Kerileanne99
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Posts posted by Kerileanne99
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I'm vegan. I won't even do as much meat-based food preparation as you describe above. (Fortunately, my husband went vegetarian after a couple of years of living with me, anyway.)
We did fruit-and-veggie mummies. I made little "bodies" with oranges and stuck little red potatoes with faces carved into them on each one with a toothpick. We sliced open the oranges and pulled out the "guts," which we wrapped and mummified separately and sealed in little canopic jars. Then, we packed the "body cavity" with herbs and salts and wrapped each "body" and proceeded with the mummification.
We made little sarcophagi and an assortment of funeral goodies (tiny clay shabtis, amulets, etc.) and papier mache funeral masks. It was, honestly, one of the best projects we ever did. The mummies still sit in a place of pride on a bookshelf in our front room.
Adorable! And thanks for the ideas. I was wondering how we were going to mummify much of anything, as I cannot imagine even having meat in the house:)
And, like Julie Smith said, my daughter (who's nickname by choice is chicken!) would be permanently traumatised if I even tried!
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Thanks everyone for your responses, and apologies for getting back so late- we had a bit of a family emergency and time and Internet access have been sporadic.
I really appreciate all the constructive answers and ideas from everyone as I was quite fearful of the 'just let her be a child' response. I absolutely agree that she needs plenty- read vast majority- of her time to play, both structured and unstructured. And this is absolutely the case. She just seems to incorporate much of her 'learning' into that play:)
And whilst I know it probably sounds as though she spends a great deal of time working on 'academic' things, she actually has gotten to this point primarily through games and play. Mostly board games and apps. Addition and subtraction reinforcement with GiggleFacts math games, multiplication/simple division with the Multiplication.com stories, read-alouds, etc.
However, she DOES thrive on structure. I would say that she probably spends anywhere between 45 min to an hour at the table for 'school', but all I require is getting there and 10-15 minutes of math and a bit of writing. This is followed by whatever she wants to work on, or she knows to tell me she has had enough. For math, I generally give her a little lesson if it is needed, and she insists I 'go away' (meaning a few feet away where I can't see the page!) as she works 4-5 problems, before she gleefully calls me back to check her work. Rinse, repeat, until she (or I) tire of the game for the day.
Right now she is REALLY into memory work and wants a new poem or similar constantly, so I do give these to her as well.
Reading is separate, but is buddy reading and read- alouds at quiet time, whilst bed time is reserved for lighter reading and she usually wants 1-2 non-fiction books as well.
I am heartened to know that many of you have young kids doing seat work as well, and it seems as though most have a similar idea of allowing them to work as they like with very little true requirement!
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We have done many of the things I see mentioned, and I love the ideas! Some things we have either done or plan to do that I didn't see mentioned above:
1) university band practices in a huge field near us. A lot of fun to watch, especially since the flag/dance team usually practices as well. Most unis and even HS practice outside and are open to public.
2) the Post office has behind the scene tours, open to homeschoolers an groups as well. We have to schedule in advance and have a minimum of five kids.
3) The Salvation Army hosts special holiday dinners and ask for community helpers. Last year we collected food and spent Thanksgiving morning helping out. My daughter is very young, but this and subsequent talks have had a large effect...for example, she realizes that there are people who are not as fortunate for many, many reasons...and has a tiny frame of reference.
4) nature scavenger hunts- put together by a couple of moms. We put together a booklet of local plants, trees, animals, etc. and let the kids search and identify them. This was a HUgE hit and now my kid loves to tell people the names of trees, plants, flowers, and the like.
5) a dairy farm, followed by a trip to a bottling plant.
6) we are lucky enough to live near a huge self-sustaining community. They have a farm, animals for food and by-products, a forge, a carpentry shop that uses no nails, a pottery shop and kiln, sheep and wool dying, yarn making, cheese making, and sooo much more. They are open to the public daily and offer classes in all the areas.
7) the science labs at our local university (where dad works) have profs and grad students that love to share their work with kids!
8) the Bank- after a trip through the drive-thru one day I asked about a tour. We set up a trip, and My kiddo opened her own ACcount, got to see the inside and outside of an ATM, saw the door of the huge vault, made a deposit with a teller, and generally had a great time. Not to mention a lollipop.
