FunSchool is Cool

Hey everyone just wanted to share a few little entertaining things we did this week in our homeschool. We had a pretty busy week outside of the house this week with an illness in the family so most of the week we just stuck to the basics reading, writing, and math. But saturday we had a little extra time to spare after our soccer game so we did two fun projects, the first one we have been working on the parts all week and we finally got it put together, and the 2nd was a life cycle activity that I found in our science text.

Lapbook

Since school started we have been working so hard on the addition chapter of our math book so once we got finished and took the test I figured we needed a little math fun so I went looking through all the fun math related freebees I have been collecting forever and found this A Circus of Math Lapbook I downloaded from CurrClick. (I guess I had a coupon for it because now it is 7 bucks.) The file comes as a 61 page download it includes everything that you need to create fun mini books for the 1-9 addition facts as well as 3 math games with directions describing how to put it all together. The only extras you will need are a couple of file folders and paper. I just printed mine of regular copy paper (because that is what I had on hand) but it will probably hold together better with cardstock, the lapbook pieces are all in black and white so it would also be eye catching on neon cardstock.  
 Most of the things I cut out because it was a lot of little pieces and plus I did it at night when the kids were sleeping. There were a few things that I let Olivia cut out and then I let her fill in the answers to the math fact problems and we glued or folded each book together.  I think that each day we did 3 books and then today we sat down and got our file folders out and refolded and glued all of our pieces together. This was a great way to practice the math facts and also we can use it as a fun resource we will be able to utilize when we start memorizing these facts.

 Metamorphosis

This week we learned a little about the life cycle of Insects and found this project in our Science text (see this post for the link to the free science text we use). We used construction paper strips to make a model of the 4 stages of a butterfly life cycle.

eggs



caterpillar                     chrysalis

 

butterfly

Olivia had fun doing this project (but she thought the strips would make better bracelets)

 

Although this week has been a little tiresome I am so blessed to be homeschooling. The school work may not always get done at “normal” school times but we were able to get plenty of learning accomplished.

 

What do you do when life puts a bump in your homeschool day?

-Becca

*****I just love going back and looking at how much fun we have during our school time it puts my mind at ease when I feel like things are not going as planned****

A short stop in Ancient Egypt

 

As I have shared before I did not buy a History/Geography curriculum for Olivia this year for a few reasons but mainly because I want to mostly focus on the 3 R’s this year, but I do want to introduce her to some things that I think she would be interested in so for the last week and a half we have been studying Ancient Egypt and it has been fun.

I found this Ancient Egypt unit study from RoyalBaloo.com she wrote it for her 2^nd grader so there is some things in there that I did not do with Olivia but we picked out the things that we would like. I love that everything is included with this unit study. I do plan on writing unit studies for us for later and this one was a very well thought out plan and a great inspiration. **Thank you Erin at RoyalBaloo for sharing all of your amazing stuff**.

The Ancient Egypt unit study is a free 22 page download that includes 2 mini books and tons of worksheets covering everything from Ancient Egypt Geography and the Nile River to the daily life an Ancient Egyptian kid, and everything in between.

The first week we learned a little about the geography of Egypt and the Nile River and Sahara desert. The download included a worksheet to write the definition of a desert and draw a picture so I used that sheet for some Dictionary practice and showed Olivia how to look up words in the dictionary.

The second week we learned about hieroglyphs and pyramids and even built a pyramid out of rice crispy treats. Olivia really enjoyed that. We still have pharos, and mummies that we have not gone over but by the middle of the second week Olivia was over the whole ancient Egypt study and to tell the truth I was as well so we ended our study there. I still have the extra stuff in our notebook so that one day when we are bored and need something fun to do we can pull this out and learn something new.

