Lapbook Giveaway

Tristan over at Our Busy Homeschool is doing a lapbook giveaway. She bought a lifetime membership after already paying for one year, so now Hands of a Child is giving the rest of her membership (seven months!) FREE to one lucky person!

Truthfully, I'm hoping it's me. :D But, you should go and try a chance at winning it, too! Go click the above linked text!

Weekly Wrap-Up

This is my first "wrap-up" post so bear with me. :D

Monday: Lily has gone through most of her Bran Quest Kindergarten workbook. So to make sure she was retaining information, I decided to do "workbook review" with her the entire week. We back-tracked and did everything she had done in the book by memory this week. On Monday she worked on writing the letters A through G in both upper- and lowercase. She also wrote number 1 through 12. Afterward we took some time out and wrote in her journal.


Iris worked on tracing. She did vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. When i got to curves, she wasn't feeling it and decided to play with blocks. So with the blocks we worked on creating patterns. I was trying to show her to just put it next to mine in a new line, but she wanted to continue the pattern adjacent to the line I had created. Worked either way. At least she was understanding the pattern concept. We then spent a half hour coloring in books. :D (me included)

We've been trying to introduce musical rhythm, and today was the day we did the most work. Unfortunately even though we worked with only a quater note, Iris just had fun saying "ta" and Lily retained 0. After 15 minutes of trying, I gave up for the day and moved on to basic Spanish--which thankfully they took on with no problems.

Tuesday: We had a playdate over at a friend's house today! We were there for three hours just having a good ol' time. We didn't get much done but had a lot of fun.

Iris worked some more on writing lines. Again, she refused to even TRY writing curves. Lily wrote some vocabulary from memory. I, my, you, a, the. When we got home, we did some basic Spanish.


Wednesday: We had an appointment with the Early Learning Center here in town for the Child Fair. The Child Fair is actually held for vision, hearing, dental, and speech/language screenings. They all passed with flying colors. Lily and Iris are 'ahead' by two years, each. Rose is only 6 months, so as long as she's squealy and healthy and happy, I'm not worried about her. Having three kids, we were there for at least an hour, maybe two. So again, we didn't get much done. Iris worked on body parts. Lily practiced basic adding/subtracting skills with a game of Monopoly, Jr.

Thursday: I had a whole big day planned that was put on the back burner because my husband had forgotten to print out all of the lapbook activities. (I would really like a printer that isn't taking up space as a paperweight like our current one) So instead, we hung out in our pajamas ALL DAY. I took the girls to the library where I printed out our activities (and it cost me 2.40$), played outside in the snow, and practiced some basic Chinese.


Friday: We had a visit from our "teacher" through the Learning for Life program provided by our Department of Public Health. So the girls got to play and interact with Carla by having a picnic, reading some stories, and playing with some random toys. Afterward we did our If You Give a Mouse a Cookie lapbook that I had gotten from homeschoolshare.com. It took the ENTIRE DAY. :) Iris did the shadow matching game (she got all of them right on the first try!) and the mouse paper craft (building a mouse). Lily did the 'bookwork' by writing all the circles she found in the story and telling me what we knew about mice. Both girls did the cookie-match and math mat activities. We shared some mouse-themed songs and poems and then we sat down and baked cookies. We had a LOT of fun doing this. I loved that it covered math, science, art, and language arts. Not to mention we ate some delicious cookies.


It was a crazy week. We kept getting visitors, AND it decided to snow again. Thankfully this weekend has been very nice and we've been able to leave the house without slipping on ice every five seconds. We actually left the house today in tennis shoes instead of snow boots. Tomorrow I'll be posting my ideas for the upcoming week's lessons.

