Creekside Astronomy: The Spiral Galaxy Experiment

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Our Spiral Galaxy Experiment: Stirring hole-punched paper, in a jar of water makes the paper move in a spiral, just like all of the planets and stars in a spiral galaxy, such as The Milky Way or Andromeda.

This experiment is from Janice VanCleave’s 200 Gooey, Slippery, Slimy, Weird and Fun Experiments. We used this in conjunction with The Usborne Book of Astronomy and Space, With Internet Links.



And learning to use the hole puncher and picking up tiny pieces of paper makes great fine motor practice for little ones.

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Learning With Literature: The Snowy Day

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

 The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats is a Caldecott winner and a Before-Five-In-a-Row selection.  And this year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of this wonderful book. Quite significant, is that it is the first children’s book to have an African American lead character.

I have a very clear memory of having it read to me as a child.  I remember how magical the book seemed.  The giant mountains of snow and Peter, so small in comparison, discovering the wonderfulness of playing in new snow.  And now I wonder what books will stand out for my kids when they are older.

My 5 year old, The Queen Bee, and I  spent a few days learning with this book to prepare for our trip to see the play at a wonderful local theatre, Adventure Theatre, at historic Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, Maryland.  And what a production it was.  If you are anywhere near the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, I highly recommend this production.  I have never seen anything at Adventure Theatre that wasn’t terrific, but this was exceptional.

After the show: Alan Wiggins, who played Peter, and Calvin McCullough, who played the roles of Harold and Arnold in Adventure Theatre's production of The Snowy Day.

 

Click here for a great video of a reading of The Snowy Day.  This can also be found on Adventure Theatre’s website.

In the days before the play, we did a snowman math activity with dot-a-dot markers, inspired by Rachel at I Heart Crafty Things.

The learning task for my daughter was to sound out the number words on the pink cards that she did not know.  She then made a fun snowman for each number and decorated it. Then she tried to teach her 3 year old brother number recognition but he was more interested in doing this with the dot-a-dot markers:

“Well, good for him!”, I thought, pleased beyond measure that he is not eating them, drawing all over his body with them or using them to color one of his siblings or our pets. Moving on…

One of our favorite activities was finding this great to-along book:  Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch. Thomas refused to put on his snowsuit and struggles ensue. His teacher winds up wearing the snowsuit.  You really must go and listen to the author read this and many more of his other books on his website. He is hilarious. My 7 year old has stayed up late into the night listening to these on the lap top in his bed. He can now recite many of the stories from memory. They are all truly silly and fun and Munsch is a wonderfully animated storyteller, which comes through, even in these audio recordings.

More Snowy Day Activities

Sparkly snow play dough, inspired by Ten Kids and a Dog.  This was very easy to make.  You add glitter to the basic dough recipe. I made the kids’ each a little jar for their Christmas stockings and they’ve played with it many times since.

Shaving cream snow and dollhouse figures to act out the story. We manipulated the dolls feet in the shaving cream to make tracks like Peter did in the book. I also gave each child a popsicle stick to make a track in the snow, like Peter.  Can’t you see Peter underneath all of this shaving cream snow?  No. Well, he’s in there. Shaving cream is messy and fun and both my 5 and 3 year olds and a visiting friend had a great time with this.

Melting Ice and Freezing Letters and Numbers Activity  We had a great time learning about how ice melts, as well as playing with plastic letters and numbers frozen in a block of ice to make words and math equations.  You can read more about those activities here or click on one of the photos below.

You can find more Snowy Day activities, including printables and crafts, on my Pinterest board, More Literature Learning.

Next up in our Learning with Literature series, The Mitten, by Jan Brett.

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Posted in books, F.I.A.R., homeschooling, keeping toddlers busy so you can actually educate your older children, kindergarten, learning to read, literature-based learning, preschool, winter | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Science, Math & Reading All in One

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

We just did a great little activity that my kids, from ages three to seven, loved.  It involved math, science and reading and it only cost me $1.

I filled a pie pan with water for each of them and sprinkled in plastic letters or numbers from a dollar store magnetic set.  Each pan of water was geared towards  what each child is currently working on.

I left the pans of water outside to freeze overnight, and this morning we got to work excavating.

Here’s the Science Lesson:

I asked them a few questions to get them started, but they took it from there.