I also found this Ancient Egypt printable pack at 3 dinosaurs it included pintables suitable for tots to 1^stgrade level. Like with the unit study I went through and picked out things that I though that my kiddos would enjoy. I printed out lots of do-a-dot pages for Edward, a color mini book with scarab beetles and several 2 piece puzzles. For Olivia I printed out a 100 chart color by number and a 10 piece count by two puzzle. I also added the greater than/less than sheet and the addition sheet to her daily calendar notebook.

Besides the do a dot pages Edward was not happy with the Ancient Egypt theme, he would not even color the mini book or play with the puzzles he wanted his dinosaur things that we did the week before. But just like with Olivia, I will put all the stuff we did not do up and pull them out another time and maybe he will enjoy it more.

Along with the pintables that I found online I also went to the library and checked out all the books that I could find on Ancient Egypt and all our read alouds from the last two weeks came from one of those books. Olivia really enjoyed the myths and legends from the book Ancient Egyptian Civilization by Michael Bell and Sarah Quie .

This is not everything that we did it is just what stuck out in my mind and the things that we got picturs of. I can not wait to figure out where our next stop in history will be.

Come back next week and I will show you some of the fun things that I am doing with Edward my 2 year old to keep him occupied while we do school.

-Becca

Journey to a more organized life

Yesterday Charmaine talked about chaos and organization here this is something that I have a lot of issues with.  Not as much in my home but in my mind *don’t get me wrong my home is a mess but it is not as distracting to me as my thoughts*

I have so many ideas of things that I want to do or try, it just gets jumbled up and I end up not getting anything done. Even while sitting here trying to write this post my mind is racing about all the other things that I could write about or could be doing. It gets so bad that I can not get to sleep at night. I just can’t get my mind to slow down.

So my thoughts are where I am going to start my journey to a better organized life. Now I just have to figure out how to slow down my overexcited mind.

After a few days of research I have found a few ideas of what I can do to try and slow this mind down. The first thing I am going try is every evening after my kiddos go to bed I will write down everything that I am thinking about, or worrying about and write down one thing that will help me stop thinking about it. I will try to write down a solution to the problem, or one thing that will get my thinking into an action.

I guess we will see how it goes. If you have any ideas about what I could try please leave a comment below this tired mama is willing to try anything.

-Becca

Olivia's first day of first grade

All summer I have been planning an exciting back to school day for Olivia, usually we just start school but this year since we are going into first grade I wanted back to school to be a celebration.  We talked about it all week and we were both super excited when the day finally arrived.

 

 

 We started back to school last week and it was a hit.  I think that we are going to have our best homeschool year yet.  We started off our morning with a very short photo session Olivia was not to into it so she only let me snap a few pictures. Then we put her daily calendar activities into the binder that she got to pick out.   Then we decorated her math binder *stickers really are all we need to have a good day*

Olivia’s favorite thing of the day was making an abacus. It really was a lot of fun, and super easy all we used was beads kabob sticks and big popsicle sticks.

We also had our first trip to the library her eyes lit up when she saw all the books everywhere. I showed her how to pull out the books where she would know where to put them back if she looked at it and decided she did not want to take it home. We went over the library etiquette and Olivia was able to get her very own library card. 

            There was one more activity sheet that I created and intended to do, it was a first day of school questionnaire, but my computer got a virus and I could not get it printed out so I guess I will turn it into a “whoohoo I am 6 questionnaire”.

 

Since we practically do school year round I think that celebrating the first day of a new school year is a good way to start fresh, and I can not wait to keep this tradition going and growing. 

Edward enjoys doing school with us as well

What kind of things do you do to make going back to school fun for you and your kids?

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Original Recipe found online

I have looked at so many different places not sure where I found this the first or who made it but thank you!

1 bar Fels-Naptha soap ($1 per bar)

1 cup Arm and Hammer Washing Soda ($3.00? for 55 oz)

1 cup 20 Mule Team Borax ($ 3.38 for 76 oz)

All of these things can be found at Wal-Mart or any store like it in the laundry isle and beside the soap each box will do several batches of soap

The recipe says to grate up the soap as small as possible (We used food processor but you can use a cheese grater) then stir in the other two ingredients and use 1-2 tablespoons per load.

