Mom Is Teaching

Independence Day is this Friday in the US. There will be fireworks, parades, games, and lots of fun. Oh, and did I mention the fireworks? That’s the boys favorite part. Seriously, every holiday should include exploding things in the sky.

Since you can make any day a learning experience, including days that involve explosions, I thought I would share a few resources for this Forth of July. Just a few sites that have games and ideas of things you can do with your kids.

• Start off your day with my Red, White and Blue Breakfast. Trust me, it’s yummy!
• The Teacher’s Corner has a collection of 4th of July Activities and Lesson Plans you can use.
• Kaboose has some fun games and quizzes for the 4th.
• Apples 4 the Teacher has a lot of great info from coloring pages to facts on the Revolutionary War.
• Homeschooling at About.com has a fun list of online games for the 4th.
• For younger kids Enchanted Learning has some great activities and craft ideas.

Lots of fun stuff that you can use to keep kids entertained all day, which might be helpful if you’re having family over for the 4th. Word search puzzles and watermelon eating contests are much better than fighting over who did or did not eat the last ice cream bar. Does anyone have any fun ideas up at their blog? Let me know and I’ll add you to the list!

Independence day, 4th of July, kids, fun

Around here summer time means fair season. There is a small traveling carnival that visits several towns in the areas. hitting ours in later summer/early fall. Between the over priced rides, tons of junk food, and pens of animals stinking in the heat it’s part magic and part nightmare. Sure the fair is a far cry from the amazing attractions county fairs used to be, but in a kid’s eyes this place is spectacular.

It never fails that every year the adults complain that it’s even worse than last year, and every year the kids mange to sweet talk far too much money out of us on rides and games.

Over the weekend I was digging around a history teaching site that a friend mentioned I should check out. There are a bunch of great little lessons on various parts of US history. One lesson that really struck out is this one of the book Charlotte’s Web and the traditional county fair. The original lesson plan is only for download so I saved it to my Good Docs section to share with anyone who can’t download it. The link should be open to anyone without needing to login, but if you get an error let me know.

Charlotte’s Web was one of my favorite stories as kid. How could you not love a book with talking animals and an amazing spider? Today I love how un-sugar coated the story is. Death is a part of the storyline, not in an explosive dramatic way, but in a normal sense. Yes, Charlotte kills the bugs, but she has to to live. yes she dies, but her children live and move on. Sure Wilber is trying to avoid death, but that in itself share a little piece of farm life (where does your bacon come from?).

I think I’m going to see about adding Charlotte’s Web to our summer reading list, hopefully just in time for the county fair to come here. Anyone else?

Charlotte’s Web, county fair, lesson plans

Week #4 of the Green Hour Challenge, this week things are coming into focus for our nature study. This week we are supposed to choose a specific area to study for the remainder of the challenge. Since it is spring and things are blooming everywhere here we choose to stick with plants. Though I am sure that incects and animals will wander in as they are needed.

This week on our nature walk we found and brought home two things to explore and learn more about.First this robin egg that we found on the ground. The top of the shell was broken, but the insides were still intact. There wasn’t a baby bird inside, but there was a clump of something floating in there.

Next we found these purple flowers growing in a huge patch. I’m still not sure exactly what kind of flower they are. I couldn’t find them in the Handbook of Nature Study and searching online by their description brought me about 500 different types. I’m just not that patient to dig through them all. But I learned of a great online resource for exploring animals and plants. eNature.com has free field guides online thousands of species that you can dig through.

This week we were supposed to read pages 10-11, 13-15, and the introduction of the area we are exploring for the challenge. I’ll save you my analysis of it this week, mostly because the kids are not interested in letting me type this morning.

nature, nature study, green hour challenge, home education

I mentioned earlier that Earth Day was happening during TV Turn Off Week. If you are planning on celebrating this year I have a couple of lists with ideas that you can use inspire you.

If you would like to try some recycled crafts this Earth Day I have a short list of ideas that you can take a crack at. There are lots of fun things that you could try that did not make the list. If you have some fun recycled or earth friendly creative projects let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

The next list is sites you can use for teaching more about Earth Day. From lesson plans to helpful information these are the sites that will help you in talking about the earth and the environment to your kids. If you know of any other great sites let me know about them!

Earth Day is coming up April 22nd, if you are thinking about sharing this day with your kids I hope these ideas help!

home education, Earth Day

Week 3 for the Green Hour Challenge and this week we started drawing.

