Penpal Fun

I've mentioned it many times before, but penpals are awesome for children. They have the possibility to teach geography, handwriting, grammar, spelling and reading with the letter itself. Add in postage, travel to and fro and you have a math lesson as well! The same old same old letters can get old every now and then and you have to spice things up! Here are a few things I have done for my kids to make having a penpal a lot of fun! I've even mentioned HERE about our penpal writing station!

Creative envelopes are so easy to make and give your letter some great looks! Not only are they inexpensive, but they can be free too! We travel A LOT and stop at many rest areas, these places are havens of maps and brochures and magazines! My kids love to grab those but then they end up all over the floor of the van after the road trip. I gather them up and pull out the pages, perfect for collages and other art work but best of all, they work out as envelopes!!

These are all from a magazine about Illinois that we came across on our trip to St. Louis. The kids love thumbing through the magazine and finding the perfect photos. Neon Labels make the perfect address labels too!

My youngest is not a fan of writing, but he loves sending mail, I like creating paper for him with writing prompts, this makes it easy for him to write a message, color and draw and also keeps it simple and clean for the reader!

My 9 year old son loves comic books and what better way to send a letter, than to draw a comic of his own! I change out the format every now and then and sometimes it's only a partial comic and the rest is lined paper. On the edge of thise one I have some writing prompts for him to fill in a little information!

My daughter is a budding fashion designer with her own portfolio and a room full of sketches. I created this stationery for her to be able to send some outfit sketches to her penpal and still wriite a message in the box. I blanked out her name on this one, but her papers are personalized for that 'professional' feel. She LOVES these and often uses them when she is not even sending them and just makes outfit notes on the right.

Enjoy every minute my friends!

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Keep it Simple...

I hope your weekend was fantastic! We are in the middle of a wonderful one, visiting old friends, new friends, family and hanging out together. On Halloween, we spent the day with new friends at an assisted living facility. My children made Halloween cards and it was time to hand deliver them. For every holiday, we usually pick a different facility in the area and deliver them there. It is amazing to see the joy and love in their faces when they get to see and speak with children.

They let the kids go on a pumpkin hunt around their facility and keep the pumpkins they found! They even told them to take as many as they wanted. It was a wonderful experience for ALL involved.

"Mom, this is like EASTER! I love hunts" 

These pudding snacks were a hit at our Halloween party & are very inexpensive to make! 

Makes 20

White Chocolate pudding .75 x 6 (4.50)
Green Food coloring 1.25
Chocolate Sprinkles 1.75
40 count cups 2.47
Black Marker (had at home)
Plastic Spoons 1.00
Milk 2.75
-------------------------------

$13.72 but I had leftover coloring, cups, sprinkles, milk and spoons 

A simple ghost face on white hot chocolate cups make them playfully cute!

Our homeschool co-op is about to begin sending letters and pictures to facilities year round, we will send them out once a month. What fun this will end up being. Enjoy your weekend my friends and remember to enjoy every minute!!

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Tic-Tac-Spell!

It's Wednesday! That puts us right in the middle of the week, which is usually the middle of our spelling lesson. Here is my youngest son's week 3 spelling list. On Monday, I posted about Spelling Test Success HERE, today we will discuss an alternative or what we do in addition to the notecard daily works.

Start out with a large tick tac toe grid and place it in a protective sheet cover or even a transparency like I mentioned on MONDAY HERE! Now, this board can be used over and over again as a dry erase game. Have the 2 players each pick out a spelling word (Can be played with children of different age levels as well, since each just picks one word from their own list). 

Begin play as though playing regular TTT, but this time use your spelling words, saying each letter aloud as it is being spelled. Winner is chosen the same way! What a fun way to bring in games to learning!

Before spelling comes learning! Here was a great way that I taught my kids upper and lower case letters. We used this worksheet paired with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Get your own copy of the sheet HERE!

How true this is my friends, especially as a homeschooler, I am with my children 24 hours a day and I seem to hardly see a change and then I look at photos from just the previous year and I am astounded by how much has changed! Let this be a lesson to us all to just enjoy every minute!

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Read it & Write it, Count it & Learn it!

A new worksheet I created is perfect for beginning readers but also for spelling practice!! Use with ready made flashcards for the beginning reader or create your own for a child with a spelling test! Slip into a protective plastic sheet and you are ready to roll. #1 Place the first word in the Read-it section and have the student sound it out. Next have letter tiles ready to go and have the student spell out the word. Searching for EACH letter tile on their own helps them memorize the spelling, because they keep repeating the letter they are looking for until the find it. Step #3 is Write-It, using a dry erase  marker have your little write the spelling of the word! Get it here!

Get the cargo on the train! Using small wood squares from the hobby store, have your little one count to 50 by loading the luggage on the train! This page prints pretty light, for extra learning, I had my son use a black marker over each number to darken it but to also work on it! Print it out HERE!

Re-purpose old games for new uses! This AWESOME game of Guess Who is fun in it's original style but use it to learn something new! This one is the start of our Guess Who Catholic Saints edition from Arma Dei that we printed out. Get creative and you will find that any game can be used for fun teaching purposes!

Enjoy every minute my friends!

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3 Letter Sight Words

As I sit here and notice that Summer is flying by, I cannot believe it. How did it disappear so quickly? It must have been the very few hot days we had and the more balmy weather. Not that I'm complaining, I'm ready for Apples and Pumpkins and Orchards and Patches! This week I made up a worksheet for Roman to reinforce his 3 letter sight words. I do this every now and then, to keep them refreshed in his head. As he learns more difficult words, I don't want him to forget the other words. If you would like to print this one out (it's the first of the school year), go HERE!

Have a wonderful day my friends and remember to enjoy every single minute!