We have been using this soap for about a year now with no problems it cleans the clothes really well and does not leave any scent. I have also read online that since it does not make a lot of suds it is ok for HE washers (not a professional so could not say for sure, but it has not messed up ours) 

I also put about ¼ cup of vinegar in the fabric softer dispenser of my washer to soften and deodorize clothes. 

Today mom and I made some more of this detergent up and decided to tweak it a bit so here is what we used.

 

6 cups Arm & hammer Washing Soda  

6 cups 20 mule team Borax

1 bar Zote pink

6 bar Fels-Naptha soap

¾ ml Tea tree oil in ½ of batch

Lotus blossom and vanilla fragrance oil in ½ of batch

6 cups Epsom salt

Measuring cup

Knife

Food processor 

 

What we did

1. cut up bars of soap so that they will fit into food processor 
2. Put in 1 bar of Fels-Naptha soap and 1/6 bar of Zote. turn on processor and grate until all the pieces are small
3. add in washing soda and borax and mix until well blended (he had to do one batch at a time because that is what would fit into my processor)
4. I also added ¼ ml of tea tree oil to each of the first 3 batches. 
5. After all 3 batches were made we put in 3 cups of Epsom salt and mixed in really well.

The 2^nd half of the soap we did not put in tea tree oil but added 9 drops of vanilla and 21 drops of lotus blossom

      After mixing everything in it still did not have a very good scent of the vanilla and lotus blossom so I took 4 cups of detergent out and added in 14 more drops of lotus blossom and 9 more drops of the vanilla

I hope that this is not to confusing we have decided to just add the scent drops after we fill up our containers so we could add what scent we like and how much we want.  

I also will not be using the vinegar this time because we added in Epsom salt. We have not used our tweaked recipe yet but I will share a review post when we have used it a while.   

What each ingredient does for the soap

Washing soda is a detergent booster

Borax is also a detergent booster, it fights stains, softens hard water, and gets rid of any odor. 

Zote brightens clothes,

Fels-Naptha is a stain fighter

Epsom salt is a fabric softener.  

If you try out our recipe or have you own tell us about it in the comments below.

 

-Becca & Debra

A soapers review...

After being able to use both batches of our soap for about a week now I can say that I love it! It turned out fantastic.

The first batch (see here) is a beautiful yellow color and is tea tree and vitamin E oil.  This batch we used cold process and had to let it sit in a closet for 3 weeks (boy was that a long hard wait) the soap turned out so good it is hard and has lots of creamy lather. It also cleans really well and rinses off clean (it does not leave any soapy residue like some soaps can).  

The second batch (see here) is a very natural looking brown color the lilac and lotus blossom gives it a very soft sent that is very soothing.  This bar we let cure for 1 week it is a little softer than the first batch but hopefully the longer it sits the harder it will be. This one also produced a very rich lather and rinses clean.  I have also enjoyed using the oatmeal honey almond soap it is a very good exfoliating bar. I do think that we will have to grind up our oatmeal a little bit more next time the pieces are kind of big.

I have also tried to use it as hand soap and at first it dried out my hands when I used it too often but now that I have used this soap exclusively for a couple of weeks I don’t notice any dry skin.   

I still don’t know if hot process or cold process is better some things that I noticed about each, cold process looks smoother like a bar of soap from the store looks and our hot process looked rawer, not perfectly smooth it had bumps and dips (this could just be our soap though?) The Hot process soap got done a whole 2 weeks faster than the cold process although not quiet as hard (yet).

I also learned that saponification is the chemical reaction that happens between the lye and the oils that turns the oils into soap. (whoohoo)

Anyway I am by no means an expert at soap making but I do know that it is fun and if you are looking for a more natural soap then this could be your solution.

