Homeschool Discoveries

Sharing a few things I've discovered along the way…

C is for Cursive March 7, 2012

Filed under: Curriculum — kirstenjoyhill @ 8:07 am
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Miss M asked to start learning cursive last year as a first grader.  Considering that for most of the previous two years she complained about having to write almost anything, this really took me by surprise.  I am one of those adults who never writes in “pure” cursive — I hated cursive penmanship practice in grade school, and my current handwriting is my own blend of printing and cursive (though I think it leans more to the “printing” side of things). I was perfectly willing to let Miss M wait until at least third grade to learn cursive, if not later.

Not wanting to miss this moment of her interest, however, I bought her “A Reason for Handwriting” book C a little over a year ago.  She spent last spring dabbling in learning her cursive letters.  The first section of the book is dedicated to first practicing each individual letter, adding in a few simple words once enough letters are learned.  After a break for the summer, I reviewed with Miss M the letters she had learned the previous spring, and she finished learning the rest of the alphabet.

Then the real fun begins.  🙂 The second section of the book contains 32 weeks of lessons, each featuring a Bible verse. Days 1 through 3 of each week’s lesson contain individual practice words from the verse.  Day 4 is tracing the verse, while Day 5 is writing the verse out on a piece of handwriting paper with a decorative border (the border paper is provided in the back of the workbook). I assign Miss M cursive practice every day, and occasionally I have her “double up” somewhere in days 1 through 3 or skip the tracing day if we don’t have five full/regular school days in a particular week.

While Miss M still usually chooses to print in the rest of her school work, I can really see her cursive improving.  It will be better than mine pretty soon!

I’m linking up with:

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Top Ten/Tech Tuesday: We love free Audiobooks! March 6, 2012

Filed under: Books,Technology — kirstenjoyhill @ 1:21 pm
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Top Ten Tuesday at Many Little Blessings

(I’m linking up with TWO linky parties today…if you just want my “top ten list” of free audiobooks we’ve enjoyed, just look to the bottom of the post!)

Audiobooks are a great way to pass the time or multitask. While our audiobook listening has diminished somewhat ever since Miss M learned to read on her own, we are still sure to stock up our Mp3 player with books before a long trip.  Miss M still also occasionally likes to listen to audiobooks while folding her laundry or just to relax. When Miss M was in Kindergarten and 1st grade, her attention span was much longer than her ability to read on her own, so she listened to several long audiobooks those two years!

The boys haven’t been big fans of audiobook listening so far, but I would like to try again to find some books they might enjoy (it’s been a while since we tried listening to one all together).  They are each getting a bit older and Mr. E in particular is getting to that same point of having a bit longer attention span to perhaps enjoy a longer audiobook.

While many audiobooks are available for purchase on sites like amazon, the price for an audiobook is often higher than the price for a regular book! Of course libraries have offered books on cassette tape or CD for years, but we (as I am sure is true of many families these days) have no convenient devices for playing cassette tapes, and even CD listening is more of a challenge than it used to be — most of our CD listening devices have broken and we haven’t replaced them!

Luckily we’ve found two great ways to get MP3 format audiobooks for free — our library and websites offering public domain audiobooks.

Most the audiobooks we’ve listened to have come from librivox.org, a site dedicated to organizing volunteers to make recordings of books in the public domain.  The recordings are then available as free downloads.  Librivox is a great site, but can be challenging to browse if you don’t have something specific in mind.  I just realized recently that booksshouldbefree.com lists most (or maybe all?) of Librivox’s audiobooks as well as a few others in a much easier-to-browse format.  Booksshouldbefree.com also gives links to ebooks in various formats, just in case you decide you would rather read it yourself instead of listening. Ipad/Iphone apps are available to help interface with these free audibooks as well, but to be honest I haven’t tried any of them yet, since we don’t find the iPad to be our preferred device for audiobook listening.

Our library system also offers free audiobook downloads.  I’m guessing that this service is offered by many libraries!  Most of the audiobooks are available to be “checked out” for a limited period of time, after which they are electronically “returned”, and no longer available on your device.  Because of this system (sometimes called “DRM” or digital rights management), these library audiobooks won’t work on all devices — but they do work on computers and many MP3 players, smartphones, and the iPad/iPhone are supported.

