31 days of blogging

31 Days of blogging.

I got this list from here.  I am planning on blogging for 31 days straight starting tomorrow. 

YIKES!!

I am horrible with follow through on these types of things.  Here’s to hoping!

Day:
01 - A few things about yourself
02 - Things you are good at
03 - I am looking forward to…
04 - Today’s playlist
05 - Weekend goals
06 - Least favorite words
07 - If I won $100,000,000 in the lottery, I would…
08 - In my bag
09 - My favorite things
10 - On my wishlist
11 - Things I collect
12 - Daily rituals
13 - DIYs I want to try
14 - Things I love about _________
15 - On my shopping list
16 - Places to see in your town
17 - Words that are hard to spell
18 - Road trip must haves
19 - Recipes I want to try
20 - Celebrity crushes
21 - Things to do this spring

22 - Today I saw
23 - Guilty pleasures
24 - I make lists for…
25 - Things I’d rather be doing right now
26 - My favorite books
27 - Lessons learned
28 - Vacations to take
29 - Favorite foods
30 - Today’s to do list

31 – What’s for Dinner?

 

First Day Homeschool Traditions

Starting school for some seems like an exciting time.  For some it’s just another day.  For others still it is a real drag. 

A few things to do on the first day of homeschool are:

We draw self portraits.  This has been a tradition for a while.  For the last few years I have just had them keep them in their sketch books. One day I will go through the sketch books and take out the self portrait pages and put them all together in order by year.

Some people don’t even do schoolwork.  They take the first day of the local public school off.  They celebrate their homeschooling freedom. They spend the time at the park, or have a picnic.  Maybe even have a party. 

You could just do school as usual.

I usually make it a point to start school the week after public school.  This year I revamped our schedule and we will actually be starting before the public school.  This will allow us to take weeks off here and there for our scheduling chunks. 

What kind of things do you do to make the start of your school year special?

I’m not the only one blogging about this!  Check out some of my awesome bloggy friends.

 

Laura @ My (re)Viewpoint
Anne @ Upstate Ramblings
Julie @ Nurturing Learning

Motivation and Encouragement for moms! Social hour!

It is truly amazing and interesting how much my social life has turned around in the past year, or two.  I will share with you how I reached out and found friends who like me for me. 

I will share with you where and how I get my encouragement.

Finally I will share with you where I get my motivation from. 

Just having friends can make a huge difference in my frame of mind.  3 1/2 years ago I moved to a small town where I knew literally no one.   I joined a local homeschool group on yahoo. Which I quickly found out was very slow.  No one really got together.  Then I decided to jump out of my comfort zone and plan a Valentine’s Day Party. It was a huge hit.  Things were still slow on the Yahoo group and then someone created a group on Facebook and it just exploded. 

The year I held the Valentines party at my house we had 5 families.  The next year we had 60.  This past year we had 120.  As of now our local Facebook group as reached over 200 families.  They are screened that they have to live local and be homeschooling or looking into homeschooling. 

This group, I call a co-op is really a commonwealth of parents.  It works for us.  It has gotten so big now that classes fill up super fast and some moms have chosen to start smaller co-ops within the commonwealth.  This group is usually just used for homeschooling teaching and questions.

I also am a moderator of my local moms group on Facebook.  This group is a lot more strict.  We have a code of conduct, an application process, participation requirements and more.  We have activities weekly.  This group does things like park days, freezer meal swaps, craft days, moms night out and more.

I am also a part of some online groups.  The biggest and best one in my opinion is The Schoolhouse Review Crew.  Along with the review items we get, we are part of an amazing forum and it keeps me blogging.  I am part of some smaller homeschool and homemaking pages as well.  I read blogs because I feel like I can relate and it makes me feel social.  

I am a member of a local Teaching Self Government Circle.  This is a very small group of us (10).  We meet monthly for this. This is great and probably my favorite one.

I have actually been so busy with my kids and these social things that I have had to cut back on some social offerings in order to be a mom and homeschooler.

How do you meet friends as a homeschooling parent?

Check out some of my awesome bloggy friends, who are also blogging in the Back to Homeschool Hop!