Why I decided to homeschool/ my curriculum choices.

Hey everyone, next week Olivia and I are going to try to start our new school year, since the beginning of May we have been doing summer school where we work on what Olivia wants to and when she wants to. The last couple of weeks she has not asked to do any kind of formal learning so we have not but we are both ready to jump back in there. I have a few fun things planned for the start of a new school year that I will share with everyone later; we will also have a busy week with doctor’s appointments and first time at a co-op function so I am not sure how much "formal" learning we will be doing. Since we are going to be starting our new school year I though I would share with you all why I want to homeschool my kiddos, there are so many more reasons but here are a few on the top of my list.

 

1. I know that I can provide a safe environment for them to learn
2. I like the idea of teaching my kids to love learning not just giving them an education.
3. I have been there “teacher” since the day that they were born. (why just because they turn 4 or 5 does that have to change)
4. It fits the way we choose to live our life. We like to be able to just pack up and go away for a few days whenever we feel like it.
5. I do not want someone else to be responsible for how my kids turn out.
6. I know that there are a lot of teachers out there that do fine by there students   but I don’t want fine for my kids I want spectacular.
7. I will be able to give my kids a personalized learning experience that no school or teacher will.
8. It brings my family closer together, If my kids were at school for 7 hours a day 5 days a week and my hubby is gone 12 hours a day 4 days a week we would never be all together. And when we would be together we would have to get all the “must do” stuff done and still not have time for the fun stuff.
9. Most importantly its fun!

 

Now onto my curriculum choices

 

This year Olivia who is 5 will be starting first grade up until now I have not really used a curriculum. And although I have chosen several curriculums for this year we will not be following them completely to the letter but it has been nice to have an idea of things we will be doing.

Math

For math we have decided to use Math Mammoth grade 1.  We have not tried this out yet but it looks like it will be a good fit for our family and covers everything that should be taught in 1^st grade math.  It starts with simple addition and subtraction and covers money, time, and calendar. We are very excited to try this curriculum out.

Reading 

For reading we are going to do a combination of phonics and sight words. For phonics I have decided to try out Explode the Code we are going to start on book 2 which covers consonant blends this is something else that we are trying for the first time this year. For sight words we will be finishing up the You Can Read lessons from 1+1+1=1. I am not sure what we are going to be doing after that I am thinking about this reading in 1st reading series from Enchanted Homeschooling Mom. Plus there will be lots of leveled readers and read aloud from me.

 Science

 I found this Elementary Life Science curriculum that I was able to download for free and include a text book, and teacher’s book. It has everything for a full 36 weeks of science with experiments worksheets and tests all included.  

 Geography/History

 We will be going thru the Road Trip USA curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler this includes a teacher and student books with everything they need to learn about each of our 50 states with coloring pages, games, creating a lapbook or notebook and even recipes from each state. She also recommends living history books to go along with each state. 

 I also have a book of mini lessons for writing and we will be pulling art projects from all of our other subjects. Wow typing this all out it  looks like a lot and like I have said we have not tried to follow a curriculum before so we are just going to go with the flow and the only thing that really matters is that we keep on learning.

If anyone has used any of the above curriculum I would love to hear how it worked out for you. Leave a comment!

linked with

 

 

-Becca

 

 

Links to the blogs mentond above. All 3 blogs have lots of freebees for homeschoolers.

 



The Water Blob

    
This project has been one year in the making, well for me anyway, last summer my husband and I were trying to think of some fun DIY water ideas. I ran across this idea for a water blob and really thought that it would be fun for us to do with the kids and when I showed my husband and he already had an idea for this water fall sprinkler made out of pvc pipe and we already had all the supplies so we made that and forgot all about the water blob.

