More Little House on the Prairie!

Can you believe it’s been five years since I wrote my first Little House on the Prairie post? I read it and am taken back to the simpler days of only having my first two kids to homeschool where we practiced a more relaxed homeschool approach. Now my oldest will be entering high school next year and the next is fully immersed in the world of junior high. How time flies. I’ve added four more kids to the mix of homeschooling with one more still to fit in the next couple of years. Gone are the relaxed, take-your-time days of yore. Now we are fully immersed in a heavy classical school load for the older two and, while the younger ones still have fun and are covering a lot of the same material as the first two, my schedule is much more structured with this next group of younger kids as I have to make sure there is enough mommy teacher time to go around to meet all the needs. Hence the sound of crickets on this here blog!

We are on round two of our history cycle wrapping up modern history this year. We began the year just post Civil War and started right in on Pioneers and the Homestead Act with my younger children. This, of course, is a perfect time to introduce another generation to my love of all things Little House of the Prairie! Oh how I wish I had more time to spend and camp out here. Even though I only had a week to fill, I made the best of it with my very kinetic learners with two great hands-on projects I wanted to share with you all.

Sometimes with homeschooling I get caught up in the wants that cost money. I would’ve loved to have had a big set of Lincoln Logs for my preschooler through fourth grader to play with. This would’ve been great to keep little hands busy while mommy was reading our literature Little House on the Prairie or our living history book selections. This was not in our budget this year. Instead, I decided to concentrate on using what I already had that also keeps little hands busy. Play dough. I decided the best way to help my hands-on learners remember what the Homestead Act meant was to immerse them in the world of sod house making. They absolutely loved this and all decided, at least the first week of school, that history was definitely their favorite subject. Score for mom! We used this play dough recipe that I had used before for a Valentine’s Day party because it smells like heavenly chocolate.

And don’t let the blog pictures deceive you. My first batch turned out horrible. I thought I could get buy without the cream of tartar and it was a disaster. So while my kids were busily, and happily, playing in the sticky muddy mess on the table, it wasn’t the right consistency to make our sod bricks out of and mommy had to do a quick run to the store in order to redo the recipe the right way. But it turned out all right in the end and they were very happy with their sod houses. Note to moms: try to gently encourage your students to stack the bricks in the staggered pattern that real builders use. Otherwise, when this project dries it will fall apart! My kids had to learn this the hard way. As their houses dried they looked great but immediately collapsed in a heap of dried sod bricks when they did not heed my warning.

We also played this fun game online that shows if you have what it takes to make it on the prairie and build a sod house properly. Both my third and fourth grader failed their first two attempts but finally got it right on attempt number three!

Our next project this week was to build this cute little pioneer peg family to live in their built sod houses. My children love to play what they learn. When we studied cowboys they played cowboys. When we studied Indians they played Indians. When we studied women’s suffrage they played making signs and voting. I love watching them play what they learn. It makes my house always chaotic and a bit on the messier side – an uphill battle I struggle with already just having seven kids living here with me all day long – but the extra effort at cleaning is worth it when I hear them ask if we can study something again because they want to play it again.

Now the crafty, OCD mommy part of me had to forcibly take a back seat on the peg project people. I modeled the project for them. I made wonderful suggestions to them. I used scrap material and yarn I already had on hand and only had to buy the peg clothespins – $2 for a bag at Michaels. But my children are nothing if not consistent and hard-headed. They had there own way of doing their dolls and mommy had to let that be okay. They had a lot of fun with this project. And, if they had listened to me with their sod houses, the houses would’ve been built high enough to use and play with the peg people. We will probably revisit making these dolls again this winter while reading “The Long Winter” for literature. Maybe I’ll teach them how to make some snow candy like Laura and Mary did if we get a dumping of good sticky snow. While this experiment didn’t quite turn out how I wanted it to with my oldest kids, it was still very yummy!

For more fun activities to pair with your Little House on the Prairie study or any history study pertaining to the early pioneers, check out my previous Little House on the Prairie Unit Study.  Also, if you wanted to expand on the activities that I listed here today, you could also try your hand at these. I wanted to get to all of them but a week is such a short time and flies by too fast.

• Make your own butter!
• What’s For Lunch pdf – lessons on what homesteaders ate, including color pages and mason jar butter recipe for above activity
• Exploring Sod Houses Lesson Plan
• Short Video on History of Sod Houses
• Make Maple Snow Candy
• Build a Marshmallow & Graham Cracker Covered Wagon
• Covered Wagon Color Page
• Westward Expansion Unit – page 1 is a Homestead Act notebook page (tracing and illustrating)
• Wild West Mega Pack for Tots

We also read a great new book that I’m adding to our list of Pioneer book must-haves. Dandelions by Eve Bunting is a picture story about two girls who move with their parents out to the prairie. I choose this particular book for several reasons. First, it was set in Nebraska – where we live. I love making history personal. It seems to stick more. Second, they build a sod house and talk about the Homestead Act, which went well with our project and notebooking for the week. Third, dandelions are my favorite under-appreciated flower! So many uses and benefits – I have a whole Pinterest Board dedicated to them – and such a bright yellow sign of hope in the spring when the winter blues have seem to permanently set in. In fact, this is kind of the point of the story. Many pioneer wives of that time, while hard and persevering women, experienced depression. While they did set out to try their hand at a new life, they also left everything behind. Being in this harsh new world without shade and trees and the beauty of flowers, without the comfort of their extended family or even neighbors and community, without their furniture (not much could fit on the wagon ride out) and heirlooms, even without wood to build a comfortable house, living in this world of dirt and nothingness must have been so hard for so many women. This story touches on that very hardship and the young girl ends up saving and planting some dandelions on her sod roof for her mother. It is a beautiful story that touches on that hope that so many prairie wives needed. I just loved it.

     

Books I would add to my first list for this time period:

• Dandelions by Eve Bunting
• Pioneer Girl by Andrea Warren (a true memoir about a Nebraska Homesteader)
• Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson (picture book biography)
• Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner
• Prairie Willow by Maxine Trotter
• Wagon Wheels by Barbara Brenner (and I Can Read! Level 3 book)
• You Wouldn’t Want to be an American Pioneer!
• A Pioneer ABC! by Mary Alice Downie (for the littles with beautiful illustrations)

Another thing I’m excited to do this winter with the kids is work through watching the first season of Little House on the Prairie. They really don’t make shows like this anymore and I mourn the loss of wholesome family values that this show teaches. This will make a perfect wintertime activity to binge on in evenings of our cozy house with the outside world shut out to us. But we will kick it off with this documentary The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I may be a bit of a nerd but I’m so excited about watching this. You must visit the blog Little House of the Prairie and watch the trailer. It looks just divine! While your at their site stay and look around a while. It is chock full of wonderful activities to pair with a Little House study!

