Amazing Art Blog

{Winter Tree Art}

I recently stumbled across an amazing art blog that is just too good not to share with you all....

Since I am more of a science/math person, art tends to be my homeschooling weakness.

I didn't take many (any) art classes beyond elementary school and my drawing

skills are quite pathetic.

So.....art tends to get a slim showing in our homeschool portfolios.....but not this year.

This year, I am being assisted by the blog Deep Space Sparkle.  Patty is an art teacher who shares these gorgeous art lessons....for FREE!!

She also includes step-by-step instructions with photos.

Here are some of her projects...

{Snowmen based on the book Snowmen at Night}

{Watercolor Birch Trees}

{Planet and Galaxy Art}

We recently did the watercolor birch trees and they turned out gorgeous!!  Even my non-artsy son has a project for his portfolio that looks artistic.

My daughter and I are off to make the winter trees today.

If you are looking for more homeschooling ideas, check out my Pinterest Board!

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Homeschooling: Cleaning up an oil spill

Have you started hearing, "I'm bored!" yet???

I thought that I would share a fun project that we did this year that

can get "bored" kids excited about science!

I taught an elementary chemistry class this past year for our co-op and one of

our lessons was on organic compounds.  After I had the kids learn how to name simple alkanes, we talked about how oil is a hydrocarbon.

Then, we recreated an oil spill!

The students were given an "environment" complete with animals and plants! Our animals consisted of fake fur and feathers.  The kids just went outside and found some leaves for plants.  

To really recreate the ocean, you can add blue food coloring and salt.  We also had the students build an island of rocks in the center of their pan.

My oil was just canola oil, but we decided that it would have been a lot more fun had we used some motor oil!

We required the students to "purchase" all of their clean-up materials setting a

maximum spending budget of $20,000,000.

Off to the side we had a "Wildlife Rescue Center" that contained a bowl with soap and some paper towels.  Students had to pay extra to use that station to clean their animals.

I have tried to find out where I got this lab originally and cannot find the source.  Here is the table that listed the "cost" of their supplies.  Be easy on me if the link doesn't work right away.  It's my first attempt using Google documents.

Oil Spill Data Table

If anyone knows a source or direct link, please let me know.  I'd much rather use that!

The class was a huge success and I know that many students in the class went home and "instructed" their younger siblings and recreated another spill at home!

The students also learned how tedious it is to remove all of the oil and how limited they are by a budget!  Great life lessons!

I love when kids get excited about science!

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Epsom Salt Crystals

I've had the total pleasure of teaching an elementary Chemistry class this year.

Once a week, twenty-two 5th and 6th graders would gather and we would

explore high school level topics with some elementary level fun!

A few weeks ago we studied solutions...saturated, unsaturated and supersaturated.

A fun way to demonstrate this is by making crystals.

Many of the kids had tried making crystals before, but it hadn't worked because

they missed this crucial step.....they did not make a supersaturated solution!

Here's my recipe for awesome crystals! 

(and the ones above are just beginning to grow!)

1/2 cups of water

1/4 cup of Epsom salt

Important....you must heat the water to near boiling or boiling.  More crystals are able to dissolve in the hot water.  You can even add an additional 1/4 cup

of Epsom salts to dissolve if the water is hot.

You will want to stir the water with the Epsom salts until it turns from cloudy

to clear.....this indicates that the salt is being fully dissolved in the water.

We took a pipe cleaner wrapped around a wood split (You can just use a 

pencil)and hung our pipe cleaner over a Styrofoam cup.

Some of the kids made really cool shapes with their pipe cleaners...snowflakes, circles, triangles, and double circles.

Place your cup in a warm, sunny place.  This aids the rate of evaporation of the water.  You want the water to evaporate.

If you notice our cup, it is now half-full of water.  It was 3/4 of the way full when we started.  

Be prepared for NOTHING to happen for up to a week!  We kept coming back and checking

and we had an empty pipe cleaner....but have faith, as the water evaporates, 

the crystals will grow!

I've also heard that you can pour the solution over a sponge and the crystals will grow on the sponge.

I'll keep you posted....we're still hoping for some bigger crystals!

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Fridays with Jimmie....creating a sense of accomplishment

This is our last Friday with Jimmie, from Jimmie's Collage.  If you have enjoyed her posts then I would encourage you to check out her blog.  She has a tremendous amount of resources on lapbooking, notebooking and homeschooling in general!