Last week my hubby was telling me about this great idea he found on Facebook for an outdoor water bed for the kids to play on. He said someone pinned it but he could not find it. When I found the pin that he was looking at what do you think that I found? The water blob idea that I had last year. So after a trip to Wal-Mart for a roll of plastic and some duck tape we had everything that we needed. That’s it! Well that is not all we bought because who can go to Wal-Mart and just gets what they ran in there for?

So while the little one was taking a nap hubby and I rolled out the plastic and folded it in half and got to taping. Boy was that fun, in the super hot Texas afternoon (said no one). After getting all the sides taped up we duck taped a water hose into one corner and laid it out on a tarp so that hopefully we would not get a hole in it, and filled that baby up. At first we were trying to tape up all around when we found leaks, but really it was not too bad even with a few leaks the water stayed in pretty good, and the water that came out onto the top of the bed just made it more fun.

The cool water in the blob made for a wonderfully wet afternoon of fun in the sun. We rolled and jumped and watched the waves. The kids tried to slip n slide on it but were not to successful. After a while even my 8 month old nephew was enjoying himself.



the kiddos playing while the blob is filling up

we all had a fun afternoon playing

 

We have been able to use this a couple of times plus use it as a slippy slide (and still able to use it) so it was well worth the 25 or so bucks we spent on it.  We have spent more money than that onstore bought water toys and sprinklers that did not last one time of using it.

 

What do you think? Is this something that you or your kiddos would enjoy?

 

-Becca

 

First hot process homemade goats milk soap with recipe

Our first batch of cold process soap (see here) still has about 3 or 4 more days before it is ready but Mom and I could not wait to try out hot process soap so today we got all of our stuff together and spent the morning making another batch of soap.  With hot process we are going to be able to use the soap alot sooner.

What you will need:

Crockpot

Bowls, spoon, spatula, wisk

Good digital scale

Stick mixer

Mold (we used a can food box from grocery store it was 8.25x12 inches divided in half with another piece of cardboard covered in plastic wrap)

Plastic garbage bag (cut into single layer to cover the box to protect from oils)

fragrance oil or essential oils (we used  Something Fabulous brand from Hobby Lobby)

Oils we used

3.2 oz sweet almond oil         10%

9.6 oz coconut oil                   30%

6.4 oz sunflower oil                20%

11.2 oz olive oil                      35%

1.6 oz stearic acid                   5%

You can use whatever oils that you like just make sure to run through a lye calculator (this is the one that we used) to verify how much lye/water to use

12.16 oz water

4.569 oz lye

4 scoops powdered goat’s milk

*Our goat’s milk came with a scoop if not use 8 tablespoons

*also when making soap with milk it will be darker in color

Extras

Fragrance oils

            Japanese louts blossom

            Lilac

            Honey almond

Honey

Oatmeal

*This recipe uses 2 lbs of oil, if you want to make more or less just plug the % into the lye calculator to get the correct amounts*

Directions:

If you have any solid oils turn Crockpot on low add in oils and stir make sure all oils are melted then turn off

Go outside and add lye to water stir until clear

*be careful with this step lye is very dangerous and will burn if it touches you skin use protective gear

*if you get lye on you, you can use vinegar to stop the burning.

* be sure to always pour lye into water not the other way around.

Pour lye water into oil
Add in stearic acid and goat milk powder

Stir with spoon or Wisk until everything is incorporated then use stick mixer until your batter is at trace (i did not time this but about 20 minuts)

trace

Set Crockpot to low and put lid on it stir occasionally to keep batter cooking even 

Our Crockpot cooked really hot and ended up separating the batter so next time we will try to cook it on warm (if this happens just turn down and keep stirring until back together)

Our booboo

When done batter will look like waxy mashed potatoes test with “zap test” (take a little and put it to your tongue if there is any sting it is not done)  to make sure the saponification process is complete. (This took 1 hour even with the mess up)

 Transfer batter into another bowl and stir for a few minutes to let soap cool add in extra’s

Put in molds and cover let sit for 12 hours then cut into bars

This time we halved the batter, in 1^st half we used

¼ oz of Japanese lotus blossom fragrance oil

¼ oz of lilac fragrance oil

The other half we used

¼ oz of honey almond fragrance oil

1 tablespoon of honey

 ¼ cup of oatmeal that we chopped up in a processor

            With this batch we got 9 bars of lotus blossom and lilac and 9 bars of honey almond  (2.75x2 inches)

Add in any fragrance you like at no more than 1oz of fragrance for 2 lbs of soap

Add dry items at no more then ½ cup for 2 lbs

Soap will be ready to use once it hardens.


