Projects and fun

We had 2 great projects recently that I wanted to share.

First is the Thanksgiving menu planning project.  April's assignment was to plan a Thanksgiving menu and she had to keep the cost of the food for her whole family under $125 dollars.  So, we got out the store ads and she picked all the items we would need for dinner.  She cut them out and put it on a large piece of construction paper.  Then we added all the items up for the total, and if more than one item was needed she took that into account too.  For example, she had 3 bags of rolls, because she thought we'd go through 3 bags of rolls (she really likes rolls!). 

Her grand total was:  $96

Then she found out how much money was left over.  Thanksgiving dinner is expensive!  She couldn't believe that one whole dinner would cost as much as an American girl doll. (of course it's quite shocking to some that a doll would even cost that much, but we won't go into that)

A close up of some of the items she chose, and this is a pretty close guess to what we will be actually shopping for:


And finally, our second project, a preschool project:  To get him excited for his snowman boxes, the night before, we put a snowman puzzle together and drank hot chocolate with mini marshmallows in it. 



Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree

Workboxes!

Okay, we got back to it today, and here was our first day back into a full workbox day.  It was so great, and I was so excited to get all 12 boxes filled for both my preschooler and my 3rd grader!  They loved it!  Unfortunately we got through only half of the boxes today because my neighbor was in a pickle and I needed to watch her little girl.  That's okay, if we don't finish them they are there for the next day.  Sometimes life just happens.  It's important to finish all the boxes though and we really usually do.

Here are the 3rd grade boxes all filled:

Here are the preschool boxes filled.  I decided to just switch over all boxes from the trays for Aaron because he was ready.  They hold the things that he'll be working on better now too.  He has all snowman stuff in his boxes today:

 

Thanks to a great blog called Confessions of a Homeschooler, I found these great snowman: letter S activities.  They filled up all the boxes!  (sorry, all the boxes are mixed between the two in this post)

Preschool Snowman cutting practice:

3rd grade Creative and Critical thinking:  She worked on a November page.

 

3rd grade box: place value game, she rolled the dice and put x number of hundred dollars, ten dollars, and one dollars, whatever was rolled (materials are from her Saxon Math book, I just laminated them and added the game feature to make it more fun).

 

3rd grade box:  "P is for Pilgrim" book and activity, she had to make a thanksgiving menu.

 

Aaron doing his snowman cutting.

 

Preschool box:  Number and writing practice (he liked this)

 

Preschool box:  Build a snowman, for the bottom ball he glued mini marshmallows on the paper, and put the rest of the snowman together.

 

 3rd grade box:  Fun crafts for American Girl dolls.  This was requested as a fun box by April, so I put it in there.  She wanted to make play cookies to share with her doll.

 

Preschool box:  color the snowman picture.  I'm so impressed with his tracing of the S!

Preschool box:  Snowman patterns, he hasn't done this one yet.  This might be a little above him, we'll see.

 Preschool box:  Snowman puzzle

 

 Preschool box:  Snowman bottle cap word game (match the bottle caps to the letters to spell the word).

 

 Preschool box:  Snowman scavenger hunt

 

 Preschool box:  Build a snowman

 

 Preschool box:  S is for snowman with little round magnets.

 

 Preschool box:  Snowman numbers 1-10 to lay out on the floor.

 

 3rd grade box:  Thanksgiving on Thursday reading and vocabulary sheet.

 

 3rd grade box:  Add leaves to Thanks and Giving trees and write down 3 things you are thankful for and 3 things you have given to someone else.

 

 3rd grade box:  Kit, American Girl, Learns a lesson (a thanksgiving story) lapbook.  She is working on chapter 2 now.  (oh and the pens are her new special pens for lapbooking, I decided that her lapbooks needed some colorful writing, she liked this)

 

 3rd grade box:  Journal writing.  This is the only notebook I could find, not my first choice.  For some reason her journals keep disappearing.

 

 3rd grade box:  Sue Patrick's typing lessons, her first one!  We even have a type writer out now!

 

 3rd grade box:  Read it!  Draw it!  Solve it!  Just a word problem or puzzle to solve each day, love this book!

 

Also, she worked on a Saxon 4/5 math lesson too, I just didn't get a picture of it.

So, that's it for workboxes this week!  

Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree

What we did...

...this week.

April started her "Kit learns a lesson" story and lapbook.  We are reading the book aloud together, we sure like the American Girl stories.  This is a thanksgiving story.

It was so fun to get out the "old fashioned" typwriter.  I think she'll start using this for her typing practice.  In the Kit books, Kit likes to type up news reports of the things going on around her.  That inspired Miss A8 to ask for our typwriter that was up in the attic.  I climbed up there, heights and all! Oh what we'll do for a fun day of homeschool!

Mr. A1 was having a great time with these Thanksgiving window clings.  He would put them on and then pull them off.