Not sure where to start? Here are 10 free audiobook titles we’ve enjoyed (in no particular order):

  1. Wonderful Wizard of Oz
  2. Marvelous Land of Oz
  3. Raggedy Ann Stories
  4. Raggedy Andy Stories
  5. Our Island Story
  6. The Bobbsey Twins
  7. Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore
  8. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
  9. The Secret Garden
  10. Five Little Peppers and How they Grew

Happy Listening!

 

Collage Friday: Leaping, Cutting and Pasting March 2, 2012

Filed under: Holidays,Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:20 am
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1. We celebrated Leap Day with a “fun school” day.  Despite my previous aspirations, we did not do a 100 days celebration as well.  Between the amount of time I was able to find to prepare, and remembering how busy our fun school Valentines day was, I decided we would shelve the 100 days celebration for this year and plan for it next year (since we will, of course, have to wait another four years to celebrate Leap Day!).  In the picture, the kids are playing leaping lilly pad games inspired by this post at Toddler Approved.

2. Also inspired by Toddler Approved, we read Frog and Toad stories on Leap Day — including the story about cookies and willpower.  Then of course we had to make some cookies.  Peanut Butter kiss cookies are a favorite here…and who says they are only a Christmas cookie? Not us!  It was fun to talk about willpower and if there is any difference between willpower and self-control.  (The kids said “no” initially, but I tried to make the case that willpower is something of our own effort, while self-control is a fruit of the Spirit).

3.  Miss M helped daddy to make our second-ever batch of homemade rootbeer! I jumped the gun on opening the first 2 liter of homemade rootbeer, and it was not very fizzy.  We’ll open batch number two tonight!

4.  While getting out some science and geography worksheets for Miss M (she really likes these, and she is probably learning at least a little bit from them), I remembered I had a Kumon cutting and pasting book for the boys we hadn’t gotten out at all this school year.

5. and 6.  With completion of lesson 81 on Tessellations, Miss M has made it through the big section of geometry/drawing lessons in the middle of RightStart C.  We had a review day yesterday and a games day today.  Miss M was not pleased to hear that we are back to “regular” lessons after this involving mostly adding, subtracting and multiplying.  She really likes the drawing and geometry!

7. Mr. E wrote a star wars story inspired by a book we read together.  I printed it out on a few sheets of paper, and he enjoyed cutting out and pasting on pictures to illustrate it from the Star Wars preschool pack at homeschool creations and from printables found on the Star Wars website.  We even bound it together with my new ProClick binding machine.  He told me, “this is a real book now!”

8. Miss M has her own cutting and pasting project — she is working on the Horse lapbook from Hands of a Child.  She has chosen horses as the subject for her “Expert Day” project for our homeschool co-op.  More on expert day in coming weeks!

9. Aren’t Baby J and Mr. E cute in their almost-matching shirts? One was a hand-me-down and one was from the thrift store — they have the same picture but different words! It’s not the best picture of the two of them, but every picture I tried to take where the boys were looking at me, Baby J’s hands were blocking his shirt! Baby J turned 4 months old this week and is now 15lbs and 12 oz!

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m linking up with:

Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and the Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

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Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

 

Book Discoveries this Week – Hitty: Her First Hundred Years March 1, 2012

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 8:39 am
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Decades before Buzz and Woody came to life on the big screen, a doll named Hitty had many years of world-traveling adventures before finally residing in an antique store, where she is at leisure to write her memoirs.  I was inspired to add Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field to our read-aloud list after reading Amy’s review at the Newberry Project blog.  “Hitty” won the Newberry medal in 1930.

Hitty is a small doll who was crafted from mountain ash wood in the woods of Maine in the early 19th century.  Her first is owner is the daughter of a whaling ship captain.  Phoebe Preble accompanies her father on a whaling voyage, sending Hitty off to far away lands with her.   Hitty sees her first owner through many ordeals on this journey.  But, as things so often go for well-loved toys that go everywhere with her owners, she is eventually lost.  A fine doll made of mountain-ash wood fares well even through the most difficult of circumstances, however, and Hitty soon finds herself with other owners.  Thus Hitty journeys through the 19th and early 20th century owned by various little girls of differing social positions, as well as being “employed” as a fashion model, a portrait model and even as a prop in the act of a snake charmer!