How do you get frozen objects out of a block of solid ice?  First they decided to try using tools:  a butter knife, a sharper knife (don’t worry, it’s a kid-safe knife).  That chipped a bit of ice away but not much and the letters were in danger of getting stabbed and broken.

What do people use to melt ice on sidewalks and roads?  Salt!  They loved pouring salt on the ice.

Then they wondered, would pepper melt ice?  They decided yes, because it’s spicy, so they tried it. No, pepper does not melt ice, they concluded.

How about pouring on warm water?  Yup, that helps a lot.

The most effective thing, they discovered, was to run the block of ice under hot water in the sink.

 Then they got to work playing with what they’d found in the ice.  Firefly, my 7 year old made multiplication equations. The Unifix cubes on the left are what he used to figure out the problem.

He tried to come up with as many combinations as possible with the numbers that were in the ice, then we added more numbers. Lots of great multiplication practice. Now, had  I asked him to do this in writing, on paper, oh the whining, can’t you just hear the whining?  On the other hand, “dig plastic numbers out of ice and make equations” got this reaction:  ”This is so cool, Mom!”

The Queen Bee, my 5 year old,  made up words from the -ot family with her treasures from the ice.

She loved this and immediately wanted more magnets to work on more word families. She spent a lot of time doing this. After -ot, I gave her -at, -it, -in, and an. Whenever she put a letter in front that didn’t spell an actual word, we called them silly words and sounded them out anyway (gat, uin, wot, etc.)

Love Bug, my 3 year old, got a handful of random letters to work on letter recognition.  He pretty much didn’t want to play with his letters or make any guesses as to what they were once he freed them from the ice. It was more about the process of getting them out for him. That’s okay. I just exclaimed excitedly, here and there, “Oh, look, you got a letter D out of the ice!”  and “Wow, now you have a letter P, like p-p-p-popcorn and p-p-p-purple!”

He very much enjoyed sprinkling salt on the ice, running the ice block under water, and freeing the letters.

The day prior to freezing the letters and numbers in the ice, we put them into the little infant blow-up pool, along with some water, and went fishing:

That was fun, too. Love Bug loved fishing the letters and out sticking them to our magnetized door.  His siblings loved spelling words with them and helping him get the letters out. They were a little tricky with these fishing rods. Next time we will attach a larger magnet to the end of the string. This one couldn’t support the weight of some of the letters.

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Creekside Astronomy Unit: The Moon

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

We have had a great time learning  about the moon as we embarked on our Astronomy Unit recently.  We began with learning about the phases of the moon.  Using the diagram on the Moon Connection website, we learned about the order and direction of the phases.  I made this little poster for Firefly to complete (click on image at left to see a larger photo). I photocopied a picture of Earth, placed it in the middle of a black square piece of paper, then traced a big circle to represent the moon’s orbit.  I wrote the phases of the moon around the orbit and gave him the different moons to attach to the poster.

He did a great job putting them into order with only one mistake.  We then hung the poster on the wall near our calendar.

This will come in handy, as our next task is going to be to keep track of the phases of the moon throughout the months so that we can learn about how often the changes occur.  For that, I made some little laminated calendar cards.  Again, we used the Moon Connection website to show us the current calendar of moon phases for our hemisphere. These are just white paper glued onto black paper.  I used a one-inch circle punch for the moons, them trimmed them to the correct phase and wrote the name of the phase with a white pencil.

Our final Moon Phase project was to make a model out of Oreo cookies. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, it’s wildly popular on various blogs, Pinterest and I’ve even seen friends with publicly schooled kids posting about it on Facebook.  Yup, it was as much fun as it looks.

We also did a fun experiment about gravity and how the moon stays in orbit, rather than drifting off into space.  We took a paper plate, cut it in half and used a marble to roll around the edge of the paper plate.

When the marble is on the plate, it rolls in a curve, but as soon as it leaves the plate, it rolls in straight line. This demonstrates the concept that things (the moon, or marble) will move in a straight path unless some other force (gravity, or paper plate), pushes or pulls them.  This experiment is from Janice VanCleave’s 200 Gooey, Slippery, Slimy, Weird and Fun Experiments.  This is the first experiment we’ve done from the book and we look forward to doing more.