9) the local private airport- some of those older pilots will talk to the kid as long as they want, and we were able to see the engine and sit in the pilots seat of a little crop-duster. We will definitely go back!
10)our power plant has a school group field trip available for older kids, but we have not been.
11) tour of the recycling plant- this is our next big plan as my dd is really set on being an oceanographer. On a recent trip to SeaWorld the guide talked to her about the importance of conservation, and specifically trash and recycling. She has become our house recycling cop:)
12) this meant a trip to the local dump to see what happens to trash and things people no longer want. I HIGHLY reccomend this as now when she asks for some plastic piece of junk it is a very simple matter to ask her if she REALLY needs it or will it end up in the dump next week when she tires of it or it breaks. This made a big impression on the whole family.
13) A compost/worm farm
14) just had a trip to the botanical gardens where they have a junior naturalist program and could earn a badge.
15) fire station training- we were lucky enough to be next to the training site where firefighters can practice one day when they were training. These buildings are often right in the city in an adjacent lot to the station. Obviously you can't get too close, but it turns out people often come out to watch.
16) we have a large free-range egg farm that we have visited.
17) candle making/glass blowing studio
18) tractor/fa store where you can walk through and look at all the tractors
19) paint store- my kid loved all the colors and really enjoyed watching the colors being mixed. We had a mini-lesson on where the dyes and pigments can come from as well.
20) I realize that this one wont be for everyone but we often visit a variety of temples/ worship areas for many religions and cultures. The focus is on the fact that whilst they often have different beliefs, respect and understanding are very important, and that we all have much in common. She also has a chance to meet and play with people that she would not normally encounter, and often encounters different accents, languages, even food.
Just a few ideas...
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I have a very young dd3.5 who is reading very well. We have 'buddy read' (she reads aloud all odd-numbered pages whilst I do the evens) Charlotte's Web, Mr. Popper's Penguins, and recently, The Tale of Despereaux this summer.
Because she was very interested in writing and how to spell, we spent the last six months going through the first level of AAS. What has really worked for us is a combination of things:
1) because she learned to read very quickly with minimal phonic instruction, we spent quite a bit of time making sure she had memorized all the phonograms. She loved this, and we did it separate from spelling time to keep it in VERY short blocks of time.
2 We do use the tiles, but she frequently gets frustrated with the 'fiddliness' and gets bored. So we use an app called Word Wizard. This kept her attention MUCH more.
3) we do quite a bit of review of the rules, and although she seems to be more of a natural speller I have not really taken her into level 2 as I want to make sure she has fully internalized all of level 1. So much of level 1 can be done outside of 'school' and in a very fun manner. Counting syllables on a drum, silly rhymes for rules. Her favorite is pulling a sad face and saying "No -ng for poor little e."
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Play the card game 'go to the dump' ala Right Start card games...if you don't have the RS card games set, no worries...you can use just about any regular card set, or iEven better, a kids Go Fish set. Instead of making pairs of cards, you make 'tens'. So if you have a seven, you need to ask for a three to make the 'ten'. If you have a two, you will need to pair it with an eight to make a 'ten'. This game was perfect for Singapore number bonds. We did RS A most of the way through, moved to RS B, and transitioned seemlessly to Singapore. I made sure to stress commutative property of addition in the game, which aligns nicely with number bonds...
There are versions of this game all over the Internet, but RS has a YouTube video that makes it extremely simple on its own channel:
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link was broken...
Hhhmmm, something about their method of searching the site. It gave me an error message when I tried to copy the link only to the earth science DVDs.
Lets try this one, but you will have to scroll down a bit to the 'earth science' lists:
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Schlessinger Media, which most libraries carry, have a great set of DVDs. They are ridiculously expensive to buy, but are pretty easy to find at even medium-sized libraries.
Here is a list of the ones I found to incorporate into our earth schttp://www.smavideo.com/store/titledetail.cfm?MerchID=28375ience this year:
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Okay, so I have been reading about how many of you spend with you Kinder kiddo's for sit-down work... And I can totally relate to those of you that differentiate between seat work and all the hands on science, read-alouds, art projects, and field trips. And lets face it, for Kindy age mom's errands totally count:))
Here is my question. I have a very young dd, and she is working well in advance of what most people would consider Kindy level. In some areas, more like 2nd and 3rd grade, or higher in reading.
