Sarah, Plain and Tall: Notebooking

R10 has been studying Sarah, Plain and Tall in Beyond FIAR. When her brother did this unit, he had a great time reading and reporting on all the creatures for his prairie and sea notebooks. E12 loves to do this sort of work. R10 not so much! So, to get her excited about researching all these critters, I gave her free creative reign on her notebooking. It's working! This is from the first chapter, so this is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

We've done so much with state geography that I didn't really want repeats of the usual fair.

So, using an idea from one of the books she did a map with a window inside which she listed some facts about Maine.

I like what she came up with to tell about the three different kinds of rock

Inside the flaps...how fun is all that? Her pictures match what kind of rock it is too. Enlarge the picture and see a close up for yourself!

For the fish types, she made folded pages in the shape of the fish and then on the inside she shared facts about the particular species.

Ta- DA! Facts on flounder

Two of my favorite lapbooking/notebooking resources

Two more and I also have the Big Book of Social Studies.

She is steadily working on more pages as we continue on through the chapters. It's funny how the same book can be enjoyed for different reasons by two students. She loves the story itself, while E12 really liked all the animal and plant science he got to do. He would never bother with such nuisances as shapes and flaps!

Heart of the Matter Conference

Heart of the Matter has graciously offered 3 tickets to give away here at Blog, She Wrote. If you'd like to win a ticket to the February HOTM Conference. Leave a comment and make sure to include your name and email. If you'd like another shot at it, please consider becoming a new follower. In fact, if you are a follower go ahead and leave an extra comment!

I'm hostessing two fabulous speakers Amanda Bennett (!) and Dianne Craft. I'm looking forward to a fun experience plus I'll be hosting another chat time after Heather Laurie's session. I usually tag in and listen to the mp3s later on while I walk. So, this real time conference attending is a new one for me. Either way you choose to participate, please consider trying it out. You won't be disappointed!

The cost of the conference is $14.95, if you'd rather just register now! This contest will close at midnight EST on February 3, 2011.

Good luck to all of you! Thanks so much for reading at Blog, She Wrote.

Mixing Bowl Academy: Meatballs and Marinara

Last week we had another chance to take a Mixing Bowl Academy class through CurrClick Live. This time it was a Junior Chef class called Meatballs and Marinara. E12 and R10 had a turn at helping to fix dinner which they both thoroughly enjoyed. The Junior Chef classes are $30 for one session which is four classes.

The class is taught using the Adobe web room format. It's easy to use and follow along. She sends you the log in information ahead of time. And in case you are wondering...of course that's a graduated cylinder in my kitchen. Doesn't everyone have one?

The kids had a great time being "in charge" in the kitchen and it was fun to just supervise and give direction.

First, the kids made the marinara sauce. They chopped the green peppers and would have chopped onions if I could have handled them. The other kids also pressed garlic. Ultimately, this sauce was put through the blender to hide all the veggies. We opted for chunky marinara!

E12 mixed up the beef with the other ingredients. I left out the onions and garlic because I'm allergic to them both. But they were tasty just the same!

E12 and R10 are sharing the load. He is rolling the meatballs and she is dredging them through the breadcrumbs. Have you ever had a meatball with an outer crusty covering? Mmmmm....

Look at how organized we were! Like my new cast iron pan? It was a gift and I bought the one that has a skillet lid as well. Love it!

This recipe uses 2lbs of ground beef and it makes caboodles of meatballs! We froze some for a future meal. Once again, I had an opportunity to use my new commercial baking pans (the 2/3 sheet size).

What a fabulous meal!

The class was definitely fun and the meatballs were AMAZING! The kids really liked working in the kitchen. The web room format has some pros and cons. I asked the kids what they thought of the experience. They really liked watching real time the action in the instructor's kitchen. You can use the chat window to ask questions and the instructor will answer you verbally.

The downside is that it is sometimes difficult to hear what's going on. Lots of folks were asking for clarification so it may have been a common problem. Between us moving back and forth from the laptop to the stove and counter top and the instructor being off to the side and her kids doing the same, it was sometimes hard to hear her and to keep up with what she was doing. The chat option is fun for the kids, but it's not so easy to hang out and chat when things are moving during class. So, the idea of the kids being part of something bigger than what's happening at our house gets a bit lost on them.

I would love to see this program offer some classes a la carte rather than having to sign on for an entire series. The other thing that could see some improvement is the recipe availability. We got the ingredients list ahead of time which does give you the amount of each ingredient, but I would think after the class takes place that a copy of the recipe would be helpful for replication. I'm left to recreate it from memory and copy it down.

