He Crawls!

Tyler is finally crawling. He is 10 months old! The first thing he crawled to was the vacuum, and that is still his favorite thing to crawl to. He gets mad when I turn it off.



He is so cute. He never even showed any signs of crawling yet. One day I was vacuuming and he just went for it, I couldn't believe it.

WannaBe- Firefighter Review

I have been wanting to go over fire safety in our house and...

I was given this amazing resource to review from The Old Schoolhouse, it's from the WannaBe Series. What is the WannaBe Series, you ask? Well it's a series of 10 Unit Studies that show kids what some of the career prospects out there are. We started with When I Grow Up I Wanna Be A Firefighter.

It made fire safety so fun, and so much more. We got to learn about what it takes to be a firefighter, how much they make, the history of firefighting, and about fire dogs. Plus we played games,

and more games. We had fire drills, practice calling 911 (we used a phone that I took the batteries out of and I was the operator), we even had a fire theme lunch. Lil' Smokies.

This was so easy to prepare. It seriously took me about 1 hour from opening it up to having it ready to teach, and 30 min of that was me reading it, and putting books on hold at the library.

All the games and activities all use common easy to find items. (All of which I happen to have on hand.)

This comes with a book list, but it is an E-Book, and you could really do it without the extra books if you wanted to, or didn't have the time.

I set this up so that my kids would read a section then do one of the many worksheets it came with it, such as firefighter math, or the creative prompts, then we did a game or a drill. These were great for my 5 year old. She is a more hands on learner. That way it kept it fresh, since there was quite a bit of reading.

My little engineer, Tommy, thought that the making of a robotic arm was the best part!

This is for ages 4-10,
I felt as if some of the math was a little hard for my 10 year old. I just did the "harder" math along with him, and my 9 year old. My four year old was not able to sit through all the reading. I think because it wasn't in storybook format. However, she loved the activities that were involved, and the books from the book list.

There are so many activities that you could even have a Firefighter themed birthday party. These would also makes a great community helpers study.


These are only $8.95 each.

The titles are

• Firefighter,
• Veterinarian,
• Chef,
• Military,
• Doctor,
• Police Officer,
• Missionary,
• Artist,
• Pilot, and
• Farmer
  

But right now they are having a special for the month of May;
You can get all 10 titles,
normally $89.50
for just $35.80

Disclaimer: I was given this free to download, use and review and this is my honest opinion.

Week in Review April 26-30, 2010

This week has been great! We got quite a bit of schoolwork done.

Most of it was map work, and reading and discussion for history. We did do one very fun activity, we learned how ancient people dyed their clothes. We each dyed a pair of our socks purple with blackberries. Now I just hope that I don't accidentally wash them in my modern washing machine, and dye all of our clothes purple.

Emily completed the Beta level in Math U See. She only missed one on the final test, and it was just a silly mistake too, is wasn't that she didn't know how to do it. Now she is ready to move on to multiplication. She is very excited about that.

The rest of the school week, was pretty much just regular school stuff, not much exciting.

It's so crazy here in Utah, one day it's 70, the next 35 and snowing. We did have a few great days of spring weather. The kids spent the afternoons outside exploring, riding bikes, and enjoying the fresh air.

Tommy is such a little engineer. Here he is building a trailer to go on the back of his bicycle. He was building it out of things he could find. I supplied him with some things I had saved for art projects, or really projects just like this.

Here is a picture of him putting together the axle and those containers are going to be the rims.

This is the trailer part of it. I don't yet know what he is planning to haul on it.

I love Tommy, he is so creative, and resourceful.

This post is linked up to the weekly wrap up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Secret Garden Party!

To celebrate finishing our most recent read aloud, The Secret Garden, we of course had a party. This is a fun tradition that we are beginning and we all have a lot of fun with it.

To start we had snacks, we had a Secret Garden Muffin Tin, that I adapted from Gourmet Mom On The Go. It was a secret what was inside, and it all came from a garden. We also had dirt and worms, (chocolate pudding with gummy worms, and crushed Oreo's on top) I forgot to get a picture of that, we all ate them so fast.

We went to the park for a picnic and played racquetball.

We went to the garden store to pick out flowers to plant in our garden.

We planted our own Secret Garden, on a much much smaller scale.

We watched the movie too.

My kids really love this. I love it that they continually ask me to read to them, and when we are reading, they don't want to stop.