I know that many of you have kiddos working ahead. So do you consider them Kindy for seat-work requirements? How do you address this?
And I think this actually affects many homeschool children who simply absorb their environment. Kids are sponges who will work to whatever levels we expect of them, especially in multi-age families.
Do you base your requirements of them on ability, experience, age, or a combination of factors?
Love to hear what more experienced HS moms think....
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Some of them are slightly more advanced than a true Kindy level, but we love the books in a series called THE TRUE BOOKS.
They have community ones, government, landforms, basic maps, and anything you can imagine. They have a series for animals as well:
Here is the amazon link to sohttp://www.amazon.com/Declaration-Independence-True-Books/dp/0531147800/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376338043&sr=1-3&keywords=True+booksme of the government ones:
Here is another examples on maps and geography. It is irritatingly difficult to pull up longer lists of them, but I know they exist because our libraries carry SO many of them. There are individual ones on parts of the US, other countries, cultures, one for every holiday imagine able, landforms, you name it.
The other series we loved before we got to The True Books are the Rookie Readers...they have a science series, maps and geography series, holidays, cultures around the world, even biographies of famous scientists, presidents, people in history, and many more. They are much closer to a Kindy level, and come graded as levels. Here is a list of some of the geography books:
We incorporate at least one culture, one science, and one more of her choice in our daily reading and both of these sets are pretty great:)
I know it isn't a complete list, but it really is a complete package to meet all requirements.
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I am not sure if I completely short-changed my dd3.5 with her name or if it was unintentionally genius. She was desperate to learn to write her name...but her parents saddled her with a total of 4 long names, with as many as 10 letters (1st name) and no fewer than six in all the others:)
And I think there are only 3 letters in the alphabet not in her name!
By the time she mastered her name, she had mastered her letters...
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Just about anything by NZ author Lynley Dodd: Hairy Maclary, Rumpus at the Vet, Slinky Malinky, etc....
Just about anything by Julia Donaldson: Room on the Broom, The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, The Tale of a Whale ..
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I have a 3.5 year old who was desperate to write 'her' letters, and even more so, her numbers at that age. She now writes very well, albeit more slowly, and we are doing AAS because she learned to read primarily intuiting phonics on her own.
One thing that she absolutely loved was the TV Teacher handwriting videos with Miss Marnie...you can do them in little 5 minute chapters by letter, and they are so much fun. They teach a lot more than just the proper way to form a letter, and have fun tracing fun sheets as well.
We eventually moved on to ZB but were able to skip to 1st grade very rapidly. You can see clips of the videos on their website.
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I recently went looking for great resources for memory work, and there have been a couple of recent threads...
The two best I have found are the FREE resource put together by Hannah Wilson and the Living Memory book by Andrew Campbell. The first is short and sweet...and a great free resource.. But the Living Memory book is simply amazing! I absolutely love it.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/hannah-wilson/grammar-stage-memorization/ebook/product-631808.html
http://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-a-campbell/living-memory/ebook/product-17520206.html
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Fantastic Mr. fox would be good, although my dd was totally traumatized as the fox attempts to steal food from wealthy and nasty farmers--who attempt to kill him:) granted, dd is 3.5, but just a warning!
Obvious, is Charlotte's Web...
We just read a book called Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright about a little girl called Garnet, age 10, on a farm, set in the 1930's.We actually had to read it twice because my dd loved it so much.
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings- this was one of my favorites as a child.
Gary Paulsen has a lesser-known book called Harris and Me that is very cute- a young city boy (I think he is about 10?) is sent to live on a farm for the summer, and spends time with his cousin Harris...warning, they get up to all sorts of trouble, and Harris is a serious daredevil.
If you like the Little House series, what about Sarah Plain and Tall, Caleb's Story, and others by Patricia MacLachlan. They are farm-oriented/western frontier.
Much more sensitive, but Where the Red Fern Grows, or Old Yeller are both in the same genre if your kiddo can handle that type of book.
What about the Kate Seredy classics like The Good Master? Older, and I think Hungarian farmers?
And slightly different, bit for a young boy that loves farming books, the Sugar Creek Gang series are not to be missed! Same time of wholesome adventure, and are so much fun!
