Meant To Teach

We made homemade play-dough and it was a huge success. Most recipes call for Cream of Tartar, however, that's not a common item in your cabinet. Our substitute for Cream of Tartar is vinegar or lemon juice. What you need: 1 cup of flour 1/4 cup of salt 3 tsp. of vinegar or lemon juice (Lemon juice will smell better) 2 tbsp. of oil 1/2 cup of water Food coloring First you mix all the dry ingredients, then you whisk in the oil, water, and lemon juice. Keep mixing over low heat until it forms dough. Split the dough and color! We also colored with kool-aid packets to make it smell better, instead of the normal play-dough smell. This is, ofcourse, optional. :)

For this art project, we even made the paint. Directions are below. What You Need: 1/4 cup cornstarch 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 Tablespoon sugar 1 cup cold water Food coloring You mix everything except for the food coloring in a pot and stir. Let it warm on the stove for 10 minutes at a low to medium setting. It will be thin at first but will thicken. When you are done, separate into little cups of some sort (jello cups, plastic tupperware, etc.). Let it cool. Then add the food coloring to make the color. Then after making the paint, we did tape art. The girls put strips of paint on a file folder (we had our reasons for choosing a file folder). They made their own designs with the tape and then painted over it. After painting, they removed the tape. Viola! They had a masterpiece. This is my oldest daughter's masterpiece. This is my youngest daughter's masterpiece.

My oldest daughter wanted to spend some time just doing fun experiments. So that's what we did! :) We did elephant toothpaste and a homemade lava lamp. I think the lava lamp was our favorite. They loved seeing the water and oil not mixing together. The water was poured in last but ended up at the bottom of the bottle. Then we poured food coloring in and it went down to the water as well. Add an Alka Seltzer and it makes a beautiful experiment! There are pictures below. I got these ideas from Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas and Preschool Powol Packets , which gives you instructions. They are showing how the oil and water are separated. You can see the food color, it literally looks like drops of blood resting on the water. After dropping just a tiny piece of one Alka Seltzer tablet. After dropping all of the tablet. This is the elephant toothpaste. It turned out okay, but not as foamy as we wanted. But it was neat to watch it just come out of the bottle on its own, once we ad...

January 20th was the Homeschool Spelling Bee. My oldest daughter competed this year for the first time. I really didn't think it would go so well! Some of the words from the list that she had to study, I didn't even know the meaning of. She did great!! She won FIRST PLACE out of her grade level! Some of the words she got right, which surprised me, were beatific and embryo. I certainly didn't know what beatific was, but she just sounded it out! At the end, we were waiting because she came down to a tie with another 3rd grade girl. Her winning word was pyramid. Kylee did awesome! She left with a 1st place medal! This is just an example of another proud mommy moment!

Easily done with glue, plastic plate, tissue, black construction paper, and a styrofoam cup. The girls had fun with this!

This week we've learned about Polar Animals...including penguins from the South Pole to polar bears of the North Pole. I find it funny that penguins and polar bears will never meet. However, seals eat penguins and polar bears eat seals, so maybe they do come together after all! Bahahaahahha! That's a joke - cause seriously, I'm not sure that leopard seals go all the way to the North Pole. Anyways, we did a science experiment this week with "blubber". It was really Crisco (or as in our case, an off brand version). First, we put our hand in ice water by itself. COLD! Then we added blubber (fat). Blubber is a thick layer of fat under the skin in polar bears and dolphins (we learned that earlier this year). With tons of blubber (which you have to pile it on thick), the fat helps keep you warm. :) Girls had fun with this! But it was very messy to wash off!

I was so proud of the girls. This week, we weren't feeling the greatest, so we weren't doing lapbooks or anything like that for science or history. We just took it easy and read a lot of library books about the human body. Some of those books included The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body , A Drop of Blood , and Your Skin and Mine . The girls seemed to learn a lot. On Thursday, they decided they wanted to trace my body and then draw some things they learned about on the inside of our bodies. They did a great job with absolutely NO HELP from me (except for tracing me)! I was so proud of them. They drew it on a table cloth and wanted to surprise Daddy when he came home from work. The table cloth was put on the table for him to see when he walked in! :) Pictures of their work are below.

In a homeschool forum, I recently responded to a post about this sort of topic. So I thought I'd write more about it and show pictures on my blog. This year, with it being the first year of us homeschooling, its taken us some time to get our routine and rhythm down. The question that even I, myself, had in the beginning was, "How am I supposed to teach two kids - especially if they have different lessons?" FOUR THINGS THAT I USE: 1.) CLIPBOARD 2.) PAGE PROTECTOR 3.) DRY-ERASE MARKER 4.) TASK LIST Months ago, I printed off a task list that I got from here . I cover it with a page protector so that I can use dry-erase markers on it. They easily wipe off. I did this not only for my kids, but for myself as well. It helps with lesson plans for the next day to make sure that I'm not forgetting a subject. I write down their assignments. In the beginning, I wrote down "with Mommy" out beside the lessons, so they knew not to do those by themselves. But t...

This is why homeschooling is one of the most fulfilling and rewarding things I've ever done. Ashlyn is reading very well and she's doing just fine. We still have a little ways to go, but I'm so proud of her.

So I can't claim this idea. I got it off of www.pinterest.com. But we tried it and its a huge success. My youngest daughter loved the fact that it was Easter Eggs and we are keeping them in an Easter basket. I have a long list of word families that we will keep adding once we master these really good. This has taken the place of our "sight word flashcards" for this week. We're ahead of the game compared to our public schools around here, so we're going to take a break on the flashcards and do these word family eggs to make sure we have got it down. My youngest daughter loves turning the eggs to make a new word and she's helping me do the eggs as well. So she loves trying to make the words. We may even get creative with them and fit an egg hunt into this, especially around Easter time. AN EGG HUNT WAS HER IDEA...so we we will see how it develops. I'm just excited that she's excited about it. BLOG UPDATE: WORD FAMILY CHARTS