Have you heard about this sale? Scholastic is having a sale on 800+ of their titles, all PDF books to be downloaded for $1. You can find the sale here. I ordered a bunch over the weekend, including titles like: Easy Make and Learn Projects: Human Body (we’re doing Human Body this year) 25 wacky [...]
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Well-Trained-Mind (WTM) curriculum board lately, getting tons of ideas for homeschool next year. I have to say that’s a place I never thought I’d find myself, as several aspects of the WTM philosophy of education don’t fit with my own beliefs. But a friend of mine [...]
This afternoon the boys and I tried a new game that had just arrived in the post: Sum Swamp: Addition and Subtraction Game. (US) In this game, players move their animal piece (yellow frog, blue turtle, green snake, or red snail) through a swamp by rolling three dice: two number dice (1-6), and an operations die [...]
A short post tonight as I am losing the battle of the head cold. This evening, Jim, with a bit of help from me and the boys, put together some storage units from IKEA that I decided were the best thing I’ve seen yet to help organize our homeschooling materials. I have to admit I [...]
Today the boys pulled out the Mighty Mind (US) visual puzzles, similar to tangrams and getting progressively harder as you move through the numbered cards. The cards start out ridiculously easy (i.e., can you make two semi-circles form a circle?), but get moderately challenging fairly quickly. The first 18 (of 30) cards give you a [...]
I recently purchased the first in a new series of math workbooks from The Critical Thinking Company, whose products are a very well-received by my boys. Daegan is now working on multiplication in his math (Math U See Gamma), but does not yet have a completely solid grasp on his addition and subtraction facts. I [...]
The boys and I watched a couple DVDs from The Way Things Work series this afternoon. We watched one on Belts & Gears, a nice extension of the activities we’ve been doing in the science crates class at the Calgary Home Schoolers Association. The DVD series explains physics concepts and technological application in cartoon format, [...]
Another of my homeschool goals for the year is to incorporate more games. I loved playing games as a kid, and am convinced that my strong skills in math, logic and reasoning come in large part from the countless hours of cribbage, canasta, Yahtzee and other games I played with friends and family. We want [...]
I’ve decided to incorporate more DVDs into our homeschooling this year, and found an absolutely wonderful math DVD at the library: Donald in Mathmagic Land. (Canada) (US) Made in 1959 and only recently released on DVD, this is one video that ALL homeschoolers should see—we loved it so much, we’ll be buying our own copy [...]
Today the boys and I watched two new Bill Nye DVDs: Solving For X: Pre-Alegbra Vol 1 (Canada) (US), and Solving For X: Algebra Vol 1 (Canada) (US). Bill Nye is best known for his Bill Nye the Science Guy DVDs, which are superb (and unfortunately, very expensive; we borrow for the library). I stumbled across [...]