They are also offering a one time savings to you homeschool moms in order to add it to your living history library as well. Just click on their Amazon link to buy the documentary and put in the coupon code (LHSCHOOL) to receive an additional 20% off!

Fall Crafting

Just thought I would share this amazingly cool blog today.

Head over to Everything Etsy to look through some amazing fall tutorials…101 of them!!!

Image courtesy of Everything Etsy

And make yourself a pumpkin spice latte to drink while you browse. Gotta love fall.

 

 

Rocks and Minerals Lapbook and Unit Study – Part I

*This series will be a 2 post series. Check back next week for part two!

I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was to start this unit. I remember my rock collection as a girl. Our neighbor had a bed of river rock in their garden and I would spend hours digging through it always looking for just the right specimens. I imagined finding a glorious Indian arrowhead or a real dinosaur fossil. I would pour over the limestone that made up part of our wall in the front yard and carefully pick out chunks of rock that did have fossils in them. My imagination of what part of the dinosaur it might be from was far superior then the actual fossil sea shells they actually were. I remember combing the shores of a nearby river on family fishing trips searching for pieces of fool’s gold. I remember visiting a real cave and being mesmerized by the stalagmites and stalactites. I couldn’t wait to share this love with my children. As I was pouring over books and settling on activities, my husband would sigh and say, “Are you ever going to be done working?” But all I could think was this is not work!

Our school mission: head to the park and collect rocks. Use recycled egg cartons to hold specimens. Collect only 12 of the most interesting ones you can find. Head back home to identify and classify.

~ Experiments and Activities ~

The first thing we did was sit down and try to identify all the cool rocks we found. We have two wonderful field guides for this that the kids used: Smithsonian’s Rock and Gem and Eyewitness Rock and Minerals. I believe the kids classifie about 75% of their rocks and are still trying to figure out what the others are. This part was by far their favorite part of the week! Part of our identification came in the form of vinegar tests. Apparently any rock that has a bit of carbonate in it (think calcium, baking soda, chalk) will fizz when drops of vinegar are applied. Lily had great fun with this experiment.

Next we discovered how sedimentary rock is formed. We watched the Magic School Bus video on erosion (see below) and then did our own experiment in a mason jar. Fill jar with dirt (sand, soil, rocks) and water. Shake and let sit for an hour or two. Discuss the layering that happens.

We also talked about the layers of the earth. We listened to the kids favorite song (haven’t forgot the layers yet!) and watched this video:

Then we did a hands-on experiment to show how this works. We filled a tub with water (our liquid, moving magma mantle layer) then set pieces of wood to float on top (our continents, or earth crust). I showed how even not touching them they were always moving just slightly on the magma because of a solid floating on a liquid. This transitioned beautifully into a discussion on plate tectonics and how they work. We practiced butting the wood pieces up against each other in different directions to see how direction of force changed the outcome.

This led beautifully into a discussion on how mountains were formed. We used clay to showcase this phenomenon. We layered colors (our rock) into two long strips and then pushed them against each other until they buckled and folded causing both a mountain and the layers we so often see in rocks.

We also discussed climate change and how that affects the earth’s crust. The ice weighs down the crust sinking it deeper into the magma and then, during time of warming, suddenly (or violently) lifts back up to the surface again. Pretty cool stuff that I’ve never thought about before.

All this talk of plate tectonics led to a natural discussion of Pangaea. I had the kids trace the continents with tracing paper and then cut out their own Pangaea puzzle. They first had to fit it together how they thought it might go then I showed them what scientists theory was.

We went to this really cool site: Continental Drift Puzzle and they were able to interactively try their hand at the Pangaea puzzle. The really cool thing about this site is the ability to rotate the continents. And you can do it how you think, you can try with a Pangaea outline, or just see how you measure up.

The main book I used as inspiration for these experiments was an older book I found at our library called Rocks and Soil by Robert Snedden.

~ Geology Living books  ~

Let’s Go Rock Collecting

Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth

Magic School Bus: Rocky Road Trip – this one is a chapter book that we used as a read-aloud at lunch time. It corresponds to the free lapbook below.

 Cool Rocks – Tracy Kompelien

 Geology Rocks!
50 Hands-on Activities to Explore the Earth

***************

~ Free Rock and Mineral Lapbooks, Printables, and Unit Studies ~

Magic School Bus: Rock Road Trip Lapbook – Yee Shall Know

Rocks and Mineral Lapbook – Homeschool Treasure Trove

Geology ideas and printables –  Eclectic Education

Geology printables – Enchanted Learning

Geology Squidoo Lens

***************

~ Rock Videos ~

Eyewitness Rock and Mineral Video

Magic School Bus Rocks and Rolls ~ Parts 1

Magic School Bus Rocks and Rolls ~ Parts 2

Magic School Bus Rocks and Rolls ~ Parts 3

*Note for you creationist science moms ~ I know many people, Christian and secular, debate the young/old earth theories. You will have to deal with a lot of editing of pretty much all the books if you do believe in the young earth theory. That said, here is a wonderful source via Answers in Creation to draw from if you need.

DON’T FORGET TO PIN THIS!!!

Roommates

Meet our new roommates….

Squirmy and Fred, our monarch caterpillars…

and Dooky (don’t ask!), our salt marsh caterpillar.

I was so excited to finally find some Monarch caterpillars. So looking forward to the exquisite jade green and gold chrysalis they make. By far my favorite caterpillar to keep and feed! Thank you, God, for the abundant amount of milkweed in our backyard fields! Monarch’s food of choice.

Gabe informed me that he thinks the cute furry gray guy is a salt marsh caterpillar (cousin to the woolly bear but non-banded). Good to know.  Can’t wait to find out!

This is our third year keeping caterpillars and it has turned into a tradition that I quite look forward to in August ~ September!

Think we shall be reading this during the school week ~

Monarch Butterfly of Aster Way

 

 

Camp Wrap Up

With counselors Dan and Anna.

Yep, I know…you are all very sad that these are the last of the 100’s of camp pictures posted!

My turn at camp with Lilah Jane came.  Our time together was sweet, short and long all at the same time. Two days without my baby and I was sore and needing to nurse ever so badly and missing the rest of my babies at home. But, oh how I never get to have one-on-one time with just one child! It was a blessing to just dote on her.

