this is a blog to showcase what i'm doing as a homeschooling parent. i'm on a journey of continual learning with my daughter and husband in tow!
the home school
Month 4 of our Little Passports has taken us to FRANCE!
In our package from France, we received our letter and photo from Sam and Sophia, our luggage tag/boarding pass, “passport stamp” sticker, the pin sticker for our world map, our activity sheet and a poster with French words! Can you say, “OOH la la!”
To find out more or order your Little Passports kit head to their site
Today is a big day for us… it’s Sebastian’s birthday (he’s 6 years old) and we launched our global pet community called PETSUMI!! If you are a pet or a pet owner please check out the site and create a profile. Lot’s of fun to be had!!
So spread the word and let’s make this BIG!!
Tonight we want to have a PAWTY for Sebastian in the chat LOBBY!! come and join us!!
I wanted to share a link I received from a friend last night. Today’s the last day to use it, but it looks pretty cool and with 50% off, it’s a great thing to add to our home school course work.
I just ordered, so in the next month or so I’ll review the product and the science experiement we recieved. I just wanted to pass this along since I know we’re always looking for new and innovative things to add to our world of homeschool!
Have a great rest of the weekend.
Have you heard about the Little Passports program?
If you have children (or a child) ages 5-10 and love to learn about new places and things, then you should check it out! My daughter is ALMOST 5 and we’ve been getting the Little Passports for 4 months now.
Every month a new country is…
HAPPY FIRST DAY OF SPRING!!
We live in Florida, near some great “u-pick” locations.
This morning on one of the local home school sites, Jordan Farms announced they were open now for u-pick… that means they are done harvesting for the season and open for the public to graze and pick berries.
http://www.localharvest.org/jordan-farms-M22860
We drove about 25 minutes to the farm and talked about farming, and what organic means, and on our drive we even saw some horses, steer and cows.
Jordan Farms is a small family owned farm, that produces organic strawberries to market. The also have a small open garden of whatever they decide to plant- available to the public to pick fresh grown — straight from the earth produce.
Lizzy and I had such a nice time chatting and picking strawberries together. The bees were buzzing, there were roosters on a neighboring farm cock-a-doo-doodle-dooing, and the sun was shining bright (we wore SPF 100 because she’s so fair skinned). Luckily today there was a nice breeze to help keep us cool. It was about 85 degrees and just the perfect day for berry picking.
The best part about picking berries at an organic farm is that we were encouraged to snack while we were picking. There were 4 different varieties of strawberries to pick, and we made sure to try a few while we were gathering our produce.
This is one of those days that Lizzy looks at me and has that smile, and then she said, “Mommy being home schooled is good because we get to do things like this.”
We also managed to get some kale and chard leaves, and some daikon- that was a surprise from the side garden.
I’m glad she enjoyed herself outside in the Florida sun on this first day of Spring, I think we’ll be making strawberry shortcake for dessert tonight.
Spring has come earlier than the ground hog predicted, we’re already seeing the tell tale signs. Little green worms dangling on fine silken threads from our great oak trees all around our yard.
Lizzy asks, “Mommy, what are those green worms in the air?”
I reply, “Those are inch worms.”
Now…
I grew up reading Dr. Seuss - and now that Lizzy is starting to read, We’ll be adding some Suess to her bookshelves.
Today is Theodor Seuss Geisel’s birthday, and what better day to remember a great man with a vivid imagination than to head out for the opening of the new Lorax movie!
Lizzy liked having a few days off from book-work. Usually once a week she doesn’t want to work on handwriting, so those days we spend more time doing our sight words and flash cards. I have to say that teaching English is not logical. Hard and soft consonants, and vowels being either long or short… and all the little nuances that I know as common knowledge (thanks to nearly 40 years of practice) doesn’t come overnight to a Pre-K kiddo!
All I can do as a parent and as her teacher, is have patience and encouraging.
I wonder if anyone has a suggestion for a good phonics book for Pre-K or Kindergarten… if so please share with me! ;)
It was such a beautiful day out today- we decided to do some school-work outside.
Lizzy was a bit distracted with all the birds in the trees, so we took some time and did some bird watching. Cardinals, Blue-Jays, Red headed Woodpeckers and Finches and Doves were all out singing in the big oak trees.
I thing that that old ground hog got it all wrong, feels more like spring than winter to me!
What a GREAT way to spend our “extra day of the year” - happy LEAP DAY!
Today is a special day, a great man and friend died back in 2003… many of us know him as Mr. Rogers, I called him my neighbor.
He wasn’t really my neighbor, but I watched him daily when I was 3-6 years old.
Looking for quality learning television programs that inspire, I’m happy to say that I found some of his videos on Netflix, so we’ll be ordering them for Lizzy to watch.
Homeschooling is great because we can be creative with our learning, while still being productive, and as a child- we all believed in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