Miss M and I really loved Hitty…a lot!  This is the kind of book that even after reading a long-ish chapter, we would often look at each other and one of us would say “just one more chapter?”  I really enjoyed the passing of time in this book.  The world and many things in it change, but Hitty fundamentally does not.  She makes her observations of the changes in the world from a sort of “outsiders” perspective as one who sees it but does not really participate.  Something about this grand sweep of time really appealed to me.   It kept me turning the pages to see how the fate would move Hitty on from owner to owner, wondering what situation she would find herself in next.

Hitty does have a flaw, which I hope you can forgive her for.  She is a product of her time, and this book is a product of its time.  So, it is very “non-pc” at various points.  While it didn’t bother me too much to hear Hitty describe natives on a remote pacific island as idol-worshipping savages, this might bother some readers.  I was a little more bothered by Hitty’s description of African Americans in the south in the post-civil wars years of the late 19th century.  While it is probably not too far from accurate as to how black girls of that time might have been thought of or portrayed, I did edit some as I was reading since I was not really prepared to discuss with Miss M right then and there why their skin color was such a big deal.   Racial prejudice is a heavy subject for bedtime.

Despite this small “flaw”, I think Hitty is a book that stands the test of time.  It’s a very enjoyable read-aloud, and it might just make it to the top of the list of my favorite read-alouds for this year.

I’m linking up with:

 

B is for Binding Machine

Filed under: Getting Organized — kirstenjoyhill @ 7:25 am
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Here’s my newest toy tool for homeschool organization:

I’ve been pondering getting a ProClick P50 binding machine for quite a while.   I think the first place I read about it was in this post over at Our Busy Homeschool, one of the many great homeschooling blogs I read.

Homeschooling involves a lot of paper — workbooks, printable worksheets, projects, planners…and the list goes on.  The last couple years I have taken stacks of items to be bound at either an office supply store or a printing shop.  The cost and time involved adds up quickly, but I so love having books that can lay flat or be easily kept open to the proper page.

I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, plus I got a couple of small gift cards as “thank you” gifts early in the year.  After buying a few books from my wishlist, I still had almost enough left to buy the ProClick and the spines.  As a treat to myself, I went ahead and splurged a little past that gift card amount to buy my binding machine.

I bound my first item earlier this week — a stack of worksheets for Miss M from a “Read and Understand Science” book.  Instead of loose copies flying around, they are now neatly in one of her school drawers, taking up less space than they would in a binder.

I have visions of many things I’ll be binding in the coming weeks and months — custom coloring books for the boys? Math practice pages for Miss M?  Pages for Miss M’s “lapbook” on horses that she is currently working on? A new-and-improved planner for me?  Don’t mind if I do!

While this is definitely not a necessity for homeschooling, I think I will have a lot of fun with this tool!

I’m linking up with:
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“Lego Star Wars: Save the Galaxy” (and the Creative Writing it Inspired) February 29, 2012

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 12:48 pm
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Mr. E really likes Star Wars books a lot, so I think it’s really saying something when he says that “Lego Star Wars: Save the Galaxy” is the best Star Wars book he has read so far.  We found this fun and unique book at the library last week.  It’s an oversize board book with the story of Star Wars Episode IV (A New Hope) told in comic-book format.  But it’s not just any retelling of “A New Hope” — it is very funny and irreverent with lines like “You’ve been Darth-in-Vadered!”

After listening to the story several times and looking through the book on his own a few times as well, Mr. E wanted to write his own story inspired by this book.  He narrated it to me (in the format of a play or screen play, perhaps, given that he gave me a list of characters first), and I wrote it down (some of these are close to being quotes from the book…others are totally made up by Mr E):

A Star Wars Book, by Mr. E

Characters:

  • Darth Vader
  • Princess Leia
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi
  • Luke Skywalker
  • Han Solo
  • Sand People
  • Batman
  • A Battle droid
  • The death star
  • R2D2
  • Geent Cho (a Storm Trooper)
  • Water Bottle Man (a Storm Trooper)
  • Superman
  • Sarge (he shoots a piece of cheese)
  • Zeebu (a lego guy)
  • Dinosaur Cot (a lego guy)
  • Kungs (a super hero)
  • Batarang Man (a military truck that does Karate)
  • Gimme Twenty (a military truck disguised as Chick the race car)

Princess Leia: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!

Darth Vader:  I got you, Luke Skywalker!

Sand People: No Stereo? Who doesn’t have a stereo in their land speeder?

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Boo, I got you Sand People!

Meanwhile, R2D2 is trying to dig for a new land speeder in the dirt

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Here’s a light saber!

Princess Leia: Not you again!