 

Laura @ My (re)Viewpoint
Anne @ Upstate Ramblings
Julie @ Nurturing Learning

Breaking the school year into bite size chunks – Lesson Planning

Lesson Planning has been fully underway for me.  I do feel like some changes had to be made this year.  We had lesson plans and all last year, but there was too much flexibility in them and we took advantage of more opportunities than we should have.  Not that the opportunities weren’t great, some of them were even necessary.  It’s more along the lines of we did way to much. I realize that spontaneity is in my families nature, and we love to travel.  So I needed lesson plans that were realistic and flexible. Here is what I have come up with.

I began by choosing our curriculum. Then I am planning it out in chunks, or blocks. I have been using the Hey Mama Planner from The Old Schoolhouse. They are supposed to average about 6 weeks.  However after looking at our calendar and some travel plans I decided to work those in to our schooling.  We have some 5 week blocks and some 6 week blocks.  After every block we get anywhere from 3-5 days without plans.  The kids can use that time to catch up if needed.  They can also just take a break, or dive into a subject they want. They may need this time to finish up work missed due to a family event that we chose to do.

Our first block is planned out and looks like this:

I also did our plans weekly within our block.  That way the kids know what they have to accomplish in a weeks time.  Last year I gave them to much freedom and we got off track so that when the end of the year came we had to work hard, too hard really to get where I wanted us to be.  We never did make it as far as my original goal.  That is life. 

So instead of taking a full summer we will take a shorter summer with these breaks built in. This has made lesson planning less intense, it opens up opportunities for change as needed.  It gives us a little break when we need it for trips, like weddings, seeing out of town family, and traveling in the off season!

This is making so much sense in my head that I really believe it will work better for us. 

Check out some of my awesome bloggy friends, who are also blogging in the Back to Homeschool Hop!

 

Laura @ My (re)Viewpoint
Anne @ Upstate Ramblings
Julie @ Nurturing Learning

Wow! - is it really that time. Burnout from last year and changes we are going to make. Curriculum

 

Last year was rough on me. Along with life’s regular hiccups, I ended up working almost full time for a few months, and then cut back to part time.  My brother moved in with us.  My husband switched jobs.  We had to find a new normal, and every time I thought we had it, we didn’t. 

We are in a good groove now and I hope we can keep it up! I have faith!

This year I have made my curriculum choices based on what has worked for us in years past.  My older kids do really well when they have independent work that is different from each other.  I do better when they have curriculum that is the same.  I am attempting to fix it by meeting in the middle.  They will both be doing Lightning Literature, but I will have Tommy through about 1 month worth of it before I start Emily in it.  Science, they will still just work out of the same book to make labs more interactive and fun.

Their personal finance class will be done together through our co-op.  The Promises of the Constitution will be done together as a family.

We are changing up our schedule this year.  In years past we work independently in the morning.  Things we did as a family, read alouds, character lessons, discussions, etc, were all done after lunch.  This caused this to get pushed to the wayside often, as the kids wouldn’t be done with their independent work, or I would have an errand to run, or my husband would come home and interrupt our schedule. 
This year we will meet at 10-11 every morning, except Wed. (Co-op Days).  We will do family school first and then they can do their independent work around that schedule.  I will also be starting my youngest in 5K.  He will need me with him for about 1 hour a day.  I plan to devote about 1 hour to each child per day.  Some of the kids will get the hour in chunks throughout the day.  Not that I am limiting the time to an hour, just that I am devoting at least one hour.

To see an entire list of my curriculum for this year, check out this post!

The crew is blogging about this same subject!

I’m not the only one blogging about this!  Check out some of my awesome bloggy friends.

 

Laura @ My (re)Viewpoint
Anne @ Upstate Ramblings
Julie @ Nurturing Learning

Coming Soon! Back to Homeschool Blog Hop!

My week of blogging will look like this:

Monday- Wow! - is it really that time.  Burnout from last year and changes we are going to make. Curriculum

Tuesday- Breaking the school year into bite size chunks – lesson planning

Wednesday- Motivation and Encouragement for moms! Social hour!

Thursday- My sanity saver tips.  White board calendars- Menu planning- check lists- schedules- routines

Friday- Starting with a bang – First day traditions. 

Many of my crew friends are blogging about this topic too.

Check out some of my awesome bloggy friends and what they have to say.

 

Laura @ My (re)Viewpoint
Anne @ Upstate Ramblings
Julie @ Nurturing Learning

Some of our favorite games

 

 

So this week I have been blogging about games and hand on homeschooling.  I have had so much fun and I would now like to share with you some of our all time favorite family games.

