The Duchess Bakes a Cake - Catapult

This week we are reading The Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virginia Kahl. There are lots of great vocabulary words and new concepts in this story that we are exploring this week. Today we used plastic spoons to catapult mini M&Ms into each others' mouths. We also viewed videos on www.youtube.com of home made catapults and human catapults. :-)

Leprechaun Mischief!!

This morning we woke up to green toilet water, pictures turned upside down and sideways, green milk for our Lucky Charms, a chair on top of the table, and green string strung all over the kitchen. Looks like leprechauns came to our house and made mischief! :-)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

That's What Leprechauns Do - Lapbook

Here are some photos of our finished lapbook for this week's book That's What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting. I got all the components for this lapbook from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/

That's What Leprechauns Do - Science

Today we used a flashlight, a piece of black construction paper, tape, scissors, and a clear glass of water to separate light into the colors of the rainbow. We found instructions on how to do this here. I was happy to be able to get a picture of our result to show you:

That's What Leprechauns Do - Math

This week we are reading That's What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting. I've found lots of activities to go along with this book at http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ and we will be putting together a lapbook this week to go with this story. Today we did a fun little math activity to go along with the leprechaun theme. We graphed the marshmallows that we found in a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. First, we lined up the marshmallows according to kind like this:

Then, in order to make the graph suitable to keep in our lapbook, we drew each kind of marshmallow at the bottom of our graph and colored the appropriate number of boxes for each kind. Last, G wrote in how many of each kind we found in the bowl.

Math Worksheets

A friend of mine (thanks, Angie!) shared this site with me where you can generate your own math worksheets: http://www.themathworksheetsite.com/ . I decided to give it a try today to see if G would understand what it all meant. I've introduced him to addition problems written this way, but he's used to doing them horizontally. Anyway, he understood and he LOVED it! I didn't think he would, but he really enjoyed doing these. He even asked if we could do it again sometime. :-) Now this is hanging on our refrigerator:

My Husband, the Homeschooling Advocate

My husband has been educating those around him on the subject of homeschooling, and they have been listening. He has a gift. He is able to relate to people very well, and with a 5 minute conversation he can take someone from "Homeschoolers are strange." to "Wow, I can see how homeschooling can be a great thing!"

It makes me smile to think that just from what he has learned from my research, he is able to be so persuasive and a great advocate for homeschooling when he's out and about. I'm proud of him. That's MY man!!