The kids had a lot of fun with this experiment, in fact, they turned it into a whole physics lesson by sending groups of marbles around the plates, using different forces to make the marbles move (bumping them, blowing air onto them, etc.), making different patterns with whole and half plates and so on.  They had so much fun with this.  It even entertained my three year old for quite some time, as you can see here.

After learning about phases and gravity, we moved on to the moon’s surface.  Here, we used the information and links from The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space.  We also searched You Tube for videos of moon landings, as well as the NASA Kids website.

I am also in the process of setting up some field trip.  Here are some potential things I’ve come across, some of which I had no idea existed until I started searching on the internet:

Local observatories.  Look at local museums, military bases, and universities. I found four in the surrounding metropolitan area where I live! I only knew about one. They all have specific dates where they are open after dark for optimal night sky viewing, as well as daytime, provided the weather is clear. We have several dates on our calendar to visit some observatories over the next few months.
Contact a local astronomy club. I googled our state and “astronomy club” and found there is one that is quite active, and they have an outreach volunteer who brings presentations to schools and other groups. I’m hoping to set something up and invite our homeschooled friends to join us. They even have access to parks and other rural land where viewing of the night sky is optimal with the high powered telescopes owned by their club.
Museum classes and tours. We have several museums in the area that have space exhibits, but what I didn’t know is that they will set up classes and tours for “school groups”.  Again, how easy would it be to set something up and invite our other homeschooled friends for a group class or tour?

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Learning With Literature: Fancy Nancy

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Welcome to our week with Fancy Nancy, one of my daughter’s favorite book characters.

She loves to play dress-up, just like Nancy. The fancier, the better.  So naturally, we dressed up each day before delving into our Fancy Nancy books.

Some days, we even had a tea party while we read. On this particular day, we read Bonjour Butterfly while donning our fancy pink star glasses.  We put a fancy tablecloth on our table and used real tea cups.  The Queen Bee served snacks and even let her brothers join us.  Afterwards we drew, colored and painted lots of butterflies.

The Fancy Nancy books are wonderful for expanding vocabulary (Nancy likes to use fancy words.) We used a fancy approach to make a  Word Wall of all of the sight words that my daughter can read on her own. She loved writing the words (or instructing me to write them) on index cards and then decorating them with bejeweled stickers, markers and a Fancy Pen (a plain pen that we fancified with pink tape, a tuft of tulle at the top and some glued on jewels).

She was so excited about the Word Wall project that she ran to her favorite Starfall games on the computer and began looking up various word families:  –en words (hen, pen, men), –ig words (wig, pig, jig), as well as words she recognizes from other games she plays on that site, books we read frequently, words on signs (Stop, Exit, etc.), and names of family members.

Something in this activity gave her a spark. Within a couple of hours we had a wall that went from blank to this:

 By dinnertime, she was showing her grandparents her Word Wall and exclaiming, “Look, I can read all of these words!”

At night, she lay awake, looking through books, trying to find the words we had identified on the word wall, coming to the top of the stairs, long past her bedtime, to tell me about the words that she found.

I love these splurges of learning moments.  She had another one, with reading, a few months ago, when she was determined to read a few of the beginning Bob books. Once she mastered that, she was no longer interested in the reading activities I presented or in moving further along with the Bob series. I decided not to nudge her or to do further formal reading curriculum.  I want her to enjoy learning to read.  It occurs to me that she may be “behind” most of her publicly school friends of the same age but that’s okay. She’s learning at her own pace and in a way that she perceives as fun and joyful. I believe in the kindergarten of the past:  more play, less academics. I trust her ability to decide when she’s ready to master something, because I know her and once she decides to focus on learning something, she does not let go until she’s got it.

She loves to learn “through” her favorite books.  So when she started to resist some of the curriculum and things we’d been working with, I knew it was time to go back and re-plan.  I began to gather and come up with activities around some of her favorite book characters and search for new ones that I thought would appeal to her.  I kept my eyes open at consignment sales, thrift stores and used book stores so that I could build up our collection of books for these themes.  I hit the jackpot with Fancy Nancy, and came home from one consignment sale with a huge collection of books.

Some other Fancy Nancy activities:

We went to see a theatre production of Fancy Nancy and other stories by TheatreWorks.  This is a traveling production and was very well done.  The tickets are reasonably priced, with discounts for groups. I highly recommend that you see if they are bringing any of their productions to a theatre in your area. They have many productions based on childrens’ books.