I did learn something though. I thought our little miss was always getting into mischief because of a desire to have more time with mommy. I always thought that if I could give her undivided one-on-one time then she would be content to be still and there would be less chaos in my house. But I was wrong. There is nothing like spending a large amount of quality time individually with a child to really see their true personality shine through. And this little girl does not have it in her to sit still. Oh, she would try. We would worship and sing and she would try so hard to sit on my lap or the grass but she literally didn’t have it in her. She had to move. I mean had to. I watched her with fascination. She literally could not help herself. And she would lose focus easily and instantly. This went way beyond mere age development of a three year old. My two year old has no problem focusing on something or sitting with mommy when it is pleasurable to her. This girl…well, she would want to sit with mommy…she would want to listen and dance to the music…she would want to participate in the activity but still she was losing focus and constantly needing to move. It was a blessing from above because it made me very aware that some things I was disciplining her for weren’t about discipline at all. And that when I do discipline, it will need to be done with that in mind. I will have to bend down to her level, gently guide her face to me and repeat many times the command of what needs to be done. Even when she was dog-tired at 9:30 at night and wanting a story and asking to go to sleep and go home, she was still moving. It did not stop until she finally just gave into sleep. I think knowing this will also come in handy when teaching her formally at home. A kinesthetic learner maybe?

Our time together ~

~ At the Barnyard ~

~ In the Chapel ~

~ Hayrack Ride ~

Lake View

Tipi Village

~ Trying to sit still for evening worship. ~

~ Canoeing and Paddle Boating ~

~ Petting a Tree Frog ~

~ Swimming ~

~ Smores ~

~ Making Friend Bracelets ~

~ Worship and Bible Study ~

~ Camp Shirt, Cuppie, and a New Friend! ~

“Cuppie” came everywhere with us. It was our life line to water (which also went everywhere with us) during 100 degree weather with a heat index of 115!!! And if you think that’s hot, try bearing it while cooking out hotdogs and marshies over a fire!!!!!!!

A Week of Camp

My babies went to camp this week. It has been my first real week without them. Sure, they’ve spent the night at gram and pop’s house or their cousins. But one night is not a week! I was a nervous wreck. I tried properly preparing them last week with a training boot camp of learning how to take showers by themselves (we are bath takers here) and making sure they knew address and phone number for pen pal exchanging and that they could still tie their shoes properly (you’d be surprised by how many times they slip their shoes on without actually ever tying them!).

By the pictures below you will see that they did absolutely fantastic! The camp very graciously kept us updated daily through their website and emails. They put up daily pictures of the campers for us parents to download and share. They sent us a daily email letting us know that days events and general camp happenings. And they allowed us to email the kids daily. Each camper received their letter at roll call in the morning. It was a nice tangible way to stay in touch with them even if they couldn’t email back! Amazing how email turned into something actually important and how all other emails suddenly became very unimportant!

Gabe's Camp Group

Lily's Camp Group

Lily singing morning camp songs.

Gabe gardening for a service project.

Lily dancing.

Gabe and Lily at worship.

Gabe ziplining.

Half way through the week the camp correspondents took time to sit with each camper and talk with them about how their week was going. Then they wrote a personalized email to me about each of my kids. Gabe enjoyed ziplining the most and Lily said she loved swimming the most. But, I will admit, I cried when they sent this picture of Lily with a smile of utter joy on her face. This is after her brave attempt at doing high ropes. I was so proud it just bubbled out of me in a big gushy mess!

Lily doing high ropes.

Gabe at the talent show.

Half way through the week Luc also got to attend camp with his Pop at Grand Camp. He was counting down the days the moment the older kids left. I can’t wait to hear how his week went! He sure looks like he had a good time!

Luc visiting the barn animals.

Luc with Pop in the background.

Luc and Pop on a hayrack ride.

Pop singing Rise and Shine!

Grandpa is a great teacher!

Service Project

I get to meet the kids at a family camp worship time this afternoon and then visit their cabins and help them pack up. It will be bittersweet for them, I know. But I will be SO happy to see them again! I will be going with Delilah on Sunday and Monday to a Taste of Camp and she is getting very impatient for her turn. So I will be back next week with more pics and camp stories!

How to File Paperwork if You Are Not a Planner {a.k.a. Unschooling}

That time is upon us once again….

Yep, filing paper work with the state education board. Fun. Fun.

This is my yearly quandary…

One of the huge advantages of homeschooling is following a MUCH more relaxed schedule. For us that contains a fair amount of unschooling…or child-led interests and rabbit trails. These really can’t be planned per say. But our state requires curriculum to be approved ahead of time. How do you balance spontaneity with a detailed plan to your state?

I do plan…in a general large-scale sorta way. We do history generally chronological. This year it will be modern history with an emphasis on the Great Depression, WWI and II, and the Industrial Revolution. But most of my planning comes in the form of strewing. I look for great living books to have on hand during chunks of learning time. I keep a running book list that I can use when purchasing on Amazon or at a library sale. We follow math and phonics in a somewhat sequential order but even these I hate to delegate to a “grade” because each of my children learn at different rates and sometimes we are still in the middle of a book when the school year “ends” and sometimes we are already in the middle of another book.

When I was trying to write out detailed plans to my state I was getting bogged down. What would we cover this year…when would we cover it…when would we be done? These questions my state would want to know and I would start sweating and becoming grumpy mommy as I desperately tried to put something on paper.

Don’t get me wrong…the planning part felt good. When I was done I felt this sense of accomplishment. Oh, of course that’s what we’ll study this year (i.e. science lessons all mapped out in great detai)! Happily I would start our year and miserably I would end it feeling like a failure because we were SO off track. Never mind that my kids were learning at a rapid pace. Never mind that they had filled their time with way more additional learning then I had written down. All I saw was those original lessons plans with a big red F across them!

Then I came up with a brilliant idea. Why not just write down a Scope and Sequence based on everything I had? I just started typing by category. Math? These were the books I owned (text and living). These were the manipulatives I owned. These were the games I owned. I put general grades after them. For instance, after listing Math U See I put K-5th Grade in parenthesis behind it. Suddenly I began to see a skeleton take shape. Eventually this is what I would teach to all my kids through all of their elementary school years and some beyond. Before I knew it I had an 8 page Elementary Scope & Sequence that MORE than covered any paltry state requirements.

I am free! This year all I had to do was pull up that file, delete and add a few things and in less than an hour I was finished. Print. Mail. Ahhhh….THAT felt good! The best part? Doesn’t matter that I’m homeschooling (officially) three children all at different grade levels. This one paper covers them all. Doesn’t matter where we are at the beginning of the year or the end. We have the freedom and leisure to learn any of this stuff at our own pace and our state has the peace of mind that we will be covering all the bases…eventually!

Here is a peek at my copy (your own will, obviously, vary) as well as a copy of my statement about using living books as that inventory list is WAY too long to send my state!

Elementary Scope & Sequence

Learning History Through Living Books

Feel free to download and steal these and modify for your own use!

Happy planning!!!

(P.S. please let me now if these links do not download right and I will try to fix! I tested them and so far so good.)

 

 

 

A Boy’s Responsibility

What can turn a boy into a man?

Responsibility.

How do you instill responsibility without being a naggy mom?

Allow him his first pet that he buys with his own money.

Meet Mike the hamster.

And how to weave into our homschool week?

