My friend Alicia, an amazing and inspiring homeschool Mom and published poet, is offering a free 10-week online course called Poetry For Kids. You can find this first week’s lesson and suggested activities here. This week’s lesson is focused on cliches, and trying to find fresh ways of saying things / evoking imagery in one’s [...]
Over the summer the boys and I have explored a variety of DVDs, including one we watched a couple weeks back and really enjoyed, called The Lion’s Share: A Tale of Halving Cake and Eating It, Too by Matthew McElligott. (There’s a picture book as well). I can’t do better than the summary on the [...]
We’ve finished our first week of easing back into the homeschooling routine, and overall it has gone well. There have been proud moments, like when Daegan grabbed his Handwriting Without Tears book and practiced his cursive, while I was working with Gareth—something I neither assigned nor even knew about til I found this on the [...]
On the weekend I went to a used curriculum sale at the Calgary Education Fair, an annual event. I got lots of goodies: more Math-U-See blocks, several board games, a few DVDs, lots of books, etc. I also found several ‘hands-on’ math activities, like this book of animal tangrams (50 cents): and a set of [...]
Today for homeschool the boys wrote thank you notes to Jim’s Mom who sent them Easter cards. We received them yesterday. Daegan was quite taken with the stamps and stickers on the cards, and I found this on the kitchen table this morning (the lens cover is hiding grandma’s return address): Daegan started with a [...]
Just a quick post tonight at the end of a hectic day that began with me having an interview about being a homeschool facilitator next year. All systems go! I was super-excited to learn that days spent facilitating count as teaching days—in other words, it is possible to earn one’s permanent teaching certification (which in [...]
I saw this fun grammar idea here a few weeks back, and we finally got around to trying it out. First, Daegan created 6 sentences which I wrote out on construction paper. I wrote the subject part of the sentences on pink paper, and the predicates on yellow. Here’s our sentences: We talked briefly about [...]
It was World Poetry Day recently (March 21), and my friend Alicia wrote up some fun ways to celebrate. Both she and my friend Tiffany reported “Dice poetry” being a big hit with their kids, so I thought we’d give it a go this morning as well. I went first, picking a topic I love [...]
Gareth also created a story using Alicia’s pictoral story starters for February; I shared Daegan’s story, The Man with the Giant Purple Ear, here. Here’s Gareth’s story, which he dictated to me. It was based on this story starter picture: The Hippo Runs Wild by Gareth Once upon a time there was a hippo [...]
I found out about a writing contest for kids from Alicia’s homeschooling column, a contest that is right up our dinosaur-loving alley. To enter, kids need to look at the cover art for Toni Buzzeo’s forthcoming book No T Rex in the Library, and write a 50-750 word story explaining how Tess got on the [...]