We can always be found having Checker tournaments.  We own 3 checker boards just for this.

Some fun big group games we play often are Phase 10, Rook (with modified rules) Sequence, Twister and more. 

We love to go bowling.

We often have family game nights.  You can check some of those out here.

Some school days we take off and have a game day.

A really fun game is Pick and Draw.

Check out my fun review of that here.

We even play silly games outside. 

I have put together an Amazon widget for some visuals.

(yes I am an affiliate, if you purchase something through my link I will make a small profit. I thank YOU.)

 

Check out what others are blogging about this week.

Don’t miss the rest of my series

Day 1 Life Skills
Day 2 Reading games.
Day 3 Science/ History Games
Day 4 Math Games
Day 5 Some of our Favorite Games

This has been so much fun and I thank you for joining me.

Do you have any favorite games that I might like to check out?

Math Games

Math can be so hard for some kids of us.  Some ways to make math seem fun can also be a challenge.

We have played some fun math games in our homeschool life and I would like to share them with you.
Some card games that can either be homemade or purchased are:
Go Fish with number cards.  This helps teach number recognition.
War is an excellent game for learning and practicing number sequence.  If your child is just learning put a number line near them.
Have you ever heard of I See Cards?  They specialize in math card games.  Such as Pyramath and Fractazmic.


Any game with dice can be a great simple addition game.  You can use 1, 2, 3 or even more dice to help with multiple addition or any fact.  We have played dice games where we had to multiply the dice or subtract them and then move that many spaces.
I have even created my own dice using labels.

There are different fractions on each side and they had to add or multiply them.

Some times they need a hands on manipulative to really understand it.  That is one of the reason I have liked Master Innovations.

Wits and Wagers has been a really fun way to teach my first grader large numbers. 

Aims specializes in hands on activities for math!  We have really loved their book Looking at Lines.

There are so many online math games as well, I have many listed on my page.  (check the sidebar)

There are some great downloadable computer math games. 
Mad Dog Math
Math Rider
Cap Jax Math Fax
Math Facts Now

Times Alive has very fun songs and music videos for visual learners.

Check out all the bloggers!
Don’t miss the rest of my posts!




Day 1 Life Skills
Day 2 Reading games.
Day 3 Science/ History Games
Day 4 Math Games
Day 5 Some of our Favorite Games

Science and History Games

Often times Science can be fun on it’s own if you add a hands on experiment or activity to the mix.  However there are still some fun ways to incorporate games into science. 

Some fun ways to do that are to have quiz type game shows.  Think Jeopardy.
Here is a sample game that we played after a few chapters in Botany.
  
I just wrote questions on each card with a point value on the other side.  Some of the questions were:

• Name 3 ways plants are helpful to us.
• Draw and Label a simple plant. 
• What is the process in which a plant needs water, light and Co2 to produce sugars which are stored in the leaves?
• What is the study of plants called?

This is fun for us and it does take some work to create and play.  We always make up funny names for ourselves and hold introductions and all at the beginning of our game shows.
Another one I play if it is just one on one is Tic-Tac-Toe.  You can only go if you first answer a question correctly.  They even get to ask me questions. 
Pass the potato is another one you can play, where they ask a question while we pass the potato and when the asker is done whoever is holding the potato has to answer it and then it is their turn to ask the question.
All these games will work for Science or History.
A really fun science game that I have reviewed is Nature Nuts!
Some other fun ways to change up science include:
Science Weekly
The Curiosity Files
Recently I have been reviewing Science Videos.  They have been a fun change up in our homeschool.
Go Science!
Amazing Science!

For us we have always enjoyed history as a more hands on experience.
Some of the ways we have done that is with
Zeezok movie guides. Johnny Tremain and Kit Kittredge
We have loved Pitsco and building some of their Medieval Machines.
Here is a really great Hands On History Post.
I don’t know what it is about us, I always try to incorporate food into our history lessons. 

Check out what all the others are blogging about.

Don’t miss out on my other posts

Day 1 Life Skills
Day 2 Reading games.
Day 3 Science/ History Games
Day 4 Math Games
Day 5 Some of our Favorite Games

What are some fun ways you incorporate games into your science and history?