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Lesson in Literacy!

Happy Tuesday! Today was one of those days that I woke up excited for it to be Wednesday and then BAM, I was rapidly stuck with reality of it being only Tuesday. I blame the long night out in the wonderful weather at the ballpark! Oh well, just 1 more day to enjoy, right?? Right???

Last week my neighbor surprised me with this AWESOMELY huge bin of foam shapes. It was going to take FOREVER to sort but well worth the fun in the end. I knew if we didn't sort it, it would hardly get used. We broke it down into Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Letters, Numbers, Shapes. Each category is safely stored in a clear shoe box that allows the kids to see which one they would like.

I knew instantly that the letters would see overtime use. Our first lesson was in spelling. My youngest had to READ his spelling words, then search for each letter to spell that word with. 

As he found a letter he used a paintbrush and dipped it into a cup of water to 'paint' the letter. He then stuck to to the wall of a clear bin! (The now empty foam bin!) This is a great way for him to work on letter recognition, blending sounds as he spells the words slowly and spelling of course!

Enjoy every minute of this TUESDAY my friends!

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Wonderful Word Wednesday...

Rain, Rain, Go Away! We have been under tremendous rain storms with a lot of flash flooding lately! I hope you are all staying warm and dry and safe out there! We've have some water in the basement but as always, it could be worse. I hope your week is going well so far!

We love words in this family and are always chattering on non-stop. One thing I am noticing though, is that my children tend to use lazy words and their writing needs a bit of a PUNCH! In order for them to begin using more colorful and vibrant words, I have a Thesaurus in a basket on the table with highlighters. They look up the word they are using, and find a good replacement word. They highlight the word in the book and also on their paper. This is helping them expand their vocabulary and spell different words! 

Sticking with our love of words, I purchased this SAT vocabulary flashcard book and we have a word of the day. In the beginning of the day we read the word and I write it on the board. We discuss the definition and attempt to use it at least once in a sentence that day. There is no test, it is just a chance to increase vocabulary. I then clip the flashcard to a board in the classroom where it stays all day long and we just continue to add to them daily. Every now and then I will catch them browsing through the words and I always catch them trying to use them! 

Space in a classroom is like gold, as I am sure many of you know! In order to conserve space and also to allow my children access to everything we have in the classroom, I have to get pretty creative on where to put things. My youngest uses sentence strips for his spelling words and creating short sentences, I have these hanging from cup hooks on the side of a bookshelf, so that they are off the floor and using up space that would otherwise be wasted! 

I tell my children this every single day. It is nice to be important but it is more important to be nice is another thing I always tell them.

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Inventors and Their Inventions

Happy Monday! It's time for the launch of our Inventors & Their Inventions Unit of Study. The kids have been so excited about this week that they counted down the weekend, which never happens! They bounced out of bed, ran to the classroom and were seated and ready before I had even started my own breakfast! I love when children get excited about something and when it's learning, well that makes it all the better. 

For this unit, I made them booklets with worksheets and plain paper stapled together. They can take notes on what they learn, do their work and study all with one packet. All worksheets can be found HERE if you would like them. 

One thing I have learned is that these kids absolutely ADORE having unit study booklets with everything in one place. After school ended, they still had them throughout the day as they flipped through and asked questions. They asked if we could go to the library and do more research and if they could add more pages to their books. I am hoping to add Biography pages of the inventors we are studying as well.

Part of our lesson will be to create our own invention. The children will be given an inventor box and be set out on their own. With tools and bits and baubles they can let their imagination run wild. 

As the children study different inventors, we will be adding vocabulary words for them to learn definitions of and the spelling of the words as well. These words will then need to be used in their final writing piece. As we learn each word, they will write the definition on the back of the sheet and once complete, they can remove the page from their booklet if they wish to and use them as flashcards to study.

This is the worksheet that I made up for the kids to write all about what they created from the inventor box. They must use at least 4 of the words from the Vocabulary List and then write all about what they created and how it works or what it does.

Enjoy Every Minute My Friends!

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Learning the Fun Way

I focus a lot of our curriculum on writing as I find it truly important in communication. Writing can portray an image of yourself that you do not even realize is being set out there. Today we are working on contractions in the classroom. Do you have a set focus in your daily studies? Writing and Math are huge over here and I also try to stress reading as much as possible but that is something that we work on outside of the classroom throughout the day as well. 

I got this wonderful list of contractions from Enchanted Learning and it was a great help in launching our lesson today. The color coded lists and the way they break them down is so helpful and also keeps the brain stimulated. It is so easy to find everything you need to supplement an education on the internet. How on earth did people homeschool before this day and age of electronics? Don't get me wrong, my favorite way of learning is still the good old library, but sometimes there are days when you just don't want to pack up the gang and go.

I am a huge fan of hands on learning and incorporate it daily into our lessons but there are still many things that need to be attacked with worksheets and books. When this time comes, I still try and make it as fun as possible so that the children have a good connotation with school. Don't go thinking that our days are all full of sunshine and rainbows but it's pretty darn close. HA.Ha.Ha. No, honestly I lose my temper and sometimes the kids get riled up and want to just play play play. This week has been difficult with the neighbors on Spring Break and outdoors at 7 a.m. The one thing that keeps us all sane in the end is knowing that we all are trying out best and of course that we are always done before noon. I don't get discouraged but sometimes it's easy to get down on myself, when those times come, I just step back, breathe and move onto something different.

This rainbow reference sheet is something I made just for today. It's National Rainbow Day and I figured I would tie it in somehow to our lessons. What I am loving most about this, is that it's so basic, even the youngest can color it and learn. I printed out 4 copies and we all sat with it, saying the words as we colored them. So simple but also fun.

EXACTLY! Enjoy the Day!

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