Best new educational toy ever

For St. Nick, which is really our Christmas present time, Daisy & Pepper got a SnapCircuits kit.  I love it, they love it!

We've been working through the Tops Electricity book and we're about halfway.  We do one lesson a week.  Daisy is pretty independent, at 11, and can complete most of the lesson herself.  Pepper has become more independent as we've moved through the book and only needs minimal assistance.

They've learned about positive and negative, circuits, resistance, series & parallel, and switches.

As a fun addition to that study, I thought they'd enjoy the Snap Circuits set.  Again, Daisy is almost completely independent with it.  Pepper, at almost 9, is doing the beginning projects herself after some instruction from Daisy.

Banana Boy, who is too young for the Tops book, enjoyed making a couple of projects from the Snap Circuits set with Dad yesterday.

Daisy & Saffron work on their first project

Daisy shows Pepper the flying fan project

Come on, fan!

Whoo! There it goes!

Electric Cat

Banana Boy's 2nd Science Unit (Backtracking here)

I mentioned in the Safari post that the African Savanna was BB's 3rd science unit. I don't think I posted about his Space unit.

It also, was fairly low key. He worked through a packet I made him from LearningPage.com. You can get an idea of the pages from the Space Gallery page. If you are a member (free, just sign up), you have access to all of the theme pages. They have units on Zoo animals, dinosaurs, the ocean, space, and insects. There are complete lesson plans for a unit, including book suggestions and a giant wall mural you can print and make.

In the past, I have used these plans (with Rose Bud when she was in Kindergarten), but this time, I just pulled out selected pages from the science, language arts and math sections. I also chose from a variety of grade levels from K-2, based on his skills (in other words, I didn't use all the first grade math pages, but just those I thought he could use practice on and I also added in a few K and 2nd grade math pages).

I also made him some little booklets from the Giant Science Resource Book by Evan-Moor and from Evan-Moor's ScienceWorks for Kids: Exploring Space.

I didn't use the whole unit from the space book, but just limited it to a few lessons on the sun and the planets, since that was BB's main focus and interest. I'm (in my old age) getting much better about not overplanning units and adding in every possible resource in the universe. I figure he has a lot of years left to learn about the way the Earth tilts on its axis. The kid just wanted to know about the planets.

So he filled out some mini-books, colored some planets, unscrambled their names and memorized the Solar System song from Audio Memory's Geography Songs. Oh, and we watched Ms. Frizzle about 10 times!

Math Cat

Safari Unit

Banana Boy's 3rd science unit was the African Savanna. This one was pretty informal and he watched a lot of movies. Some of our favorites were
Mama Mirabelle's Home Movies
Wildebeest: The Great African Migration (you can read my review of this movie at Amazon)
and some National Geographic movies.

We also read the One Small Square: African Savanna

I promised him (foolishly) that he could make a diorama of the savanna when he was done. This would have been a great and fun project for the girls, who love to draw from Draw Write Now books. BB, however, spends a lot of time looking at this book, making some marks with a pencil, then crumpling the paper, throwing it at the wall and stomping around the room.

So one morning, we made a very quicky diorama, with Mom doing much of the work. Now BB is happy to have his African scene and he took it up to the attic where he adds the little plastic African animals from the drawer to his scene.

Journal Cat

Grammar Cat

Bible Study

For our Bible study this year, I have printed out pages from Bible Scribe.

Banana Boy is doing Bible stories and we are using the Bible Scribe sheets as our outline. Here is our schedule:
Monday: I read the story from The Egermeier Bible
Tuesday: BB reads the story to me from the Beginner's Bible
Wednesday: I read the story from the Jesus Storybook Bible
Thursday: BB draws a picture on his Bible Scribe sheet (his choice how he wants to illustrate the story
Friday: BB copies a Bible verse from the story on his sheet and dictates to me the story in his own words. The copywork goes on the lined portion of the sheet and the dictation in the "ribbon."


The girls are doing something similar, only we are doing a verse study. We are using the Bible Scribe New Testament Scripture packet.

