Lilly the Lash character building books

At our homeschool group meeting this week, there were some vendors.  One of them was Julie Woik, author of the Lilly the Lash books.  They're a series of secular character building books.  Currently, there are three in the series.  I bought the third, Ocean Commotion, which addresses honesty.

One of the things I appreciated about the series was the work she put into background materials for parents.  If you go to the Lilly the Lash website there is a downloadable motivational game board and curriculum materials.  Also there's some Girl Scout materials and a kid's area with games.

I'm looking forward to going through the book and materials with the toads.  We can always use some emphasis on honesty around here and a marine themed package is guaranteed to please. 

Sharing All About Spelling and Life of Fred

While my nephew was here, I did slip away one evening for our local homeschool association monthly meeting.  It was the annual curriculum showcase night and I volunteered to bring All About Spelling and Life of Fred which had not been shown before.  This is our second year using both these programs and here are my pros and cons.

All About Spelling:

• It's easy to modify every lesson.  Each lesson has multiple components, if we're struggling with an issue we may do all components over one or more days.  Conversely, it's super easy to abbreviate a lesson to not overwhelm a short attention span.

• It's multi-sensory.  Each lesson has components that are heard, said, moved and written so it works great for sensory learners.

• It builds on previous work.  We started with book one, which was below Older Toad's spelling level but learning the rules from the get go allows us to refer back to them if we run in to trouble.

• It's a stand alone spelling program.  We have no issues with reading.  Many programs for early elementary are combined.  Toad just needs to work on his spelling.

• On the downside, it feels expensive for what it is.  It's hard to find used so it's a given expense.  Also, since it has many components, you'll need to find a way to store all the parts so nothing gets lost.

Life of Fred:

We started homeschooling with Math U See.  After one week, Toad said, "I hate math."  Toad loves math so I knew I'd made a mistake.  I bought Math U See because it was similar to the Cuisenaire rods we'd used for preschool.  I struggled for several months with what to do and then found Life of Fred.

• It's a narrative based, contextual math program.  There are no pages of worksheets that don't seem to apply to anything. 

• It's funny.  I actually have a two chapter a day rule.  Toad would read the whole book in one sitting if I let him.

• The lesson lengths are just right.

• It's more about math concepts than rote memorization.

• It's durable and you don't work in the book so you can pass them on or resell them easily.

• Which is also it's downside, sort of.  Every kid needs more or less help with something and you'll need to supplement in areas that are giving you trouble.  If you need all the curriculum laid out for you and really need to stick to the plan, this may not be for you.  It could still make a nice supplement but couldn't be your spine.  I do supplement.

* I did not receive any compensation, in kind or paid, for this review.  These are my opinions based on curriculum we've used.

Critical Thinking Co. Freebie

I've had family visiting for over a week and while it was a great visit, the rest of my life went on hold.

Here's a quick post on a current freebie.

The Critical Thinking Co. is currently offering 3 free downloads.  Here is the link.

Mondrian Inspired Paintings

Today was the first day of Modern Art class at our local coop.

The kids created Piet Mondrian inspired compositions.  I like the first day to be painting, because it's so much fun.  The class is open to kids 5-8 of all art abilities so I like to cover all the basics.  Primary colors are a great place to start and next week we'll move into color mixing.

They started with using rulers to draw parallel lines in one direction on the paper with pencil.  Then they turned the paper 90 degrees and did parallel lines the other way.  Each direction was 4-5 lines.  Then, they could choose to erase or add lines within the cells they'd created to add some variety to their compositions.

Next they went over their pencil lines with crayon.  Sharpie would work equally well.

Then they were ready to use the tempera paint in blue, red and yellow.  Since I used this project to introduce primary colors, the examples we looked at were all Mondrian paintings done in primary colors.  They were encouraged to not put the same colors next to each other.  They were also encouraged to clean their brushes between color switches so they wouldn't be getting secondary colors.  They were also not supposed to fill in all the cells.

If you would like to do some Mondrian inspired artwork Art Projects for Kids blog has some ideas as well as TeachKidsArt.  This is a very accessible artist and project to do at home and can easily be modified for whatever art supplies you have on hand.  Everybody really enjoyed today and it's a small group this time, so it's easy to give everyone lots of attention.