A pet project ~

• Check out two library books on hamsters.
• Read said library books.
• Write a paper on The Top 10 Things a Hamster Needs.
• Write a paper on a hamster’s original habitat and where it originates from.

Results?

One very happy, very occupied, never bored, eager to do school boy!

And Joining up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers @

The Official Spring Break Handbook

When I saw Mud Pies and Other Recipes online I fell in love and started having daydreams about what I would have done with a book like this when I was a little girl. Oh how my dolls and I would have played! So I knew it just had to be on my official homeschool booklist for the year. Play IS school!

And when my precious 3 year old came to me with a handful of the first dandelions of the year, I knew we had to break it out!

Then I remembered visiting The Forest Room and reading about their fun idea of a make-believe stove. So we made one. What better combination! Since I’ve constantly been defeated at trying to put up the Halloween candy tub for next year, I decided to repurpose it instead.

Even the boys joined in the play.

The Learning Room – School Shenanigans

Spring is upon us and it is bearing green. I will admit it is making me not want to work. I open the windows and smell the breeze, listen to the sound of the birds and it all makes me want to sit outside with a good book and a hot cup of coffee. And you should, I hear you saying. I know, I know. But I am inside looking at heaps of laundry that needs putting away and dishes piled up, a kitchen floor that needs mopping, more laundry that needs done, toys that need sorting ~ again ~ and a learning room that desperately needs to be organized now that all our new books for the year have come in. Sigh. It has been a rough week of kids being sick. But we went outside anyway. We declared it school. We were finding green for St. Patrick’s Day and looking for new signs of spring returning. Plus P.E. right? Can’t forget the exercise. It was good for our souls despite the wind whipping my hair at 60 mph! And the kids came back with quite the treasure trove of miscellaneous rocks and twigs.

Our school theme this week concentrated on the holiday. I love weeks like that. Some homeschoolers look at holiday worksheets and crafts and unit studies as too much extra busy work.  Let them enjoy it. Take a school break. But I have found that my kids actually look forward to it. Not a one was asking to not do school. And when it got too late in the day (since we were having company over) and I had to finish up dinner and have the kids get to chores, there was a loud chorus of groaning and please can we do some more school coming from their lips.

We found the most wonderful little freebie this week from Living Books Curriculum. It was a little holiday package with a living biography of St. Patrick and mapwork, copywork, and a fabulous color sheet. I let the kids color with the coveted color pencils while I read Amy Steedman’s Our Island Saints (Love her work! You can find more of it here.). It was a phenonomal example of a living book. I stopped periodically to have the kids narrate back what had happened and they did flawless narrations and remembered much more detail then I thought they would. One of those yeah-Charlotte-Mason-really-works!!! kind of days.

We then, as a group, worked on the Trinity Shamrock from Little Blots. This is a beloved favorite every year and we’ve done a different project for it each year. I love the depth that this tradition will bring to their adult faith when they get older.

Since we ran out of time we finished up the next day with a wonderful, simple phonics game for the littles and a St. Patrick’s Day Lapbook for the two older kids.

I worked with the two younger ones and we read My “e” Sound Box and Play with “a” and “t” to supplement.

The two older students had to use this time to practice working together. They each read St. Patrick’s Day and Let’s Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day then had to use teamwork to figure out how to fill out and put together their lapbooks. I stayed out of it and allowed them all the time they needed and the freedom for their result to turn out how they saw fit.

We used these fun little cards in the children’s treat bag and then again as copywork. So our little St. Patrick study took care of language arts, history, and art this week.

And for math we broke out the Monopoly game for the first time. I helped Luc along but we let Gabe and Lily fend for themselves. Gabe did excellent and had no problem using his multiplication and money counting skills. For him it was more about learning what a mortgage is and what property value means. For Lily it was a chance to do practical work with the money counting skills she’s been learning and some practice in triple-digit hundreds addition. For Luc we kept it simple in allowing him to count out his spaces on the board. The kids loved it. I think this game will start coming into rotation often.

Linking with Weird, Unsocialized Unschoolers @

A Fun New Crafting Site & Free Resources

My sister shared with me a wonderful link to this blog dedicated to making crafts out of toilet paper tubes. It is called tpcraft.com. How cute is that? Adding it to my resource page right now! The ultimate in upcycling!

By the way, don’t forget to check out all the fun free resource links I’ve collected. Click on Free Homeschool Resources tab above.

The Learning Room ~ Musical Schooling

Weeks Febraury  14 – 25

We’ve been musical schooling this week. A term I made up to go along with our car schooling! It’s been a light two weeks on my end, with planning anyway. We had the heart holiday off and two playdates and beautiful spring weather and my new camera to play with. So I’ve taken the “sometimes lame is better then best” approach the past two weeks by jotting down on recycled scrap paper 3-4 things I knew the kids could get done independently during school time that they needed to work on, mainly math and language arts. I didn’t worry about the plan being perfect or complete or even that it got written down in a notebook or at a certain time. I just made sure they had 2 hours of school work they could work on and I took 2 minutes or less before bed to jot it down on old paper for the next day. What did I do during the two weeks?

Week number one: clean mold. Yep, unfortunate but true. Who knew that doing 3+ loads of laundry a day and 3+ loads of dishwasher a day creates extra humidity which, if mixed with the cold temps outside, makes the perfect breeding ground for mold?

Week number two: dealing with colds and washing mud. Everyone here got change-of-the-weather colds from dramatic 65 degree weather down to 3 inches of snow again. And due to the front of the week spring weather, I had a mountain of clothes that were so caked with mud they needed to be rinsed in the tub before even hitting a prerinse. Then another prerinse, a soak overnight, a morning wash, treating stains and one more wash, a final rinse. Most everything came out clean so that’s good.

Back to the musical schooling…

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we discovered an amazing new site called Rhythm Rhyme Results. It is a group of people who are trying to reach out to kids in a new and innovative way. We stumbled on them by mistake through you tube and my kids fell in love with the hip hop educational songs. Gabe was so enamoured of the 44 Presidents Rap that he decided that he will add being a president to what he wants to do when he grows up. I was amazed at the quality of the songs. The educational information packed into each one was incredible and it is not kid-watered-down songs but songs that resonate with truth and justice and higher thinking. It is not catchy little jingles to Barney-like music but true artistic, poetic hip-hop. And since there is no Lady Gaga music playing in our car (we are K-Love fans), it is a rare treat for my kids to partake in this style of music that naturally appeals to their sense of rhythm and love of dancing.