Both of my kids thought having me set up a recipe and having them cook it would be more fun. For me, one advantage of the class is that it forces me to leave that time to have them help in the kitchen (not something we always do...I bet you know what I'm talking about!) The other thing I really liked is the choice of recipes. It introduces new things to our kitchen.

I encourage you to try this for yourselves and see what you think!

Nine Patch Quilt

I've posted about R10's Nine Patch Quilt over at Miss Bliss, but I want to be sure to keep up with her sewing on my blog too! Actually, we made a series of little videos of how she is putting together this quilt. It's a kit she received from the Corps of Re-Discovery (their stuff is so nice!) and she's been working with the directions and really making progress.

Two squares finished- an A square and a B square!

She is just following along with these directions and she's gotten a great start.

If you haven't gone there already, click to see her Quilt Making video over at Miss Bliss!

She is really keeping busy with her sewing machine. I am so thankful we were able to get one for her. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.

California Rolls!

For Christmas Dan gave me a kit full of the non-perishable items needed to make California Rolls. What a great gift. Two weeks ago he succeeded in making his first batch. They were heavenly! He has since made them once more and we have just enough of the "crab" meat to make another batch say around Valentine's Day. Sushi can be expensive, but if you are willing to take the time you can do it much cheaper at home. Our two rice loving kids got to help out and they had a great time.

The stuff you need- he went to several stores (including an oriental market) and ended up getting everything at Wegmans!

Sushi rice- made with a particular type of rice along with rice vinegar and a few other things.

The first one laid out on the bamboo mat...

You flip it over and sprinkle with roasted sesame seeds- and they make a difference!

It took him a bit to get the hang of rolling them, but he's pretty good now. His second batch looked really handsome.

Do these look amazing or WHAT?

Oh man were these good! When I was little my mom had a Japanese friend and whenever we visited with her, she made the best food. These "rice rolls" as I called them were amazing and I use to eat my weight in them I'm pretty sure. Of course, Dan knew this and since he loves to eat Sushi and I go along for the ride and get California rolls, he came up with this fun gift idea. We used Alton Brown's recipe and it is really, super yummy. You can never go wrong with Alton. Seriously.

Thanks Dan!

Adjustable School Table

A year or so after we started homeschooling, I really wanted to move from little tables we used as school desks to a school table. I told Dan I wanted an adjustable table that could be short and then grow with the kids. Of course I had visions of a table from Discount School Supply or Lakeshore, but Dan had another idea. Since we'd been married, we'd been using and moving around a kitchen table from his childhood- a pretty utilitarian formica topped table. His solution was to make new legs for that table. He made three sets of legs from a 4x4. Each set was taller than the next. For all these years we've been on the shortest set of legs and I'd been thinking lately (maybe for 6 months) that E12 might really enjoy sitting at a taller table! Dan mentioned it to me too so we finally made the table taller.

Dan is so clever!

E12 helps to put on a new leg

He even scrubbed the table top and the vinyl. A mid-year table tidy. Isn't it beautiful?

Thankfully, J5 is still at a good height for the table and it isn't too tall for him. We started out with cheap wooden chairs for the table that just fell apart too easily (they were build-able) so we replaced them with chairs from Lakeshore Learning.

The table looks so much taller! My kids are growing. *gulp* We still have one more set of legs to go before the original legs are put back on the table. So, they still have more growing to do and I guess we'll have to think about new chairs by that time!

R10's Art Center aka: Her Secret Lair

I finally posted some pictures of R10's reorganized art center over at Miss Bliss! She has decided hers is a secret lair too. She does share. A little. The other day she suggested I8 sit there to have a quiet spot to finish his math. What are big sisters for?

So, feel free to check it out. Her little artsy free spirit soars there which is fun to see and a pleasure to nurture. And for those of you worried about our boys...they are nurtured too, but they would not find an art center nearly as amazing as she does!

So Long Drop Downs...I Will Miss You

When Jolanthe did my 40th Birthday Bloggy Makeover back in November, she warned me. I asked for the slick drop down lists from the tabs under my header. She tried to persuade me to stick with the pages widget. But...I wanted to be cool. To be like the big girl blogs. But she tried to warn me.

"Internet Explorer users with older versions of IE, can't see my drop downs", she said. She told me the problem is corrected if they update their browser. So, I forged ahead with the lists.



At first everything was fine. I only heard good things like, "Look at those drop downs!" and "You have such a big girl blog now!" But slowly, over the last two months I've been hearing it more and more. "Love your blog...can't see your drop downs."