Would you try making your own soap?

-Debra and Becca

Could we be Soapers?

 

     For a while now my mom and I have wanted to try our luck at making our own bath soap.  We have talked about how much fun it would be, and how we could make it look and smell exactly how we want it to.  Plus do you know how much money we could save?  There was one thing stopping us though, I think it was the shear amount of information their is out there on the subject. Do we use cold or hot process? Is their a right combination of fats that we should be using?  What is saponification anyway?


     Fast forward a few months in April I took a trip to visit my husband's family in Idaho and while there I bought some homemade goats milk soap. We fell in love with it, so rich and creamy and it smelled heavenly plus after using it I did not have to use lotion anymore.  I mean how great is that?  That gave us the kick in the butt we needed to get this soap making thing on the roll.  So again we began scouring Pintrest and You Tube for an easy goat's milk soap recipe. Then we finally found this You Tube video that made the process look perfectly doable for two newbie Soapers.


     We have found our recipe!  It was a first step, a step that threw us into high gear. We got all of our ingredients and tools together, just waiting for us to both have a morning free so that we could get this soap making show on the road.


     We waited for a morning when she was not to busy and both of my kids were gone and we watched the video one more time to check our recipe. We gathered all of our stuff and went outside and started mixing and measuring and pouring. Do you know what? It seemed to work, everything the video said would happen did and we got our soap mixed and poured into our mold and it hardened like it should. Now we have to just wait 3 weeks to see how our soap turns out.

Have any of you tried to make your own soap? What was your experience like for you?

Becca

Meet the ladies!

Debra

Hi! My name is Debra I am 50 years old. I am married to my high school sweet heart for 34 years now. I have 4 kids, 6 grandkids and 1 on the way due in September 2013. I am a very proud mom and Grammy. I love my family, cooking, and crafting. I have a very busy life and try to enjoy each and everyday that I can. I believe in God and I am happy to be one of his children. I love nature and I am trying to get back to more natural living. I do love my modern conveniences and I am working on how to us old and new ways to make my life more to my liking. I would like to believe I could adapt to what ever life has in store for me and my family.

 

Me and the love of my life Brian

 

Becca

Hey everyone, I am a stay at home mom to Olivia (5), and Edward (2). My Husband Garry and I have been married for 4 years. We are a homeschooling, camping, DIYing type of family. Recently I have been obsessed with everything happy homemaker-ish. (I know not a word but its fun to say) and hope to share some of my obsession with all of you.

My husband Garry, Me, Edward, Olivia

 

Charmaine

Hey I'm Charmaine, I am 32 years old, and I was born in Panama but moved to Texas 15 years ago. I'm married to Jeff and we are the proud parents of Aaron 13 and Ryan 6. I homeschool my kids, and take care of my house. I love the Lord, I'm a children's church teacher, I speak Spanish and love soccer, I'm never on time, I talk a lot and I am very expressive! Coffee is my weakness!

Aaron, Ryan, Me and Jeff

 

Sarah

Hey I am Sarah the youngest of the ladies. I am a little bit of a scatter brain (well more than a little) but somehow these ladies put up with me. I am a working single mom of 2 kids Karli (4) and Kullen (8 months). I work a lot so when I am off I am a complete homebody. My all time obsession is books. I honestly believe for me reading is the best therapy.

Me Karli and Kullen