So, naturally, I had to download their music. I went to Amazon and downloaded all the songs I could. We called it homeschooling educational budget spending. And I, being that 80’s girl who loved making tapes of just the perfect mix of songs, mixed us up some CD’s. We mixed them in with some other fun educational CD’s we have from Have Fun Teaching CD’s and They Might Be Giants Science CD and a few free Animaniacs mp3’s and came up with a Grammar Songs mix, a Geography mix, a Science mix, and a History mix. I was so excited that I put it into practice immediately. We had to drive to Pop’s house for his birthday dinner and we listened to the Grammar songs on the way up and the History songs on the way back. Perfect car schooling. They were so good, in fact, that I will be listening to them on the way up to my mom’s Homeschooling Retreat tomorrow even though no kids will be in the car with me. Does that make me a nerd? I’m so making a copy for my sister to use with her preschooler class!

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway… I’ve started to make a tape… in my head… for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.  ~ Rob Gordon in the movie High Fidelity

Linking with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers @

Taking a day off…

So check out all the fun things going on at the Hands-On Homeschooling Carnival today at Cultivated Lives!

I am going to officially take the day off of school. It is 60 degrees out today, the sun is shining and my new Nikon d3100 is just begging me to take it for a spin!

Happy(early) Spring everyone!

The Learning Room ~ More Project Work

We have continued on with project work this week. I feel our biggest accomplishment was sticking to the generic schedule ~ doing school work from 10-12 each day no matter if chores were done or not and using later free time to pick up the slack on chores kids were too lazy to get done in a timely manner. For me, who has a huge tendency to get distracted by side projects, this was a major win for the week. And the biggest benefit of having them work on projects for school, aside from the obvious freeing up of my time, is seeing from an unbiased view what they actually need work on.

And, can I just rave for a minute more about Junie B. Jones? That little girl has stolen our hearts and our lunchtimes! We have read through two of her books this week and will be going to the library a week early tomorrow just to get some more. This is the most endearing book series and just begs to be read aloud. I wish they had been around for me as I was an emerging reader!

Lily, age 7,  has officially finished her first chapter book all the way through. I think she felt very proud of herself! She did much better at her narration chapter summaries this week due to last week’s coaching. The Junie B. Jones project dominated much of her time and thought. And she slowed way down on the Fancy Nancy project I think due to the fact that it involves a lot of writing and that was tiring her out so she kept procrastinating. I finally had to goad her on a bit so that I could get her to the fun part of the project (cutting out and decorating the hearts – you know, the fancy stuff).

Her area of most-needed-improvement was her penmanship. We only picked out one sentence from each of her narrations to use as copy work to go along with her picture narration. I felt this was just the right length to model good grammatical sentence structure and work on penmanship as well. Well, let’s just say her penmanship is wayyyy under par. I thought maybe this was just a hurrying-through-my-work sort of thing when I see it in her everyday play writing, but now I am having second thoughts. I also thought as she got older some of it would work itself out naturally, especially with her being a girl and having the desire for the pretty cursive handwriting. Again, I was wrong. I didn’t want to bombard her with over-criticism so we worked on putting her finger between words to properly space them and I think I will come back next week with some excersizes to address the neatness issue. Maybe it’s time to invest in an actual cursive program for her. Anyone out there using a good one that isn’t too hard for a first grader to use?

With Gabe, age 9, we needed to cover narration versus plagerism this week. I picked narration as part of his project work hoping that because it was based in books he already loved to read the narration would come more naturally. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. He basically wanted to stay immersed in his math books, not because he was working on something challenging but because he wanted to avoid narrations. I called him on it and he admitted it and said this invention stuff was just beginning to feel too much like history. All of the sudden the books weren’t interesting anymore. So we, again, went over how to do a narration. Then I had him just bite the bullet and sit down to do the task at hand whether he felt like it or not. He did a great job but I had a nagging suspicion as he kept glancing back towards the book that he was actually copying the information. I had just read an article on plagerism in the new edition of Old Schoolhouse Magazine and had thought how we had really not ever discussed it before. So, on my suspicion, I checked his work and found I was right. After praising how well he did at staying on task and finding all the information asked of him, I asked him if he knew what plagerism was and we practiced, much to his disappointment, how to redo his narration without copying. We discussed how this was why mommy required narrations so that his brain could constantly be exercised in coming up with his own sentences because that is a very hard task to master, even for adults.

So even though the work we did was not high in volume, I felt we definitely made up for it in quality by learning some very important skills this week.

Unschooling Fun ~ lots and lots of fun Valentine’s card making going on here! Again, see sidebar for the great free vintage clip art sites! Even the hubby got involved and made some really cool paper heart airplanes. He is so talented!

Onto mommy’s unschooling fun ~

Making PDF’s: mommy is learning how to convert word documents into pdf files (oh how I love them!) and how to upload them to the blog world so that I, too, may share and give back to this wonderful online community! Here is my first conversion I tried. It is the worksheet I made up to go with Lily’s Mission Addition project.  So please click on it and leave me a comment on if it does or does not work!

Mission Addition Worksheet

Also, I’ve been researching point and shoot cameras versus DSLR’s. I really (stressing the really) want a DSLR camera! I long to take my photography to the next level and get that great bokeh (fancy word for depth of field, wide aperature, cool-looking blurs – see how I’m learning?). So far I’ve come up with that, though DSLR’s have really come down in price, they still might not be quite in my budget yet. Maybe I am asking the impossible but, a challenge to you dear readers, who out there has a point and shoot camera that they love that takes pictures similar to a DSLR? I am all ears, my friends!

Linking up with Weird, Unsocialized Unschoolers @

Guided Project Work

January 31 – February 4

At the beginning of the week I mentioned that during my potty training time with Ivy I would have the two older kids working on guided project work. I was very excited about this concept and the kids were too. We’ve done project work in the past with trying to allow the kids to pick and work on something that they were interested in but have had little success with this style (no matter how promising it seems at Camp Creek!!!). Mainly, it seems, because my kids seem to still want me there to guide them and I, having too many littles, end up not being able to be there in the way they want. Or the littles constantly get into their stuff thereby defeating the purpose of taking their time to complete a project.

I thought our new method would be more constructive. I let them pick out library books they were interested in. Then, unknowingly to them, I read through their books and put together a few mini projects they could use with their books. I incorporated their specific learning styles and what they need work on currently.  That way it would still be interest-led (i.e. no reading books mom made them read) yet still accomplish goals I had for them (i.e. math, reading practice, science, history, copywork, etc.) while freeing up mommy for toddler-devoted training time.

Lily’s Projects (seven years old)

• Reading 4 Fancy Nancy books (reading practice), writing new “fancy” words on heart templates with one word to describe their meaning (vocabulary, handwriting practice), paste those heart templates onto cardstock and decorate in a fancy way, paper punch each one and bind it into her very own fancy flashcard vocabulary set (project work, crafting).
• Read Mission Addition and solve the question at the end of each chapter (math with emphais on adding and value place). I made my own worksheet for her. Maybe if I ever learn how to do that whole pdf thing then I’ll share!
• Read Junie B. Jones and Some Sneaky Peeky Spying , tell mom an oral narration after each chapter, draw a picture narration, copy down a small portion of narration (that mom dictated) to go with picture narration, bind together in a folder (narration, reading practice with a chapter book, reading comprehension, copywork/penmanship, spelling, punctuation grammar practice).