This week we talked about starting a nature journal, and this time my oldest was more excited about it. I told him that he was free to pick anything he wanted and we could talk about it and he could draw pictures of it. Leaves were on his mind a lot this week so I had him choose several different kinds that he liked. Instead of drawing we did some basic leaf rubbings with a crayon. We only did one page to begin with, but he’s excited to go out and gather some more leaves and do several more pages.

From the leaf rubbings we ended up talking about white clover, since those leaves he liked the best. In the Handbook Of Nature Studies one of the things mentioned about white clover is that bees use the flowers for their honey. So we pulled out the honey off the shelf and had biscuits and honey for a snack. Nature is sweet.

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Week 2 (for me) of the Green Hour Challenge. This week we went outside and took some time to quietly pay attention to the nature around us. Getting my boys to be quiet outside is tricky enough, but we did manage to have some moments listening and looking around us.

When we were out part of the challenge was to ask them to describe some of the things they saw, heard, and felt. There was also an optional nature journal, though my oldest wasn’t interested at all. But I did record his answers to the questions for this week.

• One word to describe something they heard - tweeting
• Two words for something they saw - flying birds
• Three words for something they felt - soft, warm wind

This week’s reading was page 15 and pages 23 and 24 of the Handbook Of Nature Study. Page 15 has a short part of the field excursion as part of the nature study. This section notes that you do not need a long period of time set aside to study nature, it can be done in short 15 to 30 minute trips.

It is a mistake to think that a half day is necessary for a field lesson, since a very efficient field trip may be made during the ten or fifteen minutes at recess, If it is well planned. Certain questions and lines of investigation should be given the pupils before starting and given in such a manner as to make them thoroughly interested in discovering the facts.

Pages 23 and 24 covers more on how to use this book. The Handbook Of Nature Study, though thick with information, was not meant to be a field guide. The books is more useful as a guide for parents and teachers to help their children learn more about nature. One thing to use the book for is to help inspire your kids to learn more about what they see and hear in nature, but not to make it tedious work.

If the questions do not inspire the child to investigate, they are useless. To grind out answers to questions about any natural object is not nature-study, it is simply “grind,” a form of mental activity which is of much greater use when applied to spelling or the multiplication table than to the study of nature.

As more things are blooming and more animals are coming out I’m looking forward to taking an active interest in noticing them and learning more. We also have a small garden growing which brings a lot of nature to study right to us. Right now it’s just bugs and worms, but soon it will be butterflies and small animals. And of course the vegetables growing themselves.

nature, nature study, home education, homeschool, home school

It’s Spring! Which means crazy weather as the warmth and cold mix and mingle. Here in Oklahoma that means tornado season starts picking up. I thought I would put together a few links and ideas about tornadoes if anyone was interested in doing a unit study on them. Tornadoes really are amazing, hypnotic acts of nature. That is, when you’re not in the line of sight of one.

• Tornado guide from the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service A great guide on what tornadoes are, what causes them, and some safety guidelines.
• The Tornado Project - A little bit of everything, worth check out for images and videos.
• National Geographic has Tornado lesson plans for kinds in K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 grades.
• Make A Tornado - A fun project for younger children (K-5) to make their own little tornado in a bottle.
• Tornado! - Lesson plans for older kids (grades 6-8) from Discovery.
• Tornadoes Lesson plan - Short lesson for Junior High and High School aged kids, teaches them to predict tornadoes and includes an online quiz at the end.
• The Fujita Scale of Tornado Intensity - Explains how tornadoes are rated and what puts the “F” in an F4.

A few good tornado books to look for would be

• Under the Whirlwind: Everything You Need to Know About Tornadoes But Didn’t Know Who to Ask - Jerrine Verkaik
• Tornadoes - H. Michael Mogil
• Storm Chaser: In Pursuit of Untamed Skies - Warren Faidley
• Do Tornadoes Really Twist? - Melvin Berger, Gilda Berger
• Tornadoes - Jean Allen
• The Weather Book: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the USA’s Weather - Jack Williams

If you don’t live somewhere that tornadoes are a hazard, or just want to check them out from the safety of your couch, just search for tornado footage on YouTube. There are several videos online of real tornadoes in action, such as this video that will put your heart in your chest a couple times as they record a tornado ripping right next to them. You can also watch live footage of the recent tornado that ripped through Atlanta.

tornado, tornadoes, weather, lesson plans

I mentioned on Monday that I was joining (late) the Green Hour Challenge. They are technically on week 5 right now, but I’m starting at the beginning instead. The first assignment was to read pages 1-8 of the Handbook of Nature Study, which you can buy in most online book stores or download the (huge) pdf version for free. I found a lot of great quotes in those first few pages. Though the book was written for public school teachers it is a great resource for anyone. I was a bit shocked that a few of the complaints in this book, first written in 1911, are still relevant today.

