes

Perfect Lemonade: Boil 2 cups of water in a med saucepan. Add 1 cup of sugar while mixing with a whisk. Mix until dissolved. Once you can not see any sugar in the syrup, place ice cubes into the pot to cool it down. Add this to the juice of 4 Meyer lemons (approximately 1 cup of juice) in a pitcher, and fill the pitcher the rest of the way with cold water or ice.

More things we saw growing in the California sun included:

Walnuts

Almonds:

Oranges:

Avocados

Lettuce and Lettuce mixes

Broccoli... you name it. It's there somewhere.

Resources for Oregon State unit study

Oregon is only a little ways off, but we got a lot of information for our sister state. For each state I used a mix of the book series in this post, and the worksheets in this post. These are the extra resources I used for Oregon State in particular:

Books:
Apples to Oregon

Videos:
Oregon, State of Wonder

Dirty Jobs with Mike Roe: Cranberry Farmer - (recap here, you can find it on Netflix or at your local library)

Bill Nye, the Science Guy - Volcanoes (talks about the ring of fire and Crater Lake briefly. Good for all the Pacific States.)

Websites:
Crater Lake National Park teacher resources - This website is for teachers who are close enough to go to Crater Lake. If you can, you should go. It's amazing! But if not, skip down to the Jr Rangers portion at the bottom of the resources.

Tillamook Cheese Factory - We were lucky enough to tour this facility while we were on our trip. What a neat place! And, they have the best ice cream EVER. :) Watching the cheese be made was fascinating.

Oregon's Cranberry Network - Fun recipes and information on how cranberries are grown and harvested. Amazing process! Reminds me a lot of how rice is grown and harvested.

The Story of Henderson Lewelling - The story that is behind the book 'Apples to Oregon' is that of Henderson Lewelling. He is the man that brought apple trees to the West Coast. He and his brother were the pioneers of the now famous Oregon and Washington apple movement. Although WA grows more apples, in Lewelling's day, Washington WAS Oregon. So we won't hold it against him. ;)

Recipes:

Macaroni and Cheese Cheese Cheese

Paula Dean's Pear Crisp

Resources for Washington State Unit Study

For each state I used a mix of the book series in this post, and the worksheets in this post. Here are the extra resources I used for the Washington State unit study:

Videos:
Over Washington
Discoveries American Series - Washington
Washington State - A Scenic Tour
Bill Nye the Science Guy - Volcanoes (Talks about Mt St Helen's, the islands of Hawaii, and even Mt Delani National park in Alaska. Good for all the Pacific States.)

Books:
Weird Washington
E is for Evergreen - A Washington Alphabet

Websites:
All about WA state - a site that has state facts, state symbols, and other resource links.

FEMA for kids - Mt St Helen's safety and information.

About.com/Washington State - Tons of links (have not checked them all) about WA state and activities for kids. Great resource!

Apple Hangman - Just for fun, but each answer is a different kind of apple!

Recipe for WA:
Grandma Ole's Apple Pie
(of course!)

(Because we live here, these were limited. I didn't think we needed to spend a lot of time on WA state. But it was neat to see a few of these things. I learned some facts about our state I never knew before.)

United States of America

As homeschoolers, we pull educational opportunities from the oddest things. Everything from roadkill that we pass on the way to a field trip, to a beautiful needle point sent by the inlaws can turn into a full blown unit study.

Last week I realised that my kids may not know where we are going for vacation. We have studied the rivers of Egypt and Ancient Rome, but they may not know the rivers we have to cross to get to California! So I jumped, nose deep, into setting up a unit study for the United States.

For now, we are just doing the Pacific States... as those are the ones we will be visiting next month. But I made the books cover all 50 states in depth. This means that it took an entire ream of paper, and two black ink cartridges before I was done... but it was well worth it. :) Here's how I did it:

For the covers, I googled 'United States of America' under the images search. I chose different images for each of the kids because there are some big differences in the work I am asking of each of them, (although many of their pages will be the same) and I wanted the covers to reflect the level of work I expected.

In Cyan's book I mostly had a set of these three pictures to introduce the states. "Where Is ...?" from Homeschool Share, the State Facts Pages from Crayola Coloring Sheets, and the State Flower and State Bird pages from Homeschool Share Geography Resources. In the beginning of her book there are a few other sheets: the 7 continents, where America is in the world, and where the USA is in North America. I also included copy sheets for our address, pages to draw a picture of her house and common plants of our area (which is great, because we have at least 5 of the 'state flower' blooming in our yard right now), a large color map of the United States, and a couple of pages on our countries flag.

In Alex's book, there are all of these pages and more. There are pages on government, some on famous people from the different states, question and answer sheets on the continents, the countries of North America, and regions of our country as well. The flag sheets along with flag etiquette and how to fold a flag... I even included some sheets to write poetry about America.

On the back of both books, I added a picture of all of the state flags (from Google images) onto card stock and I asked the kids to refer back to this when coloring the flag sheets so they are using the correct colors.

I also went on Enchanted Learning (I have a membership) and picked up a page on the regions of the US. I used this as a guide and divider for the books. I started with the Pacific States, moving from Washington, Oregon, California, and on to Alaska and Hawaii and moving across the country in sections, from top to bottom.

I organized the sections regionally so the kids can remember the states locaion in relation to other state locations. (This has always helped me remember.) It also is helpful because many of the states that are close together, have similar attributes or famous products in common. Such as the apples from Washington and Oregon.

I have been thinking about this unit study for a long time. Not specifically doing anything... but just knowing that something about the geography and history of our country was coming sometime before I was done with 'schooling' them. We have many resources and I borrowed a few more from a friend that I have found to be really helpful.

Games:

The Scrambled States of America game

10 Days in the USA

Books:

Smart About the Fifty States

Apples to Oregon (which, btw, has an AWESOME free unit study from here that goes along with it)

E is for Evergreen

My America: A Poetry Atlas for the United States

This is a page out of the book "Smart About the Fifty States".

It suddenly seems as though everything we are doing revolves around Geography and History. The grains of the world study is going well and we are identifying the continents that these grains are commonly used on. We have a history class that just had a field trip with a real archaeologist this morning and watched him make a spear head out of obsidian. And then this afternoon we spent talking about the birth of professional apple fruit tree production in Washington and Oregon with Henderson Luelling. I think my coolest moment in the day is when I could share that the Gravenstein apple was one of the varieties that Henderson Luelling brought over in his covered wagon 160 years ago, and we have one IN OUR YARD!

Somedays, I just LOVE being a homeschooler. :)

The Toymaker

Archiving Emails I came across one I hadn't really looked at before... And WOW! I love this site! My older kids will have a lot of fun with these paper toys. :)

The Toymaker