 

Gabe’s Projects (nine years old)

• Read Mistakes That Worked and Accidents May Happen, pick top three favorite inventions from each book (six total), draw a picture narration of invention, include a short narration on who invented it, when invented, and the accident or mistake that caused the invention, copy a famous quote by Mark Twain, bind and make into a folder for show and tell to mom and dad (science, history, copywork, narration/reading comprehension, researching skills, project work, oral speech skills).
• Read Go Figure and Why Pi?, pick one project and one puzzle from each book, take the Go Figure math quiz, read specifically about pi from each book and do a notebooking page, copy a famous quote by Galileo, bind all work into a folder for show and tell to mom and dad (math with emphasis on story problems, math in the read world, how science and math merge, and introduction to pi and geometry; science; copywork; logic and problem solving skills, oral speech skills).

So, how did our week go?

Lily did very well. She really enjoyed all her projects and has been working diligently daily with little help from me other than asking how the occassional word is pronounced and having me help with the dictation for her copywork. I did discover that she needed coaching in narration, or more to the point summarization. She has never had a problem narrating for me and actually quite enjoys it. But this is her first chapter book that she’s methodically read through. So I noticed on her narration that she was having a hard time summarizing her thoughts as this is a much bigger story then she normally reads. So we talked about how a narration is just a summary of what happened so we needed to know what happened at the beginning of the chapter, in the middle of the chapter, and at the end of the chapter. We practiced on one of her Fancy Nancy books and then I think it clicked for her so her narration today was much improved!

Gabe started the week off strong. He loved working independently and that he was working through books that he already loved to read. But the novelty quickly wore off for him. Once he realized that he was actually going to be doing work and that some of his work was going to challenge him (i.e. that he wasn’t going to get it right the first time sort of thing) then he wanted to quit and give up. Even with the puzzles he first picked, not being able to do it in five minutes and perfect frustrated him and he sank to the lowest denomonator and did the puzzles that he’s already done before or were easy to figure out. (A homeschooling mother’s worst nightmare!) We talked a lot about perserverance and how rewarding it will feel to figure it out on his own. He seems dubious and is still coming to me for help instead of trying to do things on his own. I just keep redirecting him and reminding him why mommy is not helping this week. This may be one to talk over with the hubby.

Other unschooling fun ~

• Continued reading Little House in the Big Woods at lunch time. The kids just love this story and it has come up several times during other discussions such as why we are not buying lettuce right now for lunch sandwiches and grocery store food versus growing your own and preserving.
• Several independent crafting projects – mainly to make their own toys. We’ve got sock puppets galore and cereal boxes being made into cardboard houses.
• A lunch discussion today involving living math. Lily wanted to know just why it was that I was always saying (mainly at lunch) that we are having water so that the milk stretches  till I get to the store next (we go through 7+ gallons a week!). So I explained to Lily and Gabe about milk and pricing, which they didn’t think was very much. Then I had them guestimate how much we spent on food in one week and then for one month. (Gabe’s answer about $300 a month or $70 a week, Lily’s answer about $20 a week or $60 for the month.) I told them the real answer (between $500 – $600) and we talked about just why daddy works and what that money is used for. Then we talked again about milk prices and the sale and normal price of milk. We worked on averages to come up with a round figure and then practiced multiplying that by 7 gallons and then that number times 4 weeks (about $80 per month on just milk!) It was a good eye opener for them both. Lily is just now starting to understand the value of money and Gabe has a better grasp due to his lack of winter chore money from gram and pop.

Linking up with…

@ Wierd, Unsocialized Homeschoolers today! 

Unschooling, New Friends, and a Broken Camera

I’m sobbing as I’m looking at my camera and trying to ~ over and over ~ press a button to make anything work at all. It’s fried. Kaput. I have no idea what happened to it. One day it worked beautifully and the next I tried to turn it on, heard a bzzzing sound and then nothing. It’s stuck in the open position with no power. Battery works. Memory card works. Camera ~ sadly ~ does NOT work!!! I’m heartbroken. How will I live without a camera for the next two months until we can replace it? How will I blog effectively without it? I didn’t realize how much I’ve come to rely on this blog as a scrapbook of our life, capturing it in photos as well as words.

That said, we had a great day today. We met some new friends. Thanks to my new ladies bible class I was introduced to the one other homeschooling mom in Ashland who happens to have 4 kids my kids same ages. After class today we had our first meet & greet playdate. It was loud and chaotic filled with happy noises of playing and promises of being best friends. My house is in shambles but they left at a still reasonable time, Gabe is practicing for the spelling bee, the littles are both down for naps and the other three decided to spend the afternoon drawing with markers at the learning table. (Would love to show you pics of their beautiful drawings but, you know, that whole camera thing and all.)

It is quiet around here. That good kind of quiet where everyone is completely absorbed and involved in their thing. I am happily spending a bit of free time catching up on blog reading and feeling really comfortable that my kids are learning just fine without me for the time being. I love this aspect of unschooling. The ebb and flow of learning and playing, of scheduling and unscheduling, of doing and just being.

And, on that note, I will share a few pics (because honestly, what is a post without pics?) of the kids in their “play” this week. Very imaginative using the cardboard insert from my new mop box to set up a labryinth Mario land for their Mario figurines and Zoobles.

(Don’tcha just love the Mario cut-out pieces?)

Woods, Winter, and the Ingall’s Girls

December 13 – 24, 2010

I am just now getting a chance to sit down and write about our history and science days of last week. We officially started our Unit Study of Little House on the Prairie. On our official “history” day we will be reading from the book, discussing, doing activities to supplement and putting together our lapbook. For our “science” day we will be studying the forest as a compliment to this book and making our own field guides.

I have to admit, I was a bit hesitant on how they would take the Little House study. I am super passionate about these books and this time period so, of course, I was excited. But sometimes history sends Gabe straight into eyes-glaze-over mode. I thought Lily would like it, as most girls who read this book do in the elementary years. I wasn’t so sure if Gabe would enjoy the book or not. To my surprise, they both loved it. Gabe even did extra reading and volunteered (hear that cyber world….volunteered!!!) a narration on his reading to put into his lapbook. Even the two smaller ones, Luc and Lilah, wouln’t hear of being left out and made me print off lapbook pages for them to do as well. Our two hour schooling window expanded to a 5 hour window (with a break for lunch of course!) and I was amazed at the enthusiasm.