The second part of the study was to spend 10-15 minutes outside, to let the kids find something that catches their eye and have a discussion and investigation about it. This part was easy enough as the warm weather has us outside every day, and I’m always asked to identify and explain every little bug, flower, and rock they see. Having a good book to refer to is certainly a life saver. For our first week’s post here are a few pictures and some of the quotes that struck me the most.
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This is probably more along the lines of something you would see discussed at Homeschooler Savvy, but it was so cool I could not resist sharing it myself.

One very artistic mom created a dollhouse for her daughter as an exact replica of Frida Kahlo’s Studio. The detail work is amazing! I have spent hours staring at her photos and trying to see all of the special touches that she did to create such an amazing dollhouse. It is a work of art in and of itself. And it’s a way for her to teach her daughter more about Frida’s life and art.

I made this miniature dollhouse for my daughter because I wanted her to learn about Frida Kahlo. This was such a fun project to make. It took me months to complete it but I am glad that I did it. Natalie loves it and once in a while we play with it on the kitchen table. She likes anything that is tiny just like her Mom. Next year I want to finish another dollhouse for her that I started last year but this one is bigger.

Suddenly I’m absolutely inspired, and wishing I had far more talent. Maybe I could glue some sticks together and call it Lincoln’s log cabin. Even if you can’t create beautiful dollhouses like Elsita does you can still use the idea as a great educational tool. You could try to create the homes of people in various time periods or create famous places. Depending on the ages of your children you could easily turn it into a family project, completing a little more each night and learning about the place and time you are building.

You can combine history, social studies and art all in one. Even a little math if you try to work everything to scale or just try to build the house yourself. eHow has an article on how to make dollhouses you can check out. For those a little more frugal or environmentally friendly FamilyFun has one for using household items in your dollhouse. You can create everything from a soap box toilet to a tea box fridge. Here is another simple one for using household trash recycled into dollhouse furniture. If you’re not sure where to begin you can download house plans for only $8 from Dollhouse Designs.

Have fun creating and learning!

doll house, dollhouse, crafts, creative, education, lesson plans, unit study

I have to thank Rebecca for this, she pointed out a fun challenge that I had not yet heard of but would love to join in. The Green Hour Challenge!

The Green Hour Challenge is a weekly challenge to get kids outside and interacting with nature. Every week a new challenge is issued with activities and reading for parents to do to get their kids outside and excited about nature. You can read the official explanation of it here along with the first week’s challenge. Every Friday the new challenge will be up along with a Mr. Linky at the bottom for you to share your posts. The challenge is already at week 5 but you are more than welcome to jump in now and join the fun, or go back to the beginning and take it one week at a time on your own schedule.

The only thing you will really need for this is a copy of Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, which you can find in most libraries or online for fairly cheap. You can also access a PDF version for free. This book is a classic, one that every homeschooling family should have just for the fun of it.

I’ll be joining in and starting from the first challenge, so anyone keeping up will be ahead of me. But the most important part is getting outside and sharing nature with our kids. Every Friday I’ll share what we did here. Is anyone else joining in?

nature, outside, education, children

With St. Patrick’s day coming up the world has turned Irish it seems. Everything green and leafy has taken over and leprechauns are found dancing in most stores, their smiling faces shining like the mythical pot of gold they are said to guard. But what you we really know about leprechauns?

I found this great Hidden Guide to Irish Fairies the other day and loved it. The information there on not just leprechauns but also other types of Irish fairies is great. It shares their habits, tricks, and even the origins of their name.

The name leprechaun may have derived from the Irish (shoemaker), although its origins may lie in luacharma’n (Irish for pygmy).

Leprechauns are such a part of what we know of Irish culture they hold a special place for many of us. Though the typical image we have now for leprechauns is a purely American invention. According to The History Channel

Leprechauns had nothing to do with St. Patrick or the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, a Catholic holy day. In 1959, Walt Disney released a film called Darby O’Gill & the Little People, which introduced America to a very different sort of leprechaun than the cantankerous little man of Irish folklore. This cheerful, friendly leprechaun is a purely American invention, but has quickly evolved into an easily recognizable symbol of both St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland in general.

Leprechauns are thought to have come from the Celtic God Lugh, a sun god worshiped in Ireland as leader of the Tuatha De Danaan.

For more leprechaun facts here are a few good books you can look for.