The Queen Bee also had two play date tea parties. She invited a friend over, we served “tea” (water, hot chocolate, juice) and snacks, the girls and I put on our fancy accessories and I read a few Fancy Nancy stories to them.

Some of our favorite Fancy Nancy books that we read:
Fancy Nancy Aspiring Artist
Fancy Nancy: Bonjour Butterfly
Fancy Nancy: The Dazzling Book Report
Fancy Nancy Tea Parties (lots of fun ideas in this one for fancifying your tea party set-up)
Fancy Nancy at the Museum
Fancy Nancy Poison Ivy Expert

Fancy Nancy books are written by Jane O’Connor and illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser.

Lots more Fancy Nancy ideas for learning and enjoying these fun books can be found on my Fancy Nancy Pinterest board.

For a list of wonderful blogs, websites and link-up parties that I regularly link to, click here.

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Phoenician Fashion

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Our model, The Creekside Dog, modeling a fashionable Phoenician pasta necklace.

The Phoenicians used a certain type of snail from the sea, in a particularly stinky process, to extract minute amounts of purple dye.  The dye was used to color fabric, usually made into clothing for royalty, since the dye was quite expensive.

We decided to do a modern day version of this project using blueberries, following the directions in the Story of the World Activity Guide.  A bag of frozen blueberries yielded about a half a cup of dye after we strained out the berry skins.

We dunked white yarn into the dye, as well as a dozen large pasta noodles.  Even though each item was only in the dye for a few seconds, everything turned a very dark purple, almost black.  The yarn was very stiff and had bits of dried blueberry on it so we decided to wash it.  The end result was a pretty lavender colored yarn with a sort of tie-dye effect.  Note:  do not attempt to rinse the pasta, even quickly. We immediately lost a few pieces to breakage.

Boiling the blueberries.

Straining the blueberries.

Dunking dried pasta into the dye.

Yarn at top of photo is prior to rinsing with water. Yarn at bottom is after rinsing. Broken and unbroken pasta.

Stringing the pasta onto the yarn. We interspersed dyed pasta with undyed to make longer necklaces and patterns.

Fine motor practice for my 3 year old.

And here is our model, trying to eat one of our fashionable necklaces.

In fact, she spent the better part of our school day, sneaking up on the kids from underneath tables and around corners and trying to nibble on the necklaces they were wearing. Silly pup.

You can also read about our other ancient Phoenician project, making a ship and playing the Phoenician Trading Game.

You can see all of our ancient history projects here.

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Ancient Phoenician Boat Craft

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Next up in our ancient history studies is Ancient Phoenicia (Chapter 15 in Story of the World, if you’re following along).  The ancient Phoenicians lived in Canaan, what is now modern day  Lebanon.

They were accomplished traders for their time, sailing their boats around the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, establishing settlements and trading goods such as salt, dyed cloth, cedar wood, clay jugs for wine, glass, horses and more.

The Creek Kids had a great time making and playing with our Phoenician Ship. and playing a Phoenician Trading Game.  For this, we had some help from my niece, Night Owl, who is in her senior year of college as an art major. This is a major advantage when you need someone to fashion you a Phoenician ship out of stuff you have just lying around the house.

We used this picture as our model:

This is from the book The Phoenicians:  Mysterious Sea People, by Katherine E. Reece.

Night Owl made our ship from a large piece of upcycled cardboard, trimmed to look like a ship with the head of a horse at it’s bow.  She turned a kid-size wooden table upside down, wrapped the cardboard around it and fastened it with a combination of string tied to the table legs and packing tape/painters tape to hold the cardboard to the upturned table.

Night Owl and Firefly painted the inside of the ship, covering up the original writing/pictures that were on the cardboard.  The Queen Bee decorated the outside of our ship with markers and bejeweled stickers (why not?).

They made a sail out of paper-covered cardboard, attached to a mast made of an empty wrapping paper roll.  Two more wrapping paper rolls served as the oars, poking out of holes made in the sides of the ship.

Here’s what the inside of the ship looked like when it was finished:

Lastly, we placed the completed ship on top of a wheeled dolly. This enabled us to push it easily on the wood floor of our kitchen.

