Meant To Teach

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that we can choose how we learn things. I love being hands on. They learn about a subject and then get to apply it. It's awesome. I've always loved the lapbooks at www.homeschoolshare.com . For a while, we stopped doing them as my oldest daughter is getting, well, older. I was becoming more concerned in her passing an ACT test. That's why I hate teaching to a test and its honestly hard to part ways from it, because you know its coming. I honestly, shouldn't let age factor in these fun projects. She has learned so much this week and it's a real life skill. That is the reason we homeschool. I found myself getting too "text book". My oldest memorizes wonderfully, so she would remember it for the test/review but not retain it. So I put the text books aside and we started doing these lapbooks again. I love how they are a unit, so not only do they learn about the subject, but there is science, history, writing, voc...

Note: The inspiration for the title of this blog post comes from this picture...it's really what I kept thinking while I was posting the pictures to the blog. I couldn't get the minions out of my head - video is below. My oldest daughter has been learning a lot about genes, chromosomes, and DNA. So we extracted DNA from a banana. It was a pretty neat project. Viola! We extracted DNA from a banana!  The project we did was similar to the instructions here.   Enjoy the Minions

We our going on our fifth year of homeschooling. I still learn new things every year, along with the girls. The things I think I learn are usually my parenting. The perception of homeschoolers, is that parents shelter their kids. Most think that the parents want their children in a bubble. While this may be true for some, my husband and I aren't those parents who shelter our kids. I won't apologize for that. Are we going to throw them out to the wolves? No! Do they know a lot more than they should about this world, probably so...because we don't hide the ways of the world. I find that we may choose the "unpopular" way to parent among our homeschool peers. You see, I want my children to come to me when they have a question or hear something new. Back in our home town, my oldest daughter had plenty of public school friends who would come to her about things that I know, I didn't know about when I was her age. One of her friends would talk about another girl...

It's time to start a new chapter in our life. So - on our move across country, I tried to make things interesting with fun, simple facts that didn't seem too educational on our drive from the East to the West. There were little things we did, like set the clock back every time we entered a new time zone. For the most part, we actually just enjoyed seeing the scenery change. Every time we passed into a new state, the girls had to get out their folder and read a few fun facts about the state. It gave them something to look forward to when crossing the state line. My youngest exclaim, "Let me get out my folder," without me even asking. Here is what I came up with:    The girls can officially say that they have been and stayed in every one of these states. We have been to TX before, we have family there. So it was cool staying in a hotel in each state, besides TX. Here are some pictures of the scenery and its changes. Traveling parts of the old Route 66 was why we c...

My oldest daughter has recently become interested in art. We have done numerous activities together, such as painting canvases and pottery. I decided, I wanted to involve it in her school work more as well, since she has taken a liking to it. I have recently tried to figure out ways to try to incorporate different subjects with art. Sometimes we are learning about an artist, but learning about that artist and the time of history he lived in makes us learn about history, too. We took the time to learn about the artist named Kadinsky. He was an artist born in Moscow. What was so interesting to know is that his art work, during World War II, was labeled as Degenerate Art. We didn't know the meaning of this. So of course, we had to look it up. This was a lot of modern art during that time, that Hitler and Nazi's banned and didn't allow because it was "un-German". Kadinsky used a lot of geometric shapes in his paintings. So my daughter did quite a few drawings herse...

Well, it was that time again - to learn about the solar system, galaxies, how we get our seasons, the moon phases, etc. You can check out our Space Unit that we completed a couple years ago, when we covered space. Meant To Teach: What's out there in space??? Also, here is the solar system we completed a couple of years ago. Meant To Teach: Solar System Complete This time I decided to do something different with the girls. I might add, it was also much easier than our solar system above. I decided to do solar bracelets this time!

That's right, we are celebrating the birth of a new baby in our household. My oldest daughter is absolutely loving her Book Of Virtue Project. You can get the Book of Virtue here and you can download the units to go with this book here . This week her unit is on responsibility. So she has a new baby egg that she has to nurture for seven days. This is so fun for her. She did get a little grouchy when she realized she had to pay a babysitter by either money or chores. This is real life! I will probably be posting more on this project, but today we are welcoming Baby Kendall into the world. My daughter is doing her shopping list to see the grand total of how much it will be to take care of Kendall. She also had to come up with a crib for her baby to sleep in the refrigerator, as well as a babysitter and doctor.  Here is my daughter's list of baby items and cost.  She had random events that would happen every day with her baby. Whether it was taking her egg to the doctor or havin...