Life in a Nutshell

Man, we have been MIA for a while. It's been a crazy couple of months...
Back in December, we did a lot of lapbooking. So much so, we actually needed a break from it. :) For our Language Arts lapbook we did A Pocket for Corduroy. Both girls did this. You can actually tell who did which lapbook just by the skills on the pasting part. Lily took her time, while Iris was just like 'this goes here, it doesn't need to be perfect.' We then mixed language with history by doing the history of Santa Claus (which I pulled out of my butt, and took 2 hours to make) and The Night Before Christmas. We then did the history of Hannukah and had a blast! I found a project on making a dreidel out of cardstock, which we jumped at. We even did a "lighting" activity where we lit the menorah for the whole holiday. We were going to do Yule and Kawanzaa, but that month was crazy and we were visiting family, so we decided to just take a vacation instead. :)


About a month ago, my husband and I went to Barnes and Noble and Border's and found a wonderful array of homeschool curriculum and workbooks in their education section. We bought three Brain Quest books for the girls to do as supplement to their every day activities. They were out of PreK, so we only brought home K, 1st, and 2nd grade. Lily is almost done with the Kindergarten book, and Iris has done a couple of the activities in it as well. Lily and Iris were also given workbooks as gifts for the holidays/birthday.

I have this old notebook that I've had for ages. I decided to make it into a planner. When I ended up finding a nice leather-bound one on sale at Borders, I ended up taking this planner/notebook that I had made into a lesson planner. It was a notebook from high school that I never used, hence the ridiculous stickers, but I found a nice fabric book-cover and added post-it tabs to make it more professional. I use it for book work, activities, and other mundane things, like doctor appointments and play-dates.

We've kept busy doing bookwork and other activities with open-ended toys. Right now I'm just trying to figure out what to do and how to do. I am the epitome of winging-it.

All I Want for Christmas...

Is an awesome wall map for my girls' Social Studies projects. I have a wall poster of the planets somewhere in my things...BUT I CAN'T FIND IT and it's driving me nuts. I find this one (picture) at the office depot website for $15 and it's LAMINATED so I want it. The world map would be awesome. But I also want one of just the United States. I have so many ideas. I HATE BEING BROKE. A globe would be nice, too. WHY ARE THEY SO EXPENSIVE.

We're currently doing a bunch of holiday lapbooks that I've either found or created myself using bits and peices of information I found online. We did one on Santa, and are currently on Hanukkah. We'll then being doing Muharram (Islam New Year), Yule (Winter Solstice), Christmas around the World, and Kwanzaa. And THAT is just this month. We also did A Pocket for Corduroy for our Reading study. Have I mentioned how much I am LOVING lapbooking? Lily loves it too. Pictures will soon follow.

I will have an all picture post of all of the recent lapbooks we've finished as well as her journal. I've been trying to keep it a daily journal (Monday through Friday) But I keep forgetting to sit down with her and do it. Juggling three kids AND homeschooling is hard work. But I'm starting to get the hang of it. I'm going to talk with the state some time after the holidays are through to see if they would reimburse us on a kindergarten curriculum even though Lily is not of compulsory age for another two and a half years. The kid is just so smart, I'm the one who is keeping up with her.

Also, I'm trying to post daily, but I get distracted easily. I sign online and then totally forget what I came here for. LOL. But everyone will be seeing more posts from me. I'm not gone yet.

Corduroy Lapbook

Today was our first attempt at lap-booking. Until about last week when I joined a yahoo homeschoolers' group, I had no clue there was even anything called a lapbook. And only a couple of days ago did I actually *know* what it was. So, thanks to the lovely help from the HomeschoolShare website, we were able to try out their activities and try our first lapbook exercise.


This assignment was on the book Corduroy by Don Freeman (one of my favorites from childhood!) Lily had a lot of fun working on it, and it took a great deal of time for all the gluing and coloring and cutting. We enjoyed ourselves very much. Though we are a pretty secular bunch (mixed religions) I really enjoyed the Bible verse that was added to this activity and shared it with Lily, who agreed that it was a very wise proverb.


The mystery toy game was played by not only writing words for the clues but pictures. We had a fun time with that, and lily was super excited that she found the right toy with all the clues given. We actually did this a couple of times with different clues and toys than the one posted.


All in all, we had a fun time doing this and I am very much going to continue using lapbooks as a teaching and learning tool.