Once the ship was finished, we played a Trading Game.  Much like the Phoenicians had done, we sailed around the Mediterranean (our kitchen/dining area) trading items in some of the  countries that the ancient Phoenicians sailed to (we chose four:  Canaan, Tunisia, Sicily and Cyprus). Each location had items to trade:

Trading supplies, clockwise from top left: Cedar trees (sticks), horses, purple dyed cloth (purple yarn), salt, glass (flat glass beads) in clay bowl.

The kids took turns sailing the boat from port to port (we hung signs with the name of each country around the kitchen) and working in the ports.  I explained the idea behind trading: Each person shows the other what they have to trade and then they agree on how much of one item they will exchange for another.  We had looked at the area extensively on the map and globe so they would have a visual picture of what we were re-creating.

They loved this game.  I thought they would all want to be in the boat the whole time but it turned out that they all loved working in the “ports” and trading their goods to each other.

We’ll be saving the cardboard shell of the ship and it’s mast and sail for future projects. Maybe we can modify it when we study Vikings?

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The Secret to Happy Kids (and Dogs, Too)

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Want to know what makes my kids come alive, use all of their senses, stop fighting (for the most part), and work as a team to help each other with challenges?  It’s this:

I so want to get outside every day this winter, unless its ridiculously cold. Each year I say this. I say I’ll bundle the kids up, go out for a half an hour, and we’ll run around to keep warm and we’ll play.  Truthfully, the kids would probably go for it, but I always chicken out.

This year I thought maybe I could do 15 minutes. But on day 1 of my plan, it was super cold and windy.  Amy, a homeschooling momma with far more experience that I, advised that we spend our 15 minutes looking out the window and noticing things, then drink hot chocolate. I am pretty sure she is a Naturalist at an actual Nature Center so I considered this very sound professional advice and we did just that.

And wouldn’t you know it, as we gazed out, it started to snow. Tons of flakes swirling around in the wind, sticking to everything in sight.  ”I feel like I’m in a snow globe, Mommy!”, Firefly said smiling, looking out the window and up at the sky.  Little birds scurried around on the ground underneath the feeders. It was just us and those few little birds and the swirling, rushing snow.

Hot chocolate forgotten, kids and dog darted out the front door and ran around in the front yard. They were back in a flash for coats and mittens, then out again.  Then just as quickly as it had begun, it was gone. Wind swooshed in and blew the snowflakes around.  Landing on what must’ve been warmer streets, patios, and earth, they disappeared. We retreated back inside.  For two, maybe three days. I lost count.

Then it happened. Unseasonably warm weather. Sixty degree days. Two of them in a row.  We would make up for lost time. We grabbed the dog and her tennis ball and headed for the woods the first day.  The second day, today, we went here:

A new place for us. So much to explore. Full of new rocks to climb, new paths to take, little fish swimming in the water, and so much more.  They didn’t want to leave.


Here’s the dog just before she ran out onto an even longer dock and flung herself into the water.

She’s sleeping now, beside me as I type, all curled up and smelling of wet, happy dog.

I feel so grateful for these two warm, unseasonable days. Maybe the key to getting out in the winter is to just get as much as we can, when we can, and let it sustain us for those cold, cold days.  Hmmmm, I don’t know. We’ll keep at it and let you know how it goes.

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Chrysanthemum Activities

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

We love the book Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes and we just did a week of fun activities to go along with this terrific book.

Chrysanthemum is a mouse who grows up loving her unique name—until she goes to school. The other mice tease her for having such a long and unusual name.  That is, until they meet their music teacher, who has a fantastic and flowery name of her own.

First, we made a Flower Garden of Names.  Starting with Chrysanthemum, then adding the names of friends and family members.

I wrote the names of Chrysanthemum, plus many of our family and friends’ names on strips of paper.  My 5 year old, The Queen Bee, copied one letter on each petal, then I helped her glue them onto a long sheet of white butcher paper, on which I’d pre-painted stems and grass.

I drew a simple flower petal template and traced it onto a sheet of white paper, then photocopied it onto different colored cardstock. The flower centers are from a one inch circle punch, found in any craft store’s scrapbooking section (Oh-so-many uses for the one inch circle punch. I’ve actually worn one out and am on my second one.).

Next we did a math activity.  We took our name strips and used cube counters and made a stack for each name, one cube per letter.

Then we ordered them from most to least.  Of course, Chrysanthemum’s was the longest.

Next, I gave her a card with a, e, i, o and u on it and we identified the vowels in all of the names, putting a cube on each vowel.

