Shamrock Art FAIL

When I saw this cute shamrock art project on Pinterest, I thought it would be super fun and easy. Bell pepper + green paint = St. Patrick's Day awesomeness.

Unfortunately, I can't cut a straight line to save my life our kitchen knives are really dull. We ended up with this:

{A couple of okay shamrocks, but mostly...not.}

The Boy was pretty disappointed. Soooo, we took a page from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. (The Boy hates it when I sing the "When Something Seems Bad" song, but I do it anyway.)


And this is what The Boy came up with as a solution:

Painting his own shamrocks! He was pretty happy with that. Crisis averted.

So, you homeschool?

Usually that question is followed by the comment, "I could never."

Homeschooling has it's ups and downs. I don't know one parent who homeschool who has had everyday be a good day. It take a lot of patience and a lot of redoing things.

Yesterday we had a bad day. I really bad day.

 So, it was time to try something new. I decided that we would do a craft to decorate for Valentine's Day. In order to do the craft my kids had to earn each item they needed by doing their different subjects. They each need to earn scissors, glue, each color of glitter, and paper. Once they earned the items we made some decorations. This also meant we were done all our school work. It worked amazingly!

We will be making decorations until Valentine's day. I'm thinking of also making Valentine cookies, Valentine cards to send, pretty much anything I can think of as a craft for Valentine's day... Yes, it worked that well.. Once it stops working, I will have to come up with another plan, but for now, I'm going to go play blocks with my kiddos because our schooling is already done!

We'll Be Right Back...

...after our lives settle down a bit. Melissa and I are both dealing with major family changes right now, and we apologize that we haven't been able to post lately. We'll be back after the holidays!

Oh...Hi, There.

So...yeah, I haven't posted here since October. We're still homeschooling--I just haven't been very good about updating. I'm thinking about quitting this blog and putting homeschool-related stuff on my personal blog from now on.

I know I don't have a ton of readers here, but if any of you really don't like this idea, speak now or forever hold your peace.

But before I go, I wanted to show you this really cool tag cloud I made at Tagxedo. I had waaay too much fun there playing around with colors and shapes and whatnot:

Fun, huh? I totally recommend it if you have some time to waste. 

Screen Time

I'm not really big on "screen time" for Little Boy. He gets really grouchy when he's been watching a lot of TV, and it takes a day or two for him to get back to normal.

(He's actually been watching way too much TV lately. Note to self: practice what you blog.)

Anyway, he gets to play the computer sometimes, too. I figure it's good to teach him some computer skills, and I only let him play for 15 - 20 minutes.

So what does Little Boy play when he's on the computer? Well, I'll tell ya: he plays games from PBS Kids.* That's our go-to for computer games for two reasons. 1) He's familiar with the characters. (Ahem. See the note above about too much TV lately.) 2) Most of them have an educational theme.

His favorites are games based on Word World and Sid the Science Kid. Of course, I took a picture when he was playing a not-educational game:

Yeah, the Clifford game isn't my favorite. But he likes it, and we all need some down time, right?

*He plays games from The Head of the Class, too. I swear I'll get around to posting about that site one of these days. Also, this is not a paid advertisement for PBS Kids. We are not cool enough for that kind of thing.

Weirdest Science Project Ever

These are normal basil seeds. Notice that they are dry. This will be important later.

I read (in The Mailbox, of course) about a cute little science experiment you can do with basil seeds--stick 'em in a bottle full of water, leave them in a sunny window sill, and they'll sprout in a few days. Cool, because then your little tyke can see the roots and the leaves sticking out of the seeds.

And, yeah, that's what happened. We got roots and sprouts within about four days.

But what the magazine did NOT tell me is what happens when you put basil seeds in water. I was seriously weirded out.

Gross, right? I thought something was horribly wrong with my seeds. They kinda look like frog eggs, which is cool, but that's a completely different science lesson and not what I was going for here.

Anyway, I consulted Dr. Google, and sweet Dr. Google assured me that this is normal. In fact, gelatinous basil seeds are a delicacy in some Asian countries.

I had no idea.

So, there ya go. A bizarre, but really cool, science experiment and a little cultural factoid that you can throw in there if you want. Two for the price of one.

Science: Salt Melts Ice

Here's yet another idea that I took from The Mailbox.

I filled a couple of Ziploc bags with water, and (carefully) stuck them in my freezer. The idea was to make ice lumps, and there's really not room in my freezer for two bowls of water, so...Ziploc bags had to do. And only one of them leaked!

The next day, I filled two bowls half-full of water, added a lot of salt, and some food coloring. And I unwrapped the ice lumps.

After explaining to Little Boy about how salt melts ice (at a four-year-old's level, of course), and showing him how to use the dropper-thingy, I let him loose.



I think the food coloring is supposed to make the salt water easier to see than if you used clear water or plain salt.

Little Boy had fun with the dropper, but the melting didn't work as well as I'd hoped. It was still hard to see much melting going on.

The salt water did finally melt a hole through a thin part of one of the ice lumps.



So...I don't really recommend this experiment. Unless you can figure out a way to make it work better...maybe use smaller ice lumps?

No School Today

I try to make a point of doing school with Little Boy almost every weekday, even when I'm tired or not feeling well.

But today...it just wasn't happening.

And I'm not gonna beat myself up about it. So there.

Tip: Remove Old Dry-Erase Marks

{photo source}

Sometimes I put Little Boy's worksheets in page protectors (the smooth kind), so he can do them over and over again with dry erase markers. Works great.

Except when you forget to erase it. And discover it several days later.

Then it's stuck.

So I turned to good ol' Google and started working my way through suggestions for removing dry erase marker.

Vinegar: didn't work much better than water.

90% rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer: I'm pretty sure that would've worked, but we were fresh out of both.

White toothpaste: worked like a charm.


You do have to wipe the toothpaste off with a little water, of course. I don't know whether toothpaste will work on other surfaces, but it does work on Little Boy skin--he managed to get a little bit of dry erase marker on his chin while I was working on toothpaste-ing his page protectors.

{cross-posted at Teach Me to Walk}

We'll Be Back After a Brief Message from Our Imaginary Sponsors

...because, you know, we don't have any sponsors.

We've been taking a little bit of a break from school. No surprise, since we've moved and most of our school stuff is still packed...in a box...somewhere...

Mini Mighty Mind

 

Note: This is not a paid review.  I'm not that cool.

This is Little Boy's favorite toy right now.  I think I ordered it from Fat Brain Toys (I looked at it on several websites, and I can't remember which one I ordered it from, off the top of my head).

It's like a set of tangrams, sort of--have you ever played with those?  This one comes with 16 cards that progress from easy to hard, and it's recommended for ages 3 - 8.

Now, I knew Little Boy would love this toy because he's very visually/spatially talented (which he did not inherit from me).  And, based on his age, I figured the Mini Mighty Mind would be a better choice for him than the regular Mighty Mind set.

Heh.

The first time we played with it, we only had a few minutes so he only got through five of the cards.  The next time we played with it, we did the same cards, plus a couple more.  The next time, I just let him go for it and watched to see how far he could get.

He got through all sixteen cards without any help.

Do you think I can get a refund?  "Um, hi...I'd like a refund on this product.  I'm not a very observant parent and I didn't realize my son was that smart."  Probably not, huh.

Anyway, the good thing is that he still loves playing with it.  And hopefully we'll be able to get him a regular Mighty Mind set soon.  And maybe from now on I'll pay closer attention to what level of educational toys my kid needs.