Here's the website for the Mondrian Trust to find out more about this artist.

I've shared this post:

Red Ted Art 

Volcano Science Projects

Today we did more volcano science projects from our volcano science packet by Ring of Fire Science.  My nephew, who is also 6, is visiting and really wanted to do school with us.

Ejecta from famous eruptions

Each cotton ball represents 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta (pumice and ash) from a famous eruption in history.  I usually use curriculum like cookbooks, which means I edit or change as necessary to suit us.  This project in the example had an additional eruption but the paper got very crowded and with the ages of the kids, simplifying a little seemed best.  You could do this project with any eruptions you're studying as long as you hunted down the relevant data.

We also did a layers of the earth project.  We did start the day with  a bit of reading on volcanoes and the Earth's layers.  Then we did a short layers of the Earth Montessori work.

 Our second project entailed creating the layers of the earth to scale.

Layers of the Earth

The favorite part of this project was using the compass. Neither of the boys had used one before and they enjoyed turning it and figuring out how to set the distance with the ruler.  It was a great chance to talk about radius and diameter of circles as well as the metric system of measuring.  Again I modified the project by adding more colors.

They're looking forward to more later in the week. 

Previously Unknown Volcano Erupts in Florida

First recorded eruption of Mt. Florida

Really!  Since we have no elevation here, this was the highest thing on the beach.

We're moving into volcano week so obviously we built the model explosion.

I used the recipe from Currclick's, Volcanoes:  Science Activities which fortuitously was a freebie several weeks ago.  I think the recipe was very safety conscious as I upped everything to accommodate the larger volume of this vessel and it made for a pretty inactive volcano.  I had brought 3 sets of materials so each kid could get one try and we went through them all just for this one.  I don't think our version endangered any tourists so find a better recipe and do try this at home.

We used (successful in the end recipe):

4 c. water
a couple squirts of dish soap
6 TBL baking soda dissolved in the water
food coloring (I was low on red but they didn't seem to notice the strong yellow lava)
6 oz. distilled vinegar

Organizing A Week's Lessons

Last summer a fellow homeschool parent shared this link  from Dana Rayburn about an organization tip for students with ADHD.  My toads and I don't have ADHD but this is a great idea to help anyone stay organized.  We used it to manage our daily studies for about 4 months and then we fell off the wagon.

It fell down for us in a couple of ways:

• It was time consuming for me to prepare the week's folders.  I'd do the post-its and slip in worksheets for each day.  It made for a bit of double prepping because I already had a master spreadsheet of goals for the month.  We live in Florida and the state requires we keep track of what we do so I'd have then record everything in binders which meant 3 levels of handling the same information.  Sometimes we didn't do everything and I'd have to refile the extras.

• Toad learned to cherry pick.  He caught on in about two days that I was stacking activities the fun activities to later in the day and we had the daily debate about why we couldn't start with the fun stuff.

 

• It was Kindergarten for Toad and learning the calendar is pretty important.  He had the days of the week down no problem but it wasn't helping him track the month as a whole or visualize the difference between the 10th and 24th of the month.

• ... and I had guilt about recycling stacks of post-its.  I started getting vague on them, like writing reading, rather than names of books, so I could reuse them but then we had to have the conversation about which book and "Why can't I read that one instead?".

So it seemed like a great technique but not the one for us.

This year we're trying a blank student assignment journal I got cheap from Rainbow Resources.  I printed mini labels from the office supply store with our subjects.  When he's done with a subject he puts the sticker in the right row and column and I add in the specifics, i.e. name of the book.  It's taking less time than the other method and not difficult.  The down side however, is the book came blank.  It doesn't have any pre-printed dates or even spots to write it in.  He's too literal for writing in margins so I'm doing that but again we're missing the larger calendar reinforcing.  It also doesn't allow us to track regularly scheduled items well, like sports practice the same time every week.

So I'm thinking of tweaking it yet again. 

Homeschool Creations shared a calendar math printable recently.  I'm thinking about incorporating more official 'classroom' type calendar activities into our day but still use the sheets to track what we actually did in the day so it keeps my workload down.

I know many of you have good homeschool organization ideas.  Feel free to comment your ideas or links to things you've found helpful.  I'm clearly on the search for the "perfect" way to keep us organized.