More window cling fun.

This was Mr. A3's idea, he wanted to fold all my towels for me in my kitchen towel drawer.  He did pretty good, notice the nice stack over there :-)

Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree

Candy school

What do you do with lots of halloween candy, besides eat it?   Well, play with it of course!  I had been planning on doing this since before halloween to get rid of lots of candy that my kids don't really need to eat, and then I saw that walking by the way had put together worksheets and ideas I couldn't believe it!  It was exactly what I was thinking about doing without all the preparations, thanks walking by the way (don't know your name :-).

The kids had loads of fun, they sorted, counted, ate, experimented, ate, and did some writing too!  April loved doing the science experiments, and they kept asking to do more "candy school" even after we were all done.

Here they are getting ready by sorting it all:

Then she did a graph to see how much of each she had:

Here is one of the experiments:  the floating "m" experiment (we could have done floating "s's" too for skittles, but we didn't have any left)

Waiting for the M's to start floating (Yeah, the picture is out of order, oh well):

The caramel dissolving experiment:  put a caramel in hot water and one in cold water and see which one dissolves faster:
 

I had my preschooler make a candy wrapper letter c, which later I cut out and "wrapped" in contact paper:

Here he is making his candy wrapper c (again, not in order):

The float or sink candy experiment:

The acid (sourness) test of a candy:  We had no fun sour candy's to do this experiment on.  This is the most sour thing we had (a now and later) and it didn't even fizz very much.

Aaron decided to dump all his smarties in the water to see what they would do (he's a preschooler, he was having fun):  I was glad that he decided to do that with ALL the smarties then he won't eat them ;-)

But, before he dumped his smarties in the water, we had fun sorting them:



Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree

Blog changes and update

I've been trying to come up with a good name for our school and I think I finally have it!  ...As long as it takes...because sometimes it just takes a long time for us.  We learn at our own pace.  It may not be the pace that I'd always like, but eventually we get there as long as it takes.

Life came up a lot this week, as it seems to do a lot, hence the reason I decided to rename the blog "as long as it takes".  We didn't get a lot of school done, and it always makes me a little frustrated and worried when we don't get to do the things I hope/plan to do.  Actually, my biggest set back IS the planning part.  It seems that I don't always have the extra time I need to plan and prepare so then we have to wing it or just put it off until we can get around to it.

Workboxes--We are still doing workboxes but I am having some mixed feelings about them.  I still love the system, how they work, and the overall wonderfulness of them.  But, I have been struggling a little bit because I don't have the time to get them together!  Every night.  Or, I don't have all the materials/books needed.  I know that my Pink flyer would love to see them filled everyday but it just hasn't been happening.  I'm hoping to over come this, somehow.  As long as it takes...

Tot school--I am missing this time with my tot's lately.  It's hard with two tot's, especially the youngest tot.  He's into everything right now so even when I get something set up like tot trays, he just wants to pull it all on the floor.  So, I haven't been doing much here with them.  I am planning on doing a lot of itty bitty bookworm this month though...as long as it takes...

I'm looking forward to doing a lot of Thanksgiving activities, books, and learning this month as we lead up to Thanksgiving.  For my 3rd grader I am planning to have her do some activities to go along with "p is for pilgrim" and a lap book for "Kit: An American Girl, Kit learns a lesson about Thanksgiving".  I also hope to get to studying more about habitats for the little explorer's nature club.  We will!  We will certainly try, and that is my hope.  It just make take a little bit...as long as it takes!

Nature Explorer's club--squirrels

I had a hard time figuring out what to do with squirrels for the Nature explorer's club, but here's what we did:

First, we read "Those darn squirrels!" by Adam Rubin while sitting around a pretend campfire roasting marshmallows and seeing pretend squirrels all around us (hey, it's all I could come up with, it's too rainy here). They really liked this though! And, they got real creative with the kinds of squirrel's they saw. We sat on the pillows, and laughed while...

Reading this story....It's very cute:

Then we gathered the acorns from our nature box (a box we put all the stuff we collect on nature walks):

And rolled the acorns in some brown paint and then rolled the brown painted acorn all over a piece of paper:

Green flyer rolling his with his finger:

My 3rd grader discovered the inside of an acorn, she was surprised to find something inside:

Then my cuties colored a picture of a squirrel with brown and gray:

Here are all the painted rolled around acorns in the box after they were done:

A notebooking page about squirrels to put in her nature book was included in Pink flyer's workboxes last week. But, she still has yet to do it, we've had some things come up and she wasn't able to finish her boxes on Friday or today.

We are also going to cut out the squirrels that they colored and put feather's on them like the squirrels in the book did. They disquised themselves as birds so that the old man would like them. We just haven't gotten around to it yet.

That was fun, I would have liked to do more observing and outside stuff, but the weather here isn't always right. To see what others did about squirrels for nature club go here.