School Where?

We woke up this morning to beautiful blue sunshiny (is that even a word..lol) skies. And right after breakfast I was presented with a question. "Mom, can we do school outside?" I have to admit, I had that "uh, do we have to?" moment. It would mean that we had to lug all of our school books and materials that we needed outside to the table on our porch. But I didn't say what I thought and went with the better answer. "Uh, sure!" I'm really glad that we did because things seemed to flow pretty well. And we got a lot done. After all we have been cooped up in the house a LOT this winter. That sunshine felt amazing on my face. It is something just how rejuvenating the warmth of the sun can be.






Of course Mom must have her "Bucks".



On another note:

We did some kite flying over the weekend. It was a perfect day for it.

Fishing for nouns and verbs.

We are using the Weaver curriculum, published by Alpha Omega, this school year. We used it for half of the year a couple of years ago but got away from it for various reasons. I broke it back out of the school cabinet this year to give it another go. It is a Bible-based unit study. I really like using unit studies for the simple fact of being able to teach different age levels at the same time. You don't have to do a lot of lesson planning with this curriculum either. Every two or three weeks I sit down for a couple of hours to lesson plan for the upcoming chapter. Each chapter consists of ten to twelve lessons to be taught. One lesson each day. They cover Social Studies, Science, Language Arts and Health. Each subject is broken up into objectives. I simply go through and place sticky notes on the edges of the pages with the day number that each objective is to be taught. The more you use this curriculum the more user friendly it becomes.

You can also buy a writing supplement to this curriculum called Wisdom Words. It is a writing program that is broken down into grade levels. One of the activities in the WW is a fishing game. With my fourteen year old with DS we have to periodically review things just to keep them fresh in her noggin. So she and I created the fishing game using the fish shapes that are provided with the WW resource pages. We made copies of the fish on card stock, cut them all out (which was great practice for her fine motor skills with the cutting), punched holes in each fish and then wrote nouns and verbs on them. She chose most of the words to place on the fish.





We had fishing poles that we had made out of a pencil with a piece of yarn tied around the top and a paper clip tied to the opposite end for the fish hook.



Then we went fishing! We scattered all of the fish face down on the floor and one at a time we would catch a fish. They didn't really slide on the hooks like we had hoped so we did have to help them on the hooks.




We had made a chart on the chalkboard. One side was for nouns and the other for verbs. She was in charge of writing down each noun or verb in the correct column. The first time through the game we really had to review the difference between a noun or verb but by the second go around, it all came back to her and she was able to chose the correct column without my help. Her brother even joined us towards the end for a little fishing.




This is a great little game that you can make up using whatever you might be studying at the time. Whether it be math, language arts, grammar, science, or social studies. Anything that is hands-on is usually a big hit around my house with two very visual learners.

Groundhog Cupcakes.

In honor of Punxsutawney Phil not seeing his shadow and bringing us closer to spring we decided to make groundhog cupcakes today. I found the idea on the Family Fun website. I couldn't find the exact ingredients listed in the recipe but we improvised. And who doesn't love an excuse to have a cupcake!!!!




I was able to get these unfrosted cupcakes from our grocery stores bakery.







1. Cut a small hole in the top of the cupcake to fit an Almond Joy into.

2. Cover the cupcake with white frosting.

3. I cut a small piece of a marshmallow to make the eyes. Glue all of the candy pieces on with a dab of frosting. (If you have some chocolate frosting it might work better for gluing the pieces on the face. The white frosting showed up more than we wanted it too.)

4. Use a small little nonpareil as pupils for the eyes.

5. We used a small pink heart for the nose, black bats (these were in our Halloween sprinkles container), and we used chocolate chips for the ears.

6. Sprinkle some crushed Oreo around the base of the groundhog for dirt.

7. Enjoy!!! We did!





Here is the link to the recipe.
http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/groundhog-day-cupcake-685681/?cmp=SMC-FB_FFUN_[groundhog-day-cupcake]_[recipe]_[familyfun.com]