Today, Jimmie is going to share how lapbooking not only contributes to your child's sense of accomplishment, but also, helps them to retain and review the information that they have been learning!

At the bottom of the post, I have some links to some of my favorite lapbooks!

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Lapbooking Benefit #3: Sense of Accomplishment

Lapbooks offer the best of both worlds when it comes to a sense of

accomplishment. Although it may take several weeks to complete an entire lapbook, a

minibook is usually completed in a single day (or maybe two). Young children love to see

a finished product at the end of the homeschool day. To be honest, mom and dad do, too!

A minibook is a standalone product in its own right and a source of pride for a

young learner. Along with the short term accomplishment of each finished minibook, there

is a huge boost at the end of a unit of study when a child can assemble all the collected

minibooks into a lapbook folder which documents the learning that took place over several

weeks. A lapbook is a concrete demonstration of the power of consistent, daily effort.

Your child sees that making minibooks each day results in a very impressive lapbook in

the end.

Lapbooking Benefit #4: Review and Retention

A last benefit of lapbooking is the review and retention lapbooks offer. Over

the years, we have pulled out past lapbooks to look up facts. Generally when the lapbooks

come down, it takes another hour of poring over them before my daughter is ready to put

them away. She loves looking at her old work and laughing at her childish writing. I am

secretly happy to let her reminisce over her lapbooks because I know she is reviewing

facts from history, science, or literature.

When I stumbled upon lapbooking several years ago, I had no idea that it had all

these benefits. To be quite honest, I used it simply because I knew the crafty aspect

would resonate with my creative daughter. But as we used lapbooks more extensively, I

began to see the educational benefits were far more than mere creative expression.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the benefits

of lapbooking. Have you found some benefits I didn’t list? Or do you have questions about

lapbooking? Feel free to ask them here.


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Here are some of my favorite lapbooks :

{Lewis & Clark}

{Light and Color}

{World War 2}

{Opera}

{Civil War}


I could keep going....Jimmie's Collage is just a tremendous resource for a homeschooling family!




Thanks so much for sharing with us, Jimmie! 

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Raising a caterpillar

My one son has a huge soft spot for animals....of all types...including bugs!

I am the "squisher" and he is the "rescuer".....even of stink bugs and spiders...gross!

This winter he found a brown woolly caterpillar on the underside of our grill cover.  He worried about that little guy.  We had been having a relatively mild

winter, but a cold snap was coming.....so he twisted my arm and

convinced me to allow him to "save" it!

He emptied out his precious bin of air-soft pellets and made the caterpillar a

plush condo of dirt and grass.  The challenge was finding anything green to feed him in the middle of winter!

One night he came in excited.....it had made a cocoon.  I honestly thought that 

the thing was dead...traumatized by the environment change!

But a few weeks later.....we had a moth!

It took some convincing, but I finally persuaded my boy to release him.  

I do have to put my foot down about having a moth flying around as a pet!

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Fridays with Jimmie....creative expression

Over the past few Fridays, Jimmie Lanley from Jimmie's Collage has been
sharing with us her passion for lapbooking.  She has been a tremendous resource
to me as I've been homeschooling, and I hope that she will
encourage you today, as well!


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In part one and two of Why Make Lapbooks? I gave a very brief overview of

lapbooking and gave what I believe to be the most important reason you should lapbook. 


You can also go back and read about organizing information with

minibooks.

Besides that foundational benefit of lapbooking, there are even more reasons to make lapbooks!

Lapbooking Benefit #2: Creative Expression

I know that not all children (and moms) love cutting, pasting, drawing, and getting crafty. But many children, especially young ones, really do. 

Lapbooking is a perfect avenue for creative expression because it is so flexible. The

same information can be represented many different ways in a minibook including text,

drawings, pasted graphics, puppets, flashcards, and so on.

You will get the maximum benefit from lapbooking if you allow your child to make

choices about how to organize and how to represent that information in his minibooks and lapbooks. 

Let him be creative in layout, artwork, and minibook folds. Creative children

usually enjoy the open ended nature of lapbooks and find them far more motivating than a

fill in the blank worksheet.

If your child loves crafty expression, make your own blank minibooks instead of

using a preprinted lapbook kit. This way you get the maximum creative expression and

ownership as well as the benefit of the organizational skills.