Han Solo: Should I blow up the death star by shooting my gun?

Darth Vader: Search the Can Opener for the crew!

Obi Wan Kenobi: Luke, you must go on without me!

Batman: I’m flying in to the rescue! I’m coming to fight the death star by throwing batarangs at it.

Death Star: I’ll shoot lasers at you!

Zeebu: Hi-Ya! I’ll get you, battle droid!

Batarang Man: Flying to the rescue! I got you, Darth Vader!

Superman: I’m flying to the rescue too! I’m going to break the storm troopers with my super punch!

Princess Leia: {Pew! Pew! Pew!} [Shooting her gun]

Batarang Man: Ouch! Where am I?

Storm Trooper: Your’re in a trap, Batarang man!

Batarang Man: I’ll just throw a Batarang and it will shoot lightning and make a hole and I’ll get out. But wait, how can I get out?

Kungs: Magical, Magical, make the death star a motorcylce! This is Kungs in disguise! I’m coming to get you Darth Vader

Sarge: Yes, it is time to shoot cheese at these storm troopers!

“Chick”:  Vroom!

Han Solo: I’m shooting all the Storm Troopers!

The End!

 

Tech Tuesday: Apps We Like for Math February 28, 2012

Filed under: Technology — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:49 pm
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Math facts and other math skills are a natural fit for practice on the iPad.   Miss M practices her math skills in many ways — regular RightStart math lessons, RightStart math games, practice worksheets from RightStart or elsewhere and of course on the iPad.  Here are a few apps we like:

For basic, no frills, math facts practice we like Math Drills.  This app allows for multiple users and customization for each user of the difficulty of each type of problem.  Want your student to practice on only more difficult adding problems, a full range of subtraction problems or only 2’s and 3’s facts in multiplication? It’s a cinch to set that up.  You can also customize the number of problems that will be offered for un-timed review, timed practice or a test.  I found this to be well worth the $1.99 I spent on it!

Skill Builder Numeracy is a free option (at least as of this writing) for no-frills practice with fewer customization options and no differentiation between users that we used before purchasing Math Drills.

For math fact practice with lots of fun included, my kids really enjoy HyperBlast and Doll House math.  HyperBlast lets the user ride through a tunnel shooting aliens, avoiding obstacles, and other challenges.  There’s a brief break in the arcade style action every few minutes to answer a few math problems.  Dollhouse math lets kids buy dolls and items for a doll house after completing a few math problems.   There’s more “fun” than practice in these apps, but it’s always nice to sneak in a few extra math problems here and there with the fun!

Number Math is a great app for practicing other numeracy skills, such as greater than/less than, skip counting and number order.   This app is free as of this writing, and features multiple levels of difficulty for each skill.

The only app for time telling that we’ve tried so far is Jungle Time.  I read a lot of favorable reviews for this app, but it was not as much of a hit with my 7 year old.  She found the interface for entering the time a bit difficult to use — there were many times when she knew the correct answer, but accidentally entered the wrong time anyway.

Do you have any apps you love for math practice?

I’m linking up with:

 

A is for Abacus February 27, 2012

Filed under: Curriculum,Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 8:51 am

I love moments like this in homeschooling:

Miss M with our RightStart Abacus

Last Friday, Miss M asked if she could do school in her “prairie girl dress” (and of course the bonnet is a required accessory).  We weren’t doing anything messy, so there was no reason not to wear it. She’s using the abacus here to help her say the multiples of seven.

The abacus is one of my favorite parts of RightStart math.  It helps the student easily visualize what is going on with various math operations.

I’m linking up with…

Caitlin @ Those Wandlings for “You Don’t See That in Public School!

and

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Collage Friday: A Short School Week February 24, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 2:09 pm

This was a short week of school for us.  Tony had the day off on Monday for President’s Day, and he took a vacation on Tuesday so I could take baby J to an all-afternoon appointment without the other three kids in tow.  Here’s a few highlights from our week:

1.  Here’s two things Mr E is proud of this week — His “Giant Monster” duplo creation and reading the book Stop Pop (nearly) all by himself!  The flip-a-word series of books is a great phonics-based series of books. (we find them at the library) — it’s too bad they are out of print!