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Story Cubes fans - did you know there's a Story Dice app for iphone? It was free when I got it, but I don't know if that's changed. It just rolls 2 dice with pictures on them, and my kids think it's hilarious to work both pictures into a story. It's nice for the car because there are no actual pieces to lose, and usually they get going on a story and don't bother with the phone anymore.
Yes, thanks! That is great!
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I have been looking for this very thing! I am using other curricula and just want a nice collection of fun supplement pages I can pull out as we go. Definitely all-in-one because I never seem to find the time to weed through the myriad free resources- and get annoyed when I do find something, only to realize I have to jump through hoops in order to download it:(
The closest I have come is this Giant Book of Science from School Zone Publishing. I just ordered it (it looks like a new product), but am really looking for something a bit more extensive.
http://www.schoolzone.com/workbooks/giant-science-workbook
Hoping others have some great ideas!
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On a trampoline, bouncer, or swing!
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Absolutely!
http://www.code.org/learn/codecademy
This site also has a list of other learning to program sites and resources, for a variety of uses.
Scratch, and the soon to be Scratch Jr. from MIT Are other great options. They do have games, but lots of other things.
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We also love Octonauts, although I'm not sure if the DVDs are out in the US yet. .
My dd loves Octonauts as well as she has decided she wants to be a princess oceanographer:) Most of the series is available on YouTube. The Octonauts even have their own channel.
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Scholastic Storybook Classics DVDs are sweet and gentle. There are Eric Carle stories, Chrysanthemum, Where the Wild Things are etc. Most libraries have those DVDs that are based on those books. http://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Video-Collection-27-Bundle/sim/B000BCLI26/2
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We love these as well! There are several different sets with up to 100 stories in each collection. The best part is that they can be played with subtitles (the original story line) and some even have a Spanish or French play option that is amazing for supplementation to learning Spanish for us!
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A couple of things I did with my dd to teach time and money that worked like a charm:
Time: I let her pick out a new analogue kiddie watch and put her in charge of time, and asked her periodically...but I also randomly wrote 3-4 times spread throughout the day in digital format on the dry erase board first thing in the morning. If she could show me on her watch those times during the day she earned a small treat.
Money: I made it a point to use cash to pay for things for awhile, and let her pay during the transaction. When the coinage change was returned, if she could count it accurately she got to keep it! She saved it up for the end of the week, totaled it and got to spend it at the Dollar Store.
We also played store and played some great board games, but these activities worked most effectively and very quickly:)
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I don't know if you are familiar with The Herp Project run out of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, but they offer a scientific endeavors camp and fieldwork for grades 8-12. The camp is a weeklong, and free to participants selected. It is set in 360 acres of wetlands and the students get to pair with field biologists to study all amphibians and reptiles living there.
That being said, they may well be open to including a much younger, exceptionally gifted child intent upon her course of study. Providing mom went too, of course.
It may well be too late for this year, camp starts July 14th, but it might be of great benefit to contact the prof in charge. You then have the next year to convince them:)
Worst case, they might have some further ideas?
http://www.camprockfish.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=223&Itemid=229
Also, here is the contact for the project itself:
theherpproject@uncg.edu
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A challenge!
Give one to each child/member of the family/ etc., and challenge THEM to come up with the most creative use for their own. Make it a competition of sorts, with bonus points for earth-friendly ideas and general creativity. Show them some of the ideas mentioned in this thread and inspire them to come up with their own ideas. Then share:)
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I am just wondering if anyone else has had trouble ordering these bands! I have tried several times via cc options (as opposed to PayPal) and it will not work. I have contacted her and we are working on it, but I just wondered if anyone else has had trouble?
Has everyone ordering them used PayPal or has a cc payment worked for you? I keep getting a message that says "I have already signed up with this information" but doesnt allow you to continue through the payment process:(
I love the idea of these and would hate for others ( and an individual seller!) to miss out for something so simple!
Favorite free online resources for Kindergarten?
in K-8 Curriculum Board
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For lots of fun kids books, popular picture books, leveled readers both fiction and non-fiction I love the Wegivebooks site!
If you haven't come across it, you read the book (100% free although you must set up an account). This is an fantastic site, and the bonus is that everytime you read one of the books they donate a copy of that book to a charity!
www.wegivebooks.org