• Castles, Keeps, and Leprechauns Tales, Myths, and Legends of Historic Sites in Great Britain and Ireland - Phyllis Meras
• 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Irish History - Ryan Hackney, Amy Hackney Blackwell
• A History of Irish Fairies - Carolyn White
• Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia - Carol Rose
• A Field Guide to Irish Fairies - Bob Curran
• Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry - William Butler Yeats

If you are looking for some fun St. Patrick’s day ideas I will be sharing craft and project ideas all week over at Creative Mom Cafe. Just head over all this week to find a few fun things for you to do. In case you hadn’t heard yet for 2008 St. Patrick’s day has been moved from March 17th to March 15th. Though, I suppose you don’t have to follow this change if you’re not Catholic.

On a more educational turn here are some links for sites full of lesson plans related to St. Patrick’s day. It is a fascinating holiday and worth looking at.

• St. Patrick’s day themed lesson plans
• Lesson Plans Page- St. Patrick’s day
• The history of St. Patrick’s day
• About Saint Patrick
• St. Patrick: No snakes. No shamrocks. Just the facts.
• Why Ireland Has No Snakes
• Urban Legends: St. Patrick’s day

St. Patrick’s day, St. Patrick, holidays, lesson plans

OK, so sometimes science is boring. Especially when reading from long books with lots of big words written in a dry, flat tone. The concepts themselves might be pretty cool, but they’re not often presented that way. I was lucky enough to have a couple science teachers in school who tried to make science fun and entertaining, though I also had my share of the monotone readers with a thousand and one worksheets and pop quizes.

My point is that when presented right science can be pretty fun. Most people already know about the mentos and soda trick, but here are a few more fun science experiments you can do with your kids. And they involve treats, which just makes them even more compelling. And scientific, it’s all in the name of science.

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Many homeschooling families say they choose to do so so that they can give their children a real world education. However, the real world comes with the good, the bad, and the ugly. Like politics, which can be all three.

Kim shared on her blog the Mock Primary that she held in her house. I think it is an incredibly great idea. Her kids got a chance to see the pros and cons of each canidate, learning more about the issues, and getting a taste of democracy. But I think what I loved the most was that she didn’t just give her kids her position in this. While it’s tempting to tell your kids not to vote for so-and-so because of this, that, and the other that doesn’t help them really learn about where their feelings are. As Kim said

“Its good you trust your parents choices because I know all of your parents and they’ve all made good choices for you. But you’re getting older too and although in the end you might agree with them, choosing to like a candidate because your mom does isn’t the same as understanding all of the candidates on your own. Ideally, you’ll research the candidates and learn what they hope to accomplish as President. You’ll be voting in a few years.”

PBS has a six part lesson called The Democracy Project that is a great way to introduce young kids to politics by letting them create their own political party. The Youth Leadership Initiative is another great site that offers free resources for teaching children about the political system in America. This site is based out of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and has a wonderful array of resources for all ages. If you have kids that like online games like fantasy baseball or fantasy football, they might enjoy Real Clear Politics, which is a fantasy politics type game. It is interesting to say the least.

Don’t be afraid to let your cihldren learn about the politics you do not agree with. And, if you can, try to kep your own opinions out of it at first. Them them decide their own ideas on who is right. Compare how issues are discussed on both the Left and the Right. Let them read more about the current politics and see where they feel we are headed. You might be surprised what they choose on their own.

homeschooling, politics, lesson plans

So it was pointed out to me that in my list of holidays to learn more about for February I missed a big one.

Mardi Gras!

So, to make up for my oversight I’m going to dedicate this entire post to resources for learning about and celebrating Mardi Gras.

• History of Mardi Gras
• The Lesson Plans Page has several lesson plans listed for Mardi Gras.
• Education world has a Mardi Gras lesson for learning more about the region and culture.
• You can find lesson plans for grades K-3rd, 4th-8th, and 9th-12th at Mardi Gras Day.
• Create your own Mardi Gras shoebox float to celebrate at home.
• Lesson Planeyt also has several lessons tagged for Mardi Gras to use.

Of course while you are studying Mardi Gras you can Make it a well rounded lesson by looking at other topics related to Mardi Gras and New Orleans.

• THE GULF COAST REGION: GEOGRAPHY, DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE EFFECTS OF HURRICANE KATRINA
• Jazz Origins in New Orleans and A New Orleans Jazz History
• Vieux Carré: A Creole Neighborhood in New Orleans
• Development of Cajun Culture as a Result of Migration

Mardi Gras, New Orleans, lesson plans, homeschooling