We read from the Egermeir Bible, Pepper's NLT Bible, Daisy's NIV Bible and then the girls illustrate, copy the verse and write the meaning in their own words.

Bird Study Lapbook

Here is the culmination of Banana Boy's bird unit. We made a lapbook together and I think he did a great job!


The photo makes it a little hard to read. It is called "All About Birds." BB chose the title himself.He drew a robin, a red-winged blackbird and a cardinal flying (if you click on the picture, you can see them better)

Here is the inside.

His bird-watching journal. It says, "What I saw: 'a blak bird. it was big.'"


His booklet titled, "What is a Bird?"


I love the picture for "Birds are warm-blooded." He drew a penguin walking in a snowstorm (keeping itself warm with its warm blood).

Resources for Bird Unit

Next up: The Solar System.

They Close Their Eyes And Just Breathe

If you read just one post from Sarah's Blog, please read this one. (This is the one I want you to read)

Rose Bud and I are going to India in January to help out at Sarah's homes and we are SO excited!

I have to admit when I first heard about Leslie's trip to India, I was mostly--selfishly--excited just to go to India. The "missions" part of it was really an excuse for me to go back. I looked at Sarah's blog and all the photos of her kids and I didn't really want to go "there."

Why is it that we have that kind of reaction to the handicapped? They are humans, they are children. But they look different. Is the feeling based on previous interactions we've had with real people who looked "funny," made strange noises, whom we couldn't understand? What makes it so hard for us to treat them as we treat any non-handicapped person?

But....it didn't take long for me, reading Sarah's blog on a daily basis, to catch hold of her wonderful attitude, her compassion and love and enthusiasm for these children and their possibilities.

When you read her blog everyday, you get to know the children by name. You learn their strengths and gifts, their personalities and their needs. You learn that they are human and they are just children. They look different, but they have hearts just like ours.

Sarah absolutely has a God-given gift for what she is doing. Her heart is 100% for the children.

Please read the post I linked above. Please feel the love Sarah has for all God's children. Please pray for her ministry and for our trip. And please read some more of her blog and meet all the children we will be meeting when we go.

I can't wait to hold them and love them, play with them and teach them, share their joy and their tears. KNOW them. They are human. They are GOD's children.

Growing Seeds

I bought these neato-mosquito containers at Oriental Trading Company about two years ago. This week, while cleaning out the school closet I decided it was high time we used them. The girls ran for their stash of seeds and they soaked them in warm water overnight. Each did two different beans, a pea and corn. Then we folded paper towel and dropped a seed in on each side of the paper towel. We fit four seeds in the container this way. The paper towel keeps the seed in place and soaks up moisture for it.

They only took about a week to grow all lush and green


What I love about the containers is that you can see the seed as it sprouts and grows. Not a very good picture of the roots here, but you get the idea.

The very sad part of our experiment, which had Pepper in tears, is that our cat thought we planted these greens for HIM. He has chomped off the tops of all of them.

Next experiment: Growing cat grass....

Friday Art: Rainbows (and a family portrait)

We are still plugging along in our book, Using Color in Your Art. This week's assignment was to imagine what is at the end of the rainbow--in other words, what does the rainbow "do" where it hits the earth?

In the example, the child colored all the flowers at the end of the rainbow in rainbow colors. I chose to make the water the rainbow "touched" spread out in rainbow colors.

So did the girls. The other part of the assignment was to paint the sky in a wash and then dab it with a papertowel to remove some of the color and make clouds.

Here is Pepper's painting.

Banana Boy's grass turned all rainbowey.

Daisy's rainbow

And finally, the family portrait, drawn by Sunshine. Isn't this cute?! It's the first time he's drawn people and I love it! I'm the big one.

More Spelling Resources

Here is a website listing lots of low-tech (no computer needed) ideas for practicing spelling words. There are also some websites listed where you can do creative things with your words like create mp3s from them and listen to them, animate them and more. I haven't checked out all the links, so proceed with caution. Wordle is pretty neat!

Lastly, if you are looking for something very simple, Scholastic has a Spelling Wizard that allows you to enter 10 words, then creates either an unscramble puzzle or a wordsearch.