Oh I gave the advice. "Update your IE browser please." Or better yet, "Switch to Firefox and enjoy amazing browsing!" I converted a few.

But finally...I had to cave. For you all. My beloved readers. My big girl blog drop down lists are gone. I'll always remember them. How slick they looked when you hovered over them. How cool it was to choose from them. The change in colors as you moved and selected. A prize piece of html coding.

In the end, I should have taken Jolanthe's wise advice! And she was gracious enough to help me switch back to the "pages" widget in Blogger.

So, everyone should be able to see the page you click on when you click a tab. Then just click from there to whatever you'd like to see.

Thanks for hanging in there IE users! I hope you'll still consider defecting! You'll never look back...trust me. But if you must stay with IE, at least update your browser...my computer security gut feeling says that it's a prudent thing to do.

As always, thanks for reading!

The Building of Stonehenge

Many, many of you have asked me if and how we use Mystery of History or Story of the World. We do use them. I've been collecting volumes of both used over the years and we've used SOTW in conjunction with our unit studies- FIAR or otherwise and we still do. This year, however, I made the decision to try and start from the beginning and work our way through volume one- the ancient world. Mainly, so we could continue along with the unit studies of our choosing all the while making sure we hit world history along the way.

It is slow going, but we are doing it. I focus on it only three days a week and I have one who loves the projects and one who likes the research. It's been a fun Bible time in our day as well. We really like seeing how secular history lines up with all the Bible stories we've been teaching the kids all these years. Yesterday, we read about Stonehenge and R10 decided to make a stop motion video of the event. She incorporated some things we'd read about how experts tried to reenact its construction. She needs some work on perspective and composition, but she put together the information form the reading in a fun way. Check out the ancient Lego men building Stonehenge.

All in all, we make a terrible model for the classical homeschooler! But we dabble and it's been enjoyable- and you have to know that I am not worried about being chronological! I know...that makes some of you all shudder. I have thoughts on timelines which you might enjoying reading. I've been trying to make headway and not skip days this semester. Last semester we really did well with all the extra geography and not as well with the world history. Now the opposite is true. I need to follow my own advice which is to throw ourselves into our unit studies and not add the extras! However, I think throwing ourselves into our unit studies with a sprinkling of chronological history is ok too. At the very least we will continue to read this aloud even if we don't get to do the projects each time. Slow and steady friends! That's how the race is won.

Mixing Bowl Academy: Strawberry Smoothies!

We had the fabulous opportunity to take a Mixing Bowl Academy class last week and review it. Well actually two classes, but so far we've only done Strawberry Smoothies. This was a pleasant experience from beginning to end. I encourage you to read below and visit the link to see if something appeals to you.

We logged into CurrClick's web classroom. She has a chat window for the kids to get to know one another for a few minutes before class. The ingredients list is there and she includes some reminders and health tips in some of those windows.

This class is designed for 4 and 5 yr olds, so J5 was the star for the afternoon. However, he had some able assistance from his big sister R10.

He did a great job following along with the instructor.

He really enjoyed the blender part, but we fell a little behind. I can probably count on one hand the number of times we've used a blender and well apparently I shouldn't open a smoothie shop with my Oster here.

Yummo! This is one proud Jr Chef! We had some very impressed recipients of some strawberry smoothies!

What a fun time for everyone! This was thoroughly enjoyable. The ingredients list was sent a week ahead of time and I just put the laptop up in the kitchen and we pulled out what we needed shortly before class. The Adobe Web Room is easy to use and the link is sent to you with the ingredients list. Once you are are logged in, it's very easy to navigate and the instructor is easy to understand. Her kids model for the class and she is there to guide us along.

We had a great experience and the recipe was tasty and very easy for the younger set. We are all looking forward to tomorrow's class and I can't wait to tell you how it went.

Focus on Science!

The Focus on Science issue of Heart of the Matter Online Magazine is out today! I've been waiting and waiting! I have two articles in the magazine which is so exciting to me. Click the link to read about:

• Science as Investigation on page 10
• Unit Study on Catapults and Trebuchets on page 14  I had a fun time writing this one after seeing the "Punkin Chunkin" competition near Thanksgiving.
• All kinds of other fun articles by other writers. I think we'll be trying out the crystal growing for sure.

So, click through and enjoy!

Speed Trap- Ultrasonic Style

Dan has been giving E12 some NXT tasks to round out his school day. Some of you long time readers might remember the speed trap E12 made with the light sensors the last time. He measured the velocity of a marble moving down a track. His current task is to create a speed trap using an ultrasonic sensor which detects motion. This time a marble will be too small, but he will use a larger ball that he'll kick toward the sensor to get a read on the speed of the object coming toward it.