Expedition Australia Review

What would you say if I told you that you could take a week long vacation in Australia for just $7.95?
(a virtual vacation that is)

We went there using Expedition Australia Download and Go, published by The Old Schoolhouse




WHAT YOU GET
You get a daily itinerary, a book list, vocabulary words, worksheets for all ages, maps, links, and lapbooking pieces. Every day you travel to a new location, learn a new Australian word, "visit" a geographic feature, learn about an Australian animal, and so much more! If that's not enough, there are extras in the back of the book, such as foods that are popular there, along with recipes, making a boomerang, and so much more.


WHAT I DID
The first day I tried to do it as a group subject and it took us about 1 hour to get through one days itinerary. I printed out the worksheets for that day, and stapled them together, and we went through the links together. They did feel like this was too long. So the second day I set up the computer by opening all the links for the day in order, printed off the days worksheets and had them just go through them on their own. They finished in about 35 minutes each. This also gave them the opportunity to read past finding the answers, if something interested them more. They also told me they enjoyed this much better. We still read the books suggested out loud as a group. We did any activities as a group, such as trying food, making a boomerang, etc. As the older kids did computer work, I did some of the worksheets for younger children, such as color matching kangaroos, counting koalas and time and temperature, and mapping activities with Katey, my 5 year old. She also enjoyed watching some of the videos,and visiting a few of the links. There are even links to Australian themed coloring pages. I let all of the children color them while I was reading from the book list.



WHAT I LIKED
I like that it is an E-book, and I can save it onto a disk and use it on any computer, and doesn't take much storage space, you get it instantly. It is flexible enough in that you can personalize it for each age range by choosing which worksheets, and links to use. I like that I could use it to teach my children, or that they could use it on their own with my supervision.



MORE INFO
While this is suggested for children from K-4th grade, I think that in could be used for children of almost any age. The links, such as an online scavenger hunt in The Great Barrier Reef could be done together. There are simple worksheets for younger children, such as some coloring pages, matching, & counting games. There are more advanced worksheets for older children, such as mapping and general question worksheets. The videos are good for all ages. I even learned things I didn't know from this.


SOME THINGS TO CONSIDER
You will need an internet connection. So if you are using a public computer and internet, you will most likely need to break it up into more than 5 days. My public library did not have very many of the suggested books, but that was easy for me to fix, I just searched for others of the same subject. A fun suggestion would be to take a week off from regular schooling and fully focus on Australia, just like a vacation! We did not use all of the resources that are available with this, so you could easily have this be a complete school day for younger children. Or even a short school day for older ones.


I used this with my children ages 5, 9, and 11, and they all loved it.


There are so many titles available. See them all here!
These come individually for $7.95 each
You can get a set of 4 for $30.00
(you can pick your own or get one of their pre-picked monthly sets)
A set of 19 for $114.00
A set of 38 for $190.00

My first Oreo!!

In our house Oreo Cookies and Milk is a staple. Here is Tiny T having his first Oreo!

Making Memories that will last a lifetime!

For me, some of the memories that stick out in my head the most always had to do with food. Like the time I was about 13 and we were having a family BBQ for Memorial Day, I shook up the mustard to squeeze it on my hotdog, I did not realize the cap was open, and I got mustard all over my very cool clothes that were chosen just for that occasion. I learned that mustard does stain and even to this day I check the mustard before I shake it.

Another memory I have is with my Grandma, she is an amazing cook, she loves to make bread from scratch. She was a school lunch cook in a small town when I was younger. It was the kind of school that made their meals from scratch. That was YUMMY School lunch! I remember she used to bring us home the extra milk and chocolate milk, in those little school lunch cartons. My brother and I thought that we were so cool sharing "the school lunch milk" with our friends.

Even now that my Grandma is retired she still has ties with the school lunch. For Christmas one year she gave me these amazing cookie sheets, that I absolutely love and use for everything. I use them as cookie sheets, as brownie pans, to carry stuff outside if we are eating out there, right now one is even being used as a catch the water from our seed starts. I just love those school lunch cookie sheets! Every time I use them I think of my Grandma.

All these food memories got me thinking, what food memories are my children going to have?

Then it came to me. My father in law told me once that my children will always remember Hobo Dinners in the back yard. We do them often in the summer, once every two weeks or so. They are so easy.

First you slice up the veggies you will be using. I just use veggies that I have on hand. I sliced them us with my Pampered Chef Mandoline. Which is amazingly easy. I just arrange them all on my infamous cookie sheet.




And let the kids go at filling their tinfoil. (I spray it with Pam first)
Then we add hamburger patties, and salt and pepper to taste, wrap them all up and put them on the fire in our back yard.

My husband watches the fire as the kids play.

Then we eat. Yummy!! We serve ours with ketchup, ranch dressing, or BBQ sauce (my favorite).

I hope this is a memory that my children will have when they are older.