 

2. It snowed on Tuesday, producing great excitement in our household.  Have I mentioned lately that I live in Minnesota?!?  Normally, we should be groaning and complaining about snow by the end of February, but not this year! I think this is only about the second time we’ve had enough snow to need a shovel or be able to send sleds down a hill.  While James and I were at his appointment, Tony took the kids sledding at the neighborhood park and out for hot drinks and treats and the nearby coffee shop

 

3. We were back in the swing of things on Wednesday.  More math drawing lessons for Miss M!  I think we’re almost through the geometry/drawing lessons in Right Start Math level C.

 

4. We’ve been working on lesson D-7 in our science book, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, for the last couple Family Science Nights.  We talked about orbit this week — I didn’t know until recently that orbit is caused by a perfect balance between the forces of gravity and inertia.  Here, Mr. E is “orbiting” the “earth” (aka tape on the floor) and learning this concept.  We also listened to a really interesting portion of a Radio Lab program talking about Newton’s theories about orbit.

 

5. Monday holidays generally mean 50% of sales at our nearby thrift store.  Often the sale is just on clothes and textiles, but this time it was on everything! So, Miss M and I spent some of our President’s Day holiday perusing the book section, and picked out…18 books! Miss M was excited to add more Boxcar Children titles to her shelf, and I was excited about several Newberry award/honor books and titles to fit in with future history studies.

 

6. We started a new “whole family” read aloud — Prince Caspian, the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.  Mr. E took this picture of daddy reading to everyone.  We haven’t done whole family read alouds very often yet,  but I am sure it is something we’ll do much more of as the boys get older.

 

7. Just in case you ever think that things are peachy and perfect all the time around here, I thought I better share a picture like this from a couple days ago. The school room looked like a disaster after the boys spread leftover valentines and miscellaneous art supplies around the room.  Then Mr K dumped the crayon bin on the floor.  On purpose.  After several refusals to clean up (complete with consequences after each refusal), he finally cleaned up.  Needless to say, school was interrupted while all this happened.  Then this morning I went upstairs for less than five minutes, the boys decided to make a huge mess by dumping a bunch of tiny stuff (legos, cars, etc) behind the couch.  Life is not always smooth sailing as we homeschool, but we try and learn through it all (including me, as I learn to keep my cool through it all!!!).

 

8.  Not really related to homeschooling, but I was so happy that I was able to get baby J on my back in my mei tai carrier without help.  After a couple nearly disastrous tries when Mr. E was a baby, I never even tried with Mr. K and assumed I would need to use a buckle carrier (I have a toddler patapum) to carry my babies on my back.  But apparently lots of practice with a buckle carrier prepared me to now be able to safely do it with the mei tai. Yeah!

 

9. Miss M “caught reading” at the table.  She decided to go back and re-read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for herself (we read it outloud as a family several months ago).  She is enjoying it so much that she’s been reading it every spare minute and will finish in record time.

 

Have a happy weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers! 

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Book Discoveries This Week: Funny Picture Books February 23, 2012

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:12 pm
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I just love finding picture books that make the boys giggle.  Today I’ll share a few particularly funny ones we’ve discovered at the library recently:

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis: This simple board book has inspired a lot of imaginative play over the past couple weeks.  It’s a pretty simple concept – a box being used in creative ways. But the execution of that idea is very well done in “Not a Box”.  You know the book is good when the boys beg me not to take it back to the library even though we had already read it many times!  We may end up buying this one for ourselves.

Harry Hungry by Steven Salerno: A baby with an over-sized appetite eats everything in sight and grows to giant proportions.  We had a fun time imagining our baby J growing as large as Harry Hungry.  🙂

Zombie in Love by Kelly DiPucchio and Scott Campbell: This was one of our read-alouds last week for Valentine’s (selected by Mr. E), but the boys requested it several times last week.  A zombie desperately wants a date to a dance, but he just can’t please the ladies with his diamond ring (still attached to a finger!), dead flowers, and “interesting” attire.  As long as your kids know that zombies are, as Mr. E puts it, “just pretend dead people monsters”, then they might enjoy this one!

Gimme Cracked Corn and I will Share by Kevin O’Malley:  Call me corny, but I really like puns.  In fact, so does my entire family, which is why I grabbed this book at the library. I laughed a lot at the puns, but I had to explain a lot of them to the boys the first time through in this story of two chickens searching for a hidden treasure trove of corn.  My having to explain the puns didn’t seem to diminish the boys’ enjoyment of the book however, since they requested it several times.  An egg-citing read!  😉

Do you have any favorite funny picture books?

I’m linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!