The brain is at the back and is hooked together with the ultrasonic sensor which is right up in the front left hand corner of the picture. The sensor will be triggered by the movement of the object coming toward it. The velocity should show on the screen of the brain. How cool is that?

This is the start of the program E12 is writing for his ultrasonic speed trap. NXT uses a "drag and drop" format for programming the "brain" that you frame with LEGOS in a robot.

We'll see if it works when he is finished programming it. However, the batteries in the bricks are dead so he'll need to juice them up again before giving it a test run.

Lessons in Writing: A Note of Thanks

My new post is up at Heart of the Matter this morning! This month I tackled the Friendly Letter Format.

It’s a new year and with it comes the determination for new focus and crisp goals. One such goal for us this year is to make sure we show gratitude to those who make us smile through gifts or kind gestures. Now that the gifts have all been opened and purchases or plans have been made for holiday gift monies, it’s time to settle down and get back to business with our schooling. What better way to ease back into the school year than to have your kids write thank you notes to friends and family who so graciously gave them gifts?

Read More...

Daily Watercolor

R10 found a watercolor calendar in her Christmas things. I thought it would be a fun way for her to do some art on her own. She's done a few so far and there aren't lessons for everyday, but she's had a really good time with it.

Not so bad...the nice thing about these is that she can learn a few things at her own pace rather than only during our art lessons.

I've always wanted to try out one of these and it will be interesting to see how her technique improves over the year.

Morse Code

I8 found a Morse Code Signal Set in his stocking this Christmas. At first, they did quite get them until everyone figured out how to use the flashers. Since then they've been signaling like crazy!

The code is in The Dangerous Book for Boys

J5 spent one whole evening sending code to me and he caught on pretty quickly so that he was deciphering codes from his siblings- and being the first to guess correctly!

The encoder comes with the alphabet on it and then it has the deciphering cards to match.

Blurry- but this is the signal when you squeeze and when you don't it is black. So cool.

This was such a great find to add to I8's adventuring. He loves it and the kids have been having a great time sending messages. E12 is doing a unit on Heroes of Invention which this time around does not include Samuel Morse, but it does go along with the spirit of invention.

Math Peek!

As a transition to getting back into the homeschooling groove, I took the time this week to work on the 3Rs only. We did a lot of writing and plenty of focused math. We tried to do some good practice, a few new concepts, and even some fun games. Here's a look at just one day this week in our math world.

With R10 and I8 I played a game called Biggest and Smallest. They had to roll the dice and create math problems from the numbers that came up.

I modified R10's game so she could practice multiplying two digit number together quickly. The basic idea of the game is to make your dice roll into a two digit number to calculate either a product or the original game involves a difference.

We play a lot of low key, skill targeting games from Games for Math by Peggy Kaye. Run! Don't walk to get yourself a copy.

E12 was working on equations with two of the same variable on both sides of the equation and on the distributive property. Both of these are beginning algebra, but they are among the last skills from the Math on the Level manuals that E12 needs before moving on to Algebra. In this case, I let him read the manual himself to correct these problems.

J5 received glow-in-the-dark Wiki Stix for Christmas and to that order I added some number and letter activities for Wiki Stix. Here is making a number 4 with a stix.

Though I showed him how easy it would be two Stix, he insisted on getting the job done with one. And here we have it. Success! Although, generally we teach a closed four so I'll have to come back to this one.

I typically set out work for the kids to do at the same time. Sometimes it relates- meaning it is the same set of math skills/concepts at various levels. This week, I worked on introducing some new things while having the kids practice some things they need work on. For example, R10 doesn't do well with timed math problem sets. This week I had her do two. Not that I'm a fan, but her computation suffered on her last IOWA test simply because she ran out of time. So, every now and then I have her do timed sets to see if we can improve things a bit.

I8 is beginning on the road to memorizing his multiplication tables. I gave him a chart and he was on his way with problems. I also had him do some drills with addition and subtraction. Where do I get the drills? It is true that I'm a Math on the Level user, but for those of you who have not been around a long time we were Horizons users for years. I have K through 6 materials (the entire Horizons program) and well...I still pull them out to use them now and then!

E12 is working with the pre-Algebra pretty hard at this point. I'm hoping to begin Algebra I within the next few months. I think he's ready and we need a goal so I'm on it!

It was a good week and I'm hoping for more in the coming weeks as we settle down and continue to focus. We have a lot of things on tap for math fun so as always, stay tuned!