I had some requests on instructions for the beadwork that my children did for our Native American studies. This activity can lend itself to a variety of ages. Some things to consider when choosing what materials might be appropriate for your child: The size of the loom. The size of the string and…
Author: The Beauty of Play
I'm a homeschooling mother sharing the journey of education and life.
What We Are Using for Foreign Language
In this post I talk about what we are using for foreign language and how it works for us.
Using Bowling for Math
We used bowling for math this week. Here’s how we did it.
Planning for our next Homeschooling Year
I love seeing how other homeschoolers plan and what their schedules look like. I’ve shared mine in this blog post.
My Switch to Living History Books
“Well, this one country, they were mad at this other country, because of this dictator, you know.” This was my son’s response to my question about what he had just read in history. We discuss what he reads after he is finished to help work it into his memory and so I can judge…
Leaf Prints for our Tree Study
Leaf prints are not difficult to do, but so gratifying when you see your creation, even for the youngest artist. We are studying trees for our naturalist unit, and leaf prints were an easy way to get a lot of new trees on the pages of our nature journals. It was a messy project taking…
Making a Skip Counting Number Wheel
I was lucky enough to be advised by older and wiser homeschooling parents than me that after my children could count proficiently to 100, I should teach them to count by 2’s, 3’s, 4’s and so forth. It worked so very well for my first child, and so with my youngest now going through kindergarten,…
Using nesting shapes when playing with math
Nesting shapes are a fun, visual way to explore shapes and math. In addition they lend themselves to flexibility of ages and a variety of mathematical concepts. I’ve written a short tutorial in making them. First take a piece of cardstock 8 ½ by 11 and mark 1 inch strips lengthwise. Cut out those…
Our Bird Unit
We did a naturalist unit for science this semester giving me a chance to teach/learn about the local fauna and flora. Part of that unit included birds. Following are the various resources that I used for the unit. The first and favorite were the picture books. We read a great number of books, but these…
Walking water
My daughter asked me to do the “walking water” demonstration this past week. It’s such a fun and simple little “experiment.” She was old enough this time to do it herself. I had a couple of people ask me about it, so I thought I do a short tutorial on how to do it. You…
Sumi-e for Japan
This year we have been doing a “travel buddies” geography for my youngest who is doing kindergarten, mostly because she doesn’t want to be left out of “school” and needed something like her brother. It has been so much fun. We were approaching Japan, when I had a spark of inspiration. Scrolling through my instagram…
Some books we are reading this week:
Boo to You by Lois Ehlert Big Pumpkin by Erika Silverman The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by Sam McBratney I Spy Spooky Night: A Book of Picture Riddles by Jean Marzollo Little Owl’s Night by Divya Srinivasan Old Devil Wind by Bill Martin
Geometry and More-Exploring the Waldorf Philosophy
I’ve been dabbling a little in the Waldorf education. I’ve always had a “whole child” philosophy to education with a delayed academics approach. I mean Finland is leading the globe in education, and they don’t even begin formal academics until after age 7. They must be doing something right. That doesn’t mean the children aren’t…
The Math Book by Clifford A. Pickover
I am loving this book! Each day after our math lesson, we read a page from this book. It had been a gateway to arithmetical adventure. Today it had us discussing and researching the 4th dimension. It has also led us to experimenting with abstract Calculus concepts, studying the statistics of dropping toothpicks, magic squares,…
Turtle Tessellation Tiles and Pentagon Spirals
We are finished with our homeschooling year. Well…almost. We didn’t get to math this year, and so as we shift our focus to more fun, and a less strictly academic theme to our schooling (because who are we kidding? Homeschooling is a lifestyle; there really is no “summer break,”) we will be doing our math…
Body Systems through Art
Last fall a homeschooling friend and I made a trade. I taught her children biology; she taught mine Spanish. That trade has been one of the best things I’ve done. Not only did my children benefit from her native tongue, but her children were delightful to teach. Biology became so much more fun with friends….
Master Gallery-Exposure to Impressionism
I try to pair music, art, and literature with history. The reasoning is that perhaps this pairing will give them a reference, a framework, if you will, to how the art developed and existed in context. That is my hope anyway. A mother can dream. In history this session we studied Story of the World…
Easter pH play
This Easter I had the lofty goal of dying eggs with food, using beets for pink, turmeric for yellow, and red cabbage for blue. Like many things, my kids had different ideas, thus we did not dye eggs. That didn’t stop us from having lots of fun with colors. I took the cabbage juice to…
Using Prime Climb for Math
Using Prime Climb for Math for all ages.
Using HABA Orchard for Math
The cooperative game of Orchard is used to teach more, less, by how much, and graphing.