We sounded out the names without their vowels. They all sounded very silly! This attracted the attention of my 7 year old as well and we all went around calling each other by our vowel-less names for a while, followed by fits of giggles. Try it, it’s fun.

This reminded The Queen Bee that there is a song on one of The Letter Factory videos about vowels. It was awesome to see her connect this to what we were working on. A lightbulb moment. She even noticed that the y in Chrysanthemum’s name was making a vowel sound so we talked about the “sometimes y” rule.

She then pulled out the cards from a Hello Kitty matching game and made up her own game with the name cards. She matched a Hello Kitty card that had the same beginning sound as each name (Daddy/drum, Bella/bird and so on).

While we read Chrysanthemum, The Queen Bee wore her mouse ears headband that we made during our week of learning with another famous mouse, Angelina Ballerina.  The instructions for making them are in my Angelina post.

For more fun activities with literature, including another Kevin Henkes favorite, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, click over to my Learning with Literature page. 

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Workbox Update: We’re On a Break

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Julie @ Creekside Learning

Workboxes continue to be a popular topic on various homeschool forums, websites and blogs and my workbox page is consistently visited on my blog.  So I feel obligated to tell you that my workboxes and I are currently taking a break in our relationship.

Actually, we’ve been on a break for some time now. I’m not really sure when it happened, although I do recall a week some months ago when I said to Firefly, “Mommy, didn’t get a chance to fill your workbox but here’s a list of what we are doing today.”,  hastily scrawled on a piece of paper.”

And he read the list himself and proceeded to get to work. It dawned on me that he no longer needed those task discs with little pictures on them any more.  His reading was proficient enough. And as long as he knows at the start of the day what he is expected to do, he transitions easily from one subject to the next, without whining, fussing or collapsing onto the carpet in a dramatic fashion.

Soon, this “list” morphed into a weekly calendar.  I print out a blank weekly calendar from iCalendar and write his assignments on it. That’s it. Nothing fancy. I do this on Sunday night or Monday morning, copying most of it out of my planner, which also contains stuff for The Queen Bee and general notes to myself on what I want to do that week, learning wise.

At the bottom of each day on the calendar, I write his outside activities: basketball practice, Lego club, a playdate with a friend, a drop off visit to Grandma’s. He looks forward to these things and it keeps him from asking me repeatedly what we are doing later in the day.

The Queen Bee, my 5 year old, never took to the workboxes much. She would pull out the stuff that looked fun and work on it, then refuse the rest. That actually was fine, as it helped me do some “research” into her learning style, what types of activities appealed to her, etc. For now, I just verbally let her know what I have planned for her that day and then we roll with it. She only has 2 or 3 tasks per day, we aren’t super structured since she is only in kindergarten. Plus she spends a good amount of time each day on educational computer sights, bringing me books to read to her and playing with math manipulatives. I think the workbox thing was more structure than she really needed.

When we were new to homeschooling, workboxes helped me to be organized, and to feel good about having a plan:  Yes, my children will learn something this week. I won’t be collapsing under the chaos of a shrieking toddler, a mound of laundry, endless preparations of snacks and meals, and so forth.

Now we have a definite rhythm to our days. I am much more relaxed about their learning. All of the learning doesn’t take place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day, or whatever. It’s much more spread out. For example, a lot of our reading (both me reading aloud to the kids and Firefly reading himself) takes place in the evening.  Much easier to do that when my 3 year old has either gone to bed or can be entertained by The Husband vs. during the day when he interrupts for snacks, help with the potty, wanting Mommy to play with him, etc. ( I am speaking of the 3 year old here, not The Husband. Just wanted to clarify.)

So there you have it. No more workboxes, at least not right now. Perhaps we will return to them someday. Perhaps my three year old will be a workbox kind of guy when he starts doing schooly stuff. We’ll have to wait and see.

One more thing:  Having a little supply box for each child has been a lifesaver. I’m not sure how or why but my kids keep track of these things. They put their pencils, crayons, erasers, scissors, glue, etc. back in their boxes each day with little encouragement from me and this has made life so much easier when we set to work on an assignment or a project. So we will keep using these wonderful little boxes. So simple, but such a timesaver.

You can read more about my other workbox posts here to see how they evolved in our house.

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Posted in homeschooling, lesson planning, workboxes | 4 Comments