Homeschool Paper Crafts and Teaching Activities to Make it Fun

It’s hot outside.  Our landscaping projects are not done.  Summer is not over, and yet the first day of school is here.  As a homeschooling family, we can have a flexible schedule and in fact we did some school over the summer months.  But we were not able to do as much as I had hoped… I underestimated the power of three Catholic school cousins who were on summer break and wanted to play with [...]

If you’re looking for a fun gardening project for your grammar or middle-school aged kids, this is a fun one: making homes for the toads around your garden.  Toads are beneficial for your garden because they eat slugs and moths that can terrorize your vegetable plants.  They are also very interesting for kids, and the Toad House activity helps them learn about what toads need to survive and the kind of habitat they thrive in. [...]

I am building our 3rd grade chemistry lesson plans on the Periodic Table of Elements, and we are currently studying the Alkaline Earth Metals.  One of these is beryllium (Be).  Since we have also been doing some astronomy as a hobby and following developments in the space industry, I was interested to come across an article about the James Webb Space Telescope, and how its mirrors are constructed of beryllium.  It turns out that beryllium [...]

As you surely know, today is the 50th anniversary of the day cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted into space and completed an orbit of the earth, becoming the first human in space.  A documentary movie shot from the International Space Station re-creates the orbit that Gagarin took in his Vostok 1 capsule.  You can visit another blog I help write (thespacegeneration.com) for more info on Yuri Gagarin and to get to the movie, called First Orbit. [...]

I was happy to find a great resource for astronomy curriculum ideas.  Lesson plans and fun astronomy activities can be found at AIAA website kids section.  (This is an organization my husband used to belong to when he worked as an aerospace engineer… this was before I dragged him off to the Midwest to be closer to my family.)  To encourage my first grader’s interest in constellations, I decided to use one of their lesson [...]

I love Homeschoolshare.com.  It is a treasure trove of creative paper crafts and lapbooks and lesson plans that could keep you busy all year with virtually no other curriculum except maybe for what you can get with your library card.  They have a category for preschoolers, and you can download the fruit of someone else’s labor there to print out and use with your own child.  That is where I found this lapbook.   My 3-year-old [...]

Keeping a preschooler busy during homeschool time is a challenge.  In fact, it’s impossible, at least with my three-year-old.  She loves each activity I give her… for about 30 seconds, then she says, “I want to do it later.”  And that’s the end of that.  However, the ones that she really has kept on coming back to were counting games.  So I am running with that, generating as many counting games, printables, dot-to-dots, lapbooks, counting [...]

I have a little astronomer in the family, it seems. My six-year-old has taken to stargazing much more than to the human body study we had been doing, so it seems it is time to switch subjects. (I’m more interested in astronomy too!) And it looks like it will be more-or-less clear tonight, so we have plans to go out in the country and do some astronomy. We don’t have a telescope, nor even a [...]

Math is one class I don’t have to do much with to keep it interesting.  Granted, that doesn’t mean it is automatically my kids’ favorite subject.  But it does keep them on their toes!  We have been using Saxon Math since we started, and I can’t imagine using anything else.  It has a nice combination of memorization, drills, story problems, and hands-on learning.  And one of the way it does hands-on math is with the [...]

Temps were in the high 30s today, and the cousins were over to play, so the kids enjoyed the great outdoors together.  There is still plenty of snow in our yard, and since it’s all melting, it’s “packy”.  There is nothing better than packy snow, even if it is in April!  But they must have been feeling the summertime calling, because they got out their shovels and started building snow castles (in lieu of sand [...]