History

Read:

• Chapters 1-4 of Little House in the Big Woods (ending with the chapter appropriately titled “Christmas” yesterday!)
• Winter Days in the Big Woods (a My First Little House)
• Gabe read and narrated from Look Inside a Log Cabin by Mari Schuh
• All read from If You Were a Pioneer on the Prairie (which delightfully grossed the children out – especially outhouses and bed bugs!)

Activities ~ Making our own butter. At first everyone one was so excited and fighting over who got to shake the cream. By the end of 20 minutes they were all trying to shove it off on each other and no one wanted to finish. We got it to the butter just starting to seperate out from the buttermilk stage before they gave up all together and were no longer interested. Gabe said he sure was glad we could just buy butter from the store now!

Lapbooking ~ picked and colored cover pages and put together lapbook folders, hotglued popscicle sticks onto a log cabin (Luc and Lilah’s fave activity), made food preservation mini books, made a mini smokehouse replica (Gabe and Lil’s fave since it involved Liquid Smoke), wrote about our Christmas versus the Ingall’s, wrote about a favorite gift and used as copywork/penmanship, made mini books about making bullets and gun safety, made a mini book on the Ingall’s weekly chores

Language Arts

These past two weeks we also concentrated on reading. That pretty homeschool picture we all have in our head of snuggling on the couch and reading great books rarely happens around here. Mainly because mommy is always busy and interrupted with the needs of littler ones and we do a lot of our reading separately by subject.  But since we have forgone stories at bedtime to replace with our Advent activities, I really didn’t want the Christmas season to go by without reading some of the classics! Plus, we needed to return some library books that were too good to not let the kids get a chance to hear read aloud! So our whole day of language arts this week just focused on reading great children’s literature. I let each of the kids pick a book and I took turns reading their selections (which they loved!!!) and then I would pick a selection and read. This took time, but it was nice time that we all desperately needed. And it fostered some great discussions. We talked about homophones (hair and hare), about hibernation and dens (science), about the real meaning of discipline and it’s oppositte meaning (dictionary skills and bible character training), and about what would truly satisfy you and make you happy on Christmas morning (Let’s just say my kids have a long ways to go! Apparently a tin cup and one peppermint stick or a new pair of mittens would not make them as excited as the Ingall’s girls. Who knew?)

Literature & Poetry Reading  ~

• Bear Snores On by Wilson & Chapman (one of our winter faves…so lyrical and fun to read!)
• Forest Child by Marni McGee
• The Little Engine That Could and the Snowy, Blowy Christmas by Watty Piper
• Santa Comes to Little House by Laura Ingalls Wilder, illustrated by Rnee Graef (beautiful pictures and the book that inspired the conversation of materialism and happiness ~ also counted towards our history unit study)
• Christmas in the Big Woods (a My First Little House book)
• The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Krats
• Antler, Bear, Canoe: A Northwoods Alphabet Year by Betsy Bowen
• Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
• A Charlie Brown Christmas (Hallmark interactive story – Lilah’s favorite!)

Spelling ~ Both Gabe and Lily worked on the Scripps spelling bee list for the upcoming spelling bee. They practiced alone, with each other and with mom. They picked out the words they needed to work on independently and worked on them at SpellingCity.com Lily and I talked about memorization tricks and visual learning (picturing letters as colors).

Phonics ~ Lily did several pages in her phonics workbooks concentrating on long vowel rules.

Grammar & Mechanics ~ Gabe and Lily both did a fun worksheet on alphabetizing Christmas words (Gabe’s was more intense). Lily did a Christmas worksheet on forming compound words.

Math

Gabe ~ Math U See – all of chapter 9 and test (finding the area of triangles), all of chapter 10 and test (division by 4’s)

Lily ~ Kumon Counting Coins book (adding nickels and pennies together, adding dimes and pennies together), Kumon Time book (telling time by hours, the different ways of writing o’clock)

Science

We did a lot of science reading too. Our favorites are Jim Arnosky’s books. I will be investing money in these this upcoming spring. Though Lily is pretty convinced that she doesn’t want to go back into the woods after all the precautionary talk we did, I assured her it’s a lovely place to explore but she is now hyper-worried about disease and poisonous plants!

Read:

• Creatures in the Woods (National Geographic book)
• Walking in Wild Places by Jim Arnosky
• Wild Tracks by Jim Arnosky (By far the most looked at book the past couple of weeks. We will be adding to our home library this spring. Includes fold out pages that have life-size tracks pictured. That impressed us all!)
• Whose Tracks Are These? (a fun book where you were given clues and then had to guess the animal who made the tracks – kids loved it)

Discussed: Ticks, Lyme disease, poisonous plants, bee stings, water pollution, reindeer (what kind of real deer they are), protective forest clothing and why.

Activities: All went out to the forest and prairie area and had a great time looking for animal scats and tracks before it snowed. The kids had great fun with this. We think we may even have found mountain lion tracks! And Luc was beyond thrilled to discover real deer poop! I also had kids look through several different types of field guides, plants and animals, to see real-life examples of how they are put together. They’ve looked at these a million times before (by far the most used books in the house) but were now looking with fresh eyes. Do they want to use real photos or sketch? If real, use a camera or pull off internet? If sketch, pencil or paint or colored pencil? What information to include? Bound or spiraled? Laminated or paper? I told them we will discuss their ideas after Christmas and each one would be unique to what that person wanted to do.

Gabe ~ made an illustration of a forest biome including the canopy, understory, brush, herb, and floor layers to include in his field guide; read his new National Geographic magazine

Lily ~ tried her hand at sketching a deer and also sketched some tracks (deer and mountain lion) to include in her field guide; read her new National Geographic magazine

deer tracks

deer scat

cat tracks

The much bigger mountain lion tracks!

Faith & Advent

• Read The Nativity by
• Read nightly out of The Jesse Tree by
• Made ornaments for our Jesse Tree.
• Practiced singing carols and learning words (The Cherry Tree Carol, The First Noel, and O Come Emmanuel)

Little House on the Prairie Lapbook Unit Study

Updated 10/11/15 – check below for more links including this incredible documentary! Like what you see in this post? Come join me for More Little House on the Prairie for more activities and book suggestions!

Now that we are done with the Civil War era (will back post on books and links this winter when I have a bit more downtime at home – but notice how I finally updated the book bar on the side!) we will be moving on to the Pioneer era. And what better way to do this then through the Little House on the Prairie book series? In fact, I know of very little who don’t love this series.  I remember watching the TV series as a small girl and falling in love with this time period. I can’t wait to share this with my children and let it become a memory of their’s as well. We will be studying the period lazily over the winter. By lazily I mean taking our time, delving deep, letting the books speak and guide our direction and interests. I have no idea how long it will take us.