I admit that I first started using lapbooking with a digital kit purchased from

a major lapbook retailer. But after that initial experience, I had a good grasp of what a

lapbook could be and didn’t need to purchase kits. Instead, I offered my daughter blank

minibooks that she could choose from and fill in on her own. The educational value is

magnified when the child is choosing the book layout and dividing

the information herself. So although there is nothing wrong with premade kits, they are

somewhat akin to worksheets and have limited value.

After you feel confident with lapbooking, try going DIY. Making the books from

scratch gives the students more ownership and boosts their educational return.

 

Jimmie Lanley is the mother of one creative twelve year old daughter. 

Jimmie's Collage is where she blogs about her Charlotte Mason styled homeschool.

 The Notebooking Fairy features free notebooking printables and how-tos plus the affordable eBook guide Notebooking Success.

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$50 Campus Textbooks Giveaway

Did you know that you can rent college textbooks???

As a science major, I paid SO much money for my textbooks!  Almost 20 years ago,

I would easily pay over $100 for just ONE book!

Campus Book Rentals rents college textbooks and can save you 40-

90% off bookstore prices...AND they offer free shipping BOTH ways!

Instead of paying $120 for this chemistry textbook...

....you can rent it from Campus Book Rentals for $27.70 per semester!

Here are some more perks of renting textbooks with Campus Book Rentals:

-flexible renting periods
-you can HIGHLIGHT in the textbooks
-with every textbook rented they donate to Operation Smile

The best part??  Campus Book Rentals has given me a 

$50 credit to give away to you!!!

And if you don't need it now and would prefer to use it in the fall....you can!

Just leave me a comment telling me what you would use the credit for!!  I'll choose a winner on Friday, March 30th!

I still have SO many of my college texts molding in my basement.  I can't bear

to part with them because I spent so much money on them.  I told my husband

though that this spring, I am willing to have a little celebratory bonfire and burn them!

Save yourself the hassle....rent them!

{Campus Textbooks provided the $50 giveaway for this review, but I did not receive any financial compensation.}

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Lapbooking: Part 2 Minibooks

I am frequently asked questions about how we homeschool.
Since I can't invite you all over to my house to show you how we do it, I thought that 
on Fridays, I'd try and share different creative ideas that we use to homeschool.


Last week Jimmie from Jimmie's Collage introduced us to lapbooking and shared
with us some of her Flickr Photos of lapbooks that she has created.


This week she is going to be sharing how minibooks create a physical scaffold 
for the information that goes into our lapbooks.


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When you select a minibook that matches the type or amount of 

information, you have created a physical scaffold for the information.

This learning scaffold makes the ideas easier to understand and to remember. Young

children are not abstract thinkers. Anything a homeschool mom can do to make that

understanding tangible will help the children to learn. 


Minibooks can make ideas more concrete.

Take this solar eclipse minibook as an example. This simple accordion fold book

divides the information visually into four parts: the earth, the moon, the sun, and a

panel for explanation. The folds of the book itself contribute to the 

significance of the science facts in the book. 


Without the earth, moon,and sun lined up correctly, there is no solar eclipse. 


Yes, the same idea could be represented on a plain sheet of paper, but the folds help 
to outline the facts in a very visual way.

 

Another example is from a Chemistry lapbook. 
This minibook features the five elements in the Nitrogen family. 


Each element gets its own matchbook within the larger folder. So the physical minibook

reflects the reality that these elements are all 
different (separate matchbooks) but related (placed in a single minibook).

There are myriad ways to organize information, so don’t worry about getting it

wrong. But do be deliberate to match the minibook’s layout and its folds with the contents. 


If your material is three steps, have a three flap layered book (or four flaps if you leave one 
for the title page). If your content is a list of equally important information, a wheel book may 
work well. Don’t be obsessive over making the content match the form, but do keep it in mind.

What is so important about organizing information? 
The answer is writing. 


The same mental process involved in 

dividing information into a minibook is used in composition.

In fact, you can look at most minibooks as paragraphs. The title page is the

topic sentence, and the pages or flaps are the main ideas in the paragraph. There is a

direct application from minibooks to organizing paragraphs and even essays. That makes

minibooks tiny, movable graphic organizers.

If you have questions about how to use lapbooking, please feel free to leave

them in a comment below. I’ll check back and provide my answers. And, readers, please

feel free to answer each other’s questions. We all have something to offer.

