Oceans and Currently

Last week we wrapped up our study on oceans, just as I was discovering a learning tool called "Lapbooks." Is anyone familiar with these? I find them fascinating and wonder how is it I have never heard of them before. I graduated with a BA, substituted in school districts, and completed work for a teaching certification.... and I have never heard of Lapbooks! We will begin our next unit on space, and I will most definitely be incorporating this learning tool.

Back to the ocean unit, my daughter finished her Beach Journal:

She included sentences like, "I bring my..., I wear..., I pack..., I build..., I eat..., I see..., and included illustrations for each page.

 She also completed her wall ocean, which included clippings from National Geographic magazines.

As a fun craft, we made a couple of other ocean-related things that I'm excited to show later. For now, here is my "currently" for the month of February (including a new "Random And Kind" section). 

Have a great week!

Oceanography Study - 4th Grade Fun!

Happy Friday, everyone! We started our first week of oceanography and the curriculum does a great job of keeping it a bit... uninspiring. We did the best we could to make this an exciting lesson.

First, I wanted to get the girls excited about learning about the ocean. We put on our swimsuits (after cranking up the heater), and laid out our towels and some party table covers for our "ocean."

My 10-year-old created a "Beach Journal" where she wrote what she wears to the beach, builds, eats, drinks, does, brings, etc. We also read together the only book I have that related to our topic:

Once the excitement was there, we started the chapter on oceanography. Each day, we encorporated a craft to keep it interesting. On one particular day we made an "Ocean in a Bowl."

We made blue jello, let it sit a bit in the fridge, then added some Nemo gummy fish. We stuck it back in the fridge to harden completely. My 10-year-old was thrilled by how it turned out! She showed it to all the neighborhood kids too.

We also hung up a blue, plastic, table cover on her wall. Using National Geographic magazines, she's cutting out pictures of fish and slowly adding it to her wall display. I'll post more pics next week as we finish our lesson on the ocean.

Having a great time with our ocean in the desert. Have a great weekend. :)

Linking to: 3 boys and a Dog, Living Life Intentionally

What We're Reading

Since I've been homeschooling my fourth grader, I have been inspired by other Moms on how to create lessons. I know many Moms out there ditch books all together and go with natural, everyday experience-type learning... but the Type A in me really needs structure, lists, schedules, and routine. I like to think my daughter does too because she has a sense of pride when she gets to check off something from a list. :)

Anyway, back to my inspiration. I've been reading a blog called Almost Unschoolers and have really made it a point to include (free) library books into my teachings. At a recent outing, I was thrilled at the books we found that matched perfectly with what we were learning!

Yes, even that Potty book was perfect. It motivated "B" to ditch the diaper for good and I can now, proudly say... SHE IS POTTY TRAINED!!!!!!!!!!! "B" loves the Potty book because the boy in there has "undies" just like her. At the end of the book, it shows many different kinds of underwear and "B" likes to point out which ones are mine, Daddys, sissies, Grandmas, and so on. She loves this book.

"R" finished up her "Noun Word Wall"  and on the final day, before she entered her final 10 nouns, we read this book...

With the new vocabulary, she was able to complete her word wall of winter nouns:

She had so much completing this that we are continuing on with "Texas" nouns this week. She's learning about Texas history for the next 6 weeks, so this will cover subjects in Language, Reading, and History.

These books are assisting her in learning new nouns for her word wall...

Do you all have any books you enjoy reading to your kids?



Nouns can be fun. ROFL fun!

Note: Since I will be talking about my kids more than usual, I will be calling the 10 year old "R" and the 2 year old "B." Blogging about their adventures will flow a lot smoother this way. :) So, to clarify I is in month 2 of being homeschooled, and B is on day 3 of potty-training. (jumping for joy on the inside)

R has used the Abeka curriculum since she was 4. It's quite structured as far as homeschooling choices go, but it's what she's use to. I have changed things up a bit though by trying to incorporate more hands-on learning, as Abeka is pretty much worksheets.

For the last 3 years, R's school has taught her about the different parts of speech, with every year getting a bit more detailed than the previous. Currently, she's learning the rules for common and proper nouns and I wanted to put aside the textbooks this week. I love, love, loooove Language Arts, so creating fun lessons has been exciting for both of us.

As she is reviewing nouns, we have been making a really fun Word Wall. Each day, we add ten new nouns to the theme word. This is a simple exercise that can be used for verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. This weeks theme is "winter."

The first two days, R quickly spit out all the easy nouns associated with winter. Day 3 and 4 were a bit more challenging as she really had to use her head. By the way, I didn't want to spend the money on butcher paper, so I'm using the back of an old desk calender to display charts and such. #twice-owned, #under$20, and still #frugalLiving. See... the old repurposed me is still there. :) This cost me NADA.

Today, we had made a trip to a bookstore to spend a gift card she received from her Grandma for Christmas. Imagine my excitement as I found a huge selection of Mad Libs! I loved playing with them when I was little and thought this would be a perfect way to practice her parts of speech. I showed her how to play them, afraid she would find them boring, but she started cracking up with the very first story. We ended up walking out of there with 5 versions!!!! Mad-Libs are $3.99 at this store, and even though our gift card made this FREE, it still would have been under $20 with our membership discount.

That night, we played Mad Libs for over an hour. On some stories, she was laughing so hard, tears began to fall. Little did she know, I was counting this as schoolwork and her problems with identifying adjectives are nearly over.

You can kind of see her wet eyelashes and red nose. This was after one particularly hilarious, ROFL, story.

Homeschooling can be LOL fun...

Linking up with:
Christina's Adventures, A Creative Princess

Happy New Year!

Hooray!!! I hope you all had a safe and happy new year! Did you notice I took a vacation? ;)

HA! Hardly a vacation and more like a "I'm so stressed out I'm going to SCREAM" hibernation. Oh, how I wish I was joking. Rather than bore you with the details, here is a quick rundown of what has happened to me (er, my blog) since I last posted in... September? October?

1) My two-year old toddler turned terrible. GAH. I don't even want to go there. And she is still NOT potty-trained.

2) My ten-year old was missing at school one afternoon and I made the decision to pull her out and homeschool. There were a lot of other factors other than safety, but that was the one that sent me over the edge.

3) The growth of Creative Memories. I have been so caught up in my scrapbooking, that I have put aside my home projects.

We're still tiling, painting, and changing out light fixtures.... but who wants to read a blog about changing a brass sconce into a satin nickel one??? Didn't think so. Rather than post about boring projects.. I just chose not to post period. :( I hope you can understand. I miss my blog though. This is my outlet and I miss the ladies who visited my site often, and we would root each other on. :( Are you all still there?!

I think this blog will have a new direction for 2012, since my life has taken quite a dramatic turn. If you don't mind about reading about my adventures in homeschooling... stick around. :) I've missed you!

Have a wonderful Tuesday!