We will be continuing our use of lapbooks with this study. We have found, through a bit of dabbling in it this year, that the kids respond to my choice of books better and remember the information better if they have this to look forward to after the readings. Lily loves lapbooks because it is much like scrapbooking our history information. Gabe loves it because it frees him of the burden of narrations. I have narrowed narrations down to one main narration per time period that they will stick in their lapbook/scrapbook and it will be based on a book of their choice to read from that time period. I know this isn’t quite the Charlotte Mason way but it still fits and I have to do what is right for my family as God whispered to a dear church friend who wrote it to me in an encouraging note. This worked so well while studying the Civil War and Gabe ended up doing a lovely narration effortlessly when allowed to choose what he thought was an exciting book, not what I thought.

Luckily, Homeschool Share has a free lapbook for each of the original Little House series beautifully made by Heather L. This is the main site I used to download pdf files for our use. I have fallen in love with this site! I encourage every homeschooling mother to go there and poke around.

First of all, here are the living books we will be using:

The Little House on the Prairie Book Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

starting with

Little House in the Big Woods (perfect now that we have a forest in our backyard!)

We will also read all of the My First Little House Picture Books concentrating on the winter ones first since we are in that season.

And read a living biography on Laura Ingalls Wilder

As spines alongside our literature study we will use If You Were a Pioneer on the Prairie

as well as A Pioneer Sample: Daily Life of a Pioneer Family in 1840

and Look Inside a Log Cabin by Mari Schuh

These three books will be great sources of information for making the lapbooks and answering questions about the time period. And to delve into the science of the period we will be, obviously, studying prairie grassland habitats through these books:

One Day in the Prairie by Jean Craighead George

A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet by Claudia McGehee

Prairie Food Chains by Kelley MacAulay

and America’s Prairies and Grasslands Guide to Plant and Animals by Marianne D. Wallace

And for activities to supplement or add to the study:

• Lapbook for Little House in the Big Woods
• Additional Lapbook Templates for Little House in the Big Woods
• Watching the DVD series of Little House on the Prairie
• Cooking from The Little House Cookbook
• Crafting from the My Little House Sewing Book
• Host a Little House on the Prairie Party
• Make Pioneer Children Paper Dolls
• Make Your Own Butter
• Make Your Own Rock Candy
• Make Play dough Sod Houses
• Make Pioneer Peg Clothespin People
• Listening to Pa’s Fiddle on Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Wilder audio CD
• Maybe learning some songs from The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook

Updated – 10/11/15

I’d have never guessed when I first wrote this post almost 5 years ago how popular it would become! Besides my Rock and Mineral Unit Study post, this page keeps my tiny blog afloat amid the absence of current posts that my seven kids lovingly prevent me from writing! 

And today I’m excited to add a few nuggets to the Little House extravaganza. Thanks to the generosity of the blog Little House on the Prairie, I’ve been able to add a number of free activities above such as how to host a Little House on the Prairie party, how to make rock candy, and even free printable Little House paper dolls – which are way super cute! They are also sending me a copy of their new documentary “The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder” to review which I’m super excited about. Will be reviewing and linking back to here very soon. You must go over and watch the trailer. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd, but watching this has me like a child running to check the mailbox everyday looking for that package! 

And now you can also enjoy a little slice of this Americana too. The people behind  Little House on the Prairie are offering a coupon code which allows you 20% off the already low price of $19.95. This is an excellent addition to any homeschool living history library. Just click on their  Amazon link and add to your cart. Enter LHSCHOOL into the promotion code box when checking out. Voila! Instant savings!

Play or Project Work?

I’ve been thinking a lot about project work and unschooling and relaxed homeschooling…about my children learning…about killing that with too much of my “to do”…about retention and memory and what’s really important.  Some of this is natural for the time of year…coming up on a new school year. How to proceed? More planning or less? How much did they retain from last year? What worked and what didn’t? Some of this is coming out of our frustration with a four-year old boy and potty training issues. Some of this is coming out of reading new posts at Camp Creek Blog (especially this one on hands-on learning) and rereading back posts that I had printed off and saved in my collective education journal. My husband would say I’m just thinking about it because I’m nerdy that way and it’s what I like to do in my free time. (Who doesn’t like to sit down and read a stack of articles, magazines, printed posts, and books on the pedagogy of education? Doesn’t everyone do that to relax in the evening?) But, whatever the case, it is on my brain and I am revisiting thoughts I had last year and wondering if I can even begin to implement them this year.

Lily being inspired by Curious George.

Galileo, watch out!

When thinking about how to implement project work, I get caught up in the details and seem to have a really hard time letting go of control (an issue I have in numerous life areas). Or I try it and it seems to fail (have a theory that is more about me and not them). But then there are days like this one where it just pops up unexpectedly (which, if reading Camp Creek right, is the whole point of project work). I see a deep interest developing. Because it wasn’t part of “school” I allow them freedom in exploring and brainstorming ideas and things flow. This week, as I was more cognizant of it, I allowed for some of my “to do” to be let go of and their “want to do” added in. It made for less stress, math and reading was still accomplished and everyone seemed to enjoy school more. This is what I want more of. Less of me…more of them.

This week it is firefighters, which happened on a whim of dress up play and an innocent question from me before heading to the library. We found just a couple of books and one sparked a for-serious interest. It has been a week of deep-interest playing, constant question asking, and the desire to make this world real. I’ve had to stretch my imagination and pull out the recycle bin several times in order to conjure up the wishlist.  But I see thirsts being quenched and I see project work being played out. I am trying very hard to stay out of the way, facilitate when needed and just observe and document (hence this post). These moments keep me from giving up on this particular learning style.

"Firefightmen" is the theme this week.

Homemade oxygen tank

Firefighter Jane

Fire Extinguisher

Walkie Talkie Radios

Of course, when these moments do pop up they seem more like play. My own doubts sway me to disbelieve that these moments can really become deep vessels of learning experiences because they seem to happen more with my littles (4-6 age group) then with my older. I need to contemplate on this…I need white space to think and wonder if it is me and my approach that is inhibiting the older child or if I am just not giving it enough time.

THE Recycle box...the one I am constantly questioning my own sanity over.

Our house after project work.

I will try and continue this discussion over the next few weeks as I am contemplating.

New Friendly Faces

Just wanted to take a quick moment to let you all know of some wonderful blogs I’ve stumbled across the past few days (you know…a link then a link then a link kind of thing!). These women have beautiful sites, mostly about homeschooling and a few eclectic life ones that I think I – and others – will benefit from as I continue to read daily tidbits.

I don’t have as much time as I used to in reading blogs – maybe only once a week or so – or typing on mine for that matter. But I always find that when I do, I am enriched, inspired, and encouraged. And really, that’s what it’s all about right?

Megan at Contented Sparrow

The Magnifying Glass (an online Nature Journal blog with great book recommendations and inspiring activities)

Vintage Chica at Summer Unschool

Molly at A Foothill Companion

Have a wonderful Saturday, everyone!

Blessings,

Amy