 

Jimmie Lanley is the mother of one creative twelve year old daughter. 

Jimmie's Collage is where she blogs about her Charlotte Mason styled homeschool.

 The Notebooking Fairy features free notebooking printables and how-tos plus the affordable eBook guide Notebooking Success.

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Oobleck

I am completely embarrassed to say that despite the fact that I've 

been a science teacher and homeschooled my kids...

....I've NEVER made Oobleck until recently!

Wow...what have I been missing!

This is a super easy experiment and you probably already 
have all the ingredients on hand right now!

Ingredients:
cornstarch
water


You want to mix the cornstarch and water until you get a mixture that is not a 
paste and not watery.  It will be about 3/4 cup of cornstarch to 1/2 cup of 
water.  You do not need to be exact.


What is so amazing is that this is a Non-Newtonian fluid.....when compressed
it turns into a solid.  When the pressure is released, it turns right back into a liquid!

Translation....beaucoup fun!!

I must warn you though...it will get messy!


 

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Fridays with Jimmie...lapbooking

I never expected to find myself homeschooling and was suddenly thrust into this "foreign" world...

I remember a friend recommending the blog Jimmie's Collage.  Desperate for any

means of support and encouragement, I stumbled onto what was probably my very first blog.

Jimmie didn't know me, but she suddenly became a friend and support through her

wealth of information and creative ideas.

I found myself scouring her site and studying her lapbooks.....what an amazing 

way to teach my kids.  I remember thinking...why don't they do this in schools??

I recently contacted Jimmie and was totally humbled and honored when she agreed to

write a series of guest posts here.

You will find her down-to-earth...incredibly talented....and a wealth of information

to aid in your homeschooling journey!

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Lapbooks are a collection of folding minibooks all centered on a unifying topic and affixed 

to a file folder. Here are some photos to give you an idea of what they are. 

You can find many more photos at my Lapbooks Flickr collection.

Some homeschool moms have their children make a lapbook for everything they

study. Others use lapbooks only for history or only for literature. There are special

lapbooking kits you can purchase, or you may choose the DIY route and start from scratch.

Whatever your approach to lapbooking, there are real educational benefits to

this educational method. Lapbooking is far more than just a cute papercraft.

I have narrowed down the benefits of lapbooking into four main areas. For this

post, I will discuss only one – the most valuable one. 

Lapbooking Benefit #1: Concrete Ways to Organize Information

The primary benefit of lapbooking is that it teaches children how to organize

information in very concrete ways that they can see and touch. 
Consider this lapbook on opera.

Inside it are minibooks dealing with different aspects of opera that my daughter studied:

-the first opera
-composer verses librettist
-performers in an opera
-famous opera composers
-operas versus musicals
-famous operas
-parts of an opera

Each chunk of information is neatly divided into its own minibook. Inside each  minibook that 
information is further divided, often with physical representations of pages, special folds, or moving parts.


 In my next post, I will show you how minibooks make ideas easier to understand and remember!

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Next Friday Jimmie is going to show us how she uses mini-books to create a 

physical scaffold for the information in her lapbooks!  


 

 


Jimmie Lanley is the mother of one creative twelve year old daughter. Jimmie's Collage is where she blogs about her Charlotte Mason styled homeschool. The Notebooking Fairy features free 
notebooking printables and how-tos plus the affordable eBook guide Notebooking Success.

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Those pesky multiplication facts

Multiplication facts......I remember learning them, but didn't 

realize how painful it could be to teach them!

I have one son who is a bit of a dreamer....creative, curious, artistic and a

 tad bit, shall we say......distracted!

So, memorizing facts was excruciating for him!

Since there are so many different learning styles, I tried numerous methods of 

helping him memorize.....I even resorted to having him hop on one foot reciting 

"6 times 8 is forty-eight!".....didn't work!  

The next day, I showed him the flashcard and HE DIDN'T KNOW IT!!!

One day, my hubby "subbed" for me and saw just how excruciating it was working with him.

Now, my hubby is a lot like this son of mine and came up with a method that

actually clicked with his brain.....a COLOR-CODED chart!

He hung it right by our kitchen table so that every time our son sat at

the table....the table was staring right back at him....and he learned the facts!!

The added benefit.....my 6 year old daughterhas been staring at the chart and 
has started finding patterns and learning facts!

All it took was a piece of white paper